CD Giveaway - Sam Shrieve, "Bittersweet Lullabies"
Ends Nov 29, 2009
The current student at Berklee College of Music has a rock 'n' roll pedigree, but delivers a pleasing and diverse collection of soft pop on his debut record. Enter our contest for your chance to win!
The Twilight Saga: New Moon Prize Pack
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Rating: Country: USA Release Date: November 14, 2006 Distributor: Universal Studios Director: · Steve Pink Cast: · Justin Long · Jonah Hill · Adam Herschman · Columbus Short · Maria Thayer · Lewis Black · Blake Lively Related Sites: ·IMDb: Accepted
Grade: B+
When I saw that "Accepted" was using the tout line "From the studio that brought you 'American Pie'," I was skeptical. Yes, the "American Pie" franchise has gathered a large viewing audience -- I'm just not in it.
I was thus pleasantly surprised that "Accepted" managed to come in with a PG-13 rating, and fairly much earn it. So for all you Stifler-fans out there hoping to see something along the lines of the upcoming "The Naked Mile", this isn't going to be it.
The nut of the story is this: Bartleby Gaines (Justin Long) is graduating high school without a single college acceptance letter. His father and mother are dismayed. As the rejections continue to come in, Bartleby learns that other of his friends are also up in the air: Hands (Columbus Short) lost his football scholarship to an injury, and Rory (Maria Thayer) is an over-achiever who disintegrates when she isn't accepted into Yale.
With the help of his best friend Schrader (Jonah Hill) -- who has been accepted into Harmon College -- Bartleby concocts a plan to keep his and his friends' parents at bay: create a fake acceptance letter from a fake college, complete with a fake website. And thus is born the South Harmon Institute of Technology (the acronym for which gets plenty of usage throughout the film.) Taking the $10,000 tuition money from his dad, Bartleby and company rent an abandoned mental hospital and clean it up (mostly) to look like a campus -- right down to hiring Schrader's Uncle Ben (Lewis Black) as the fake dean of students.
But problems begin to arise when Bartleby learns that Schrader took his instructions to make the website realistic a bit too seriously. It's also functional! Suddenly hundreds of kids who'd been rejected from everywhere show up for classes. Bartleby pretty much figures the gig is up at this point, but seeing so much rejection in one place, his confession transmogrifies into a rousing welcome speech, and he shifts gears into making South Harmon a real college, with a curriculum designed by and taught by the students themselves.
Taking it to the Board: To gain accreditation for South Harmon
Institute of Technology, our heroes have to face the ultimate
showdown: the Ohio State Board of Education!
(L-R: Columbus Short, Lewis Black, Maria Thayer, Jonah Hill,
Justin Long)
Naturally, this cannot continue without some sort of antogonism. The nearby Harmon College is looking to expand their campus, knocking down nearby buildings in some bid to be able to reject more students in the future -- because the more students you can reject, the more prestigious you are as a school. But the never-heard-of South Harmon is now in the way. Ultimately, the pompous jerks blow the lid off the whole thing, and the school is dismantled... only to be possibly saved when Schrader applies for actual accreditation! It's a longshot that can't possibly work, but what the heck.
"Accepted" has some coarse and sexual humor in it, but overall it continues the long tradition of coming-of-age college films that began (for me, at least) way back with Val Kilmer's "Real Genius". It's not for everybody, but for students out on their own, this is the subversive voice of the new generation.
In addition to a commentary track -- with Director Steve Pink and actors Justin Long, Lewis Black, Jonah Hill, and Adam Herschman -- the special features on this disc include the obligatory making-of video (a merciful ten minutes), and a self-guided tour of the campus that rewards clicks with making-of clips. There are two music videos, thirteen minutes of deleted scenes, eight minutes of bloopers, and an eleven minute spoof of actor Adam Herschman being treated like a demanding diva on the set. The DVD-ROM features also include a handful of MP3 files -- which, if you place the disc into a DVD-ROM reader, will be the first thing you learn since the autorun will annoyingly open an HTML browser instead of playing the movie.
Previews on this disc include "American Pie Presents: The Naked Mile" Unrated, "Balls of Fury", "Hot Fuzz", and "You, Me and Dupree".
