Accepted

Review By: Andrea Tuccillo
AndreaTuccillo@TheCinemaSource.com

As we approach back-to-school time, let us sit back and enjoy a movie that encourages slacking off, deceiving authority, and generally discarding all means of traditional education.

This is the basic premise of Accepted, the story about a recent high school graduate who makes up his own college when all the real ones reject him. It’s a ridiculous teen comedy where the jokes can be seen coming from a mile away. The overall message is also disappointing: Book learning is for dummies! What’s really important is being accepted! According to this movie slacking off in high school will get you into the coolest college ever. Where’s the justice for all of us hard workers out there? But to be fair, Bartleby “B” Gaines (Justin Long), the mastermind behind the idea, did not really intend for his college to become so well-populated.

All he wanted was to fool his parents into being proud of him. So he bands together with a few other rejected friends, makes up a fake college, rents a fake location, fixes up said location, has a computer savvy friend create a fake website, hires a fake dean…okay so he does get himself in a little deep right from the start.

But the deception works out quite well in the beginning and B is good at it. He uses the tuition money his parents gave him to fix up the school, formerly a psychiatric hospital. It’s ironic since you’d have to mental to actually attempt to pull the scheme that B’s pulling. Well maybe not mental, but certainly really, really desperate. If he would have only put this much effort into his school work he might have been accepted to real college.

What he doesn’t realize until it’s too late is that the fake website functions a little too well. By clicking a link anyone who applies automatically gets enrolled. When hundreds of kids show up for orientation, tuition checks in hand, B is shocked to say the least. But he just doesn’t have the heart to turn these losers away. He looks into their faces and sees outcasts just like him, feeling worthless in the eyes of their parents and society. He can’t bear to reject them from another college, even if it’s only a fake one, so instead he decides to play along.

The fact that he calls the school the South Harmon Institute of Technology causes giggles when they realize what the acronym turns out to be. Yes, I chuckled the first time, but the joke is repeated ad nauseam. It’s one of the movie’s many running jokes. The other involves a former stripper who traded her pole for life as a college girl.

There are many things in Accepted that just don’t add up, mainly the stupidity of the characters. All of South Harmon’s students actually believe they’re going to a real school. With a pool, a half-pipe, a juice bar and classes like Rock and Roll 101? Come on, people! ...