Accepted Combo HD DVD and Standard DVD DVD with Justin Long, Jonah Hill, Blake Lively (PG-13) +Movie Reviews

Silliness Highlights Important Theme (get it?)

Melanie N. Lee | Corona, New York United States | 09/11/2006

(4 out of 5 stars)

"My friend Suzanne took me to see Accepted three weeks ago, probably to celebrate my new hire as an adjunct lecturer in the English Department of Queensborough Community College. In the movie, high school graduate Bartelby Gaines--a name with literary overtones, at least the first name--can't get accepted to the staid Harmon College in his hometown in Ohio, or to any other school. To get his parents off his back, the inventive Bartelby (Justin Long), using his computer, invents an acceptance letter from the South Harmon Institute of Technology (get it?). Bartelby, to complete the ruse, gets his computer-savvy friend, Harmon freshman Sherman Schrader (Jonah Hill) to create a website for the bogus school. But the website works too well, and Bartelby is faced with hundreds of college rejects looking for acceptance. So in the confines of an abandoned mental hospital, Bartelby and friends create a college--really an adult education center or community center--where students design their own courses, design clothes in the school colors brown and blue (get it?), create the school newspaper the SH**rag, build a state-of-the-art skateboarding rink, and listen to radical lectures from a washed-up ex-professor (Lewis Black). However, Harmon College's traditionalist Dean Van Horne (Boston Public's Anthony Heald) and the fraternity brothers have reasons to close the new school down.

Sure, the plot is improbable--as one TV reviewer said, "Haven't they ever heard of community college?" But if you look past the silly plot and over-the-top episodes, there's a real message hear about academic freedom, creativity, and appeal to students. In my years at CUNY and even at Pace University, I was never subject to the extreme whitebread culture of Harmon College, and I'm not sure I want to be. Even beyond the college trappings of Accepted, one can see the battle between the desire to mold oneself into acceptability by upper-middle class, status-driven White America, and the desire to be oneself and build toward a true calling by following one's heart and interests. Perhaps we teachers can cull some real lessons from the looney bin of Accepted.

BTW, Accepted fully exploits one or two curse words--and excises the rest.

"

Enjoyable, fun comedy in the school genre. Expect familiar s

A. G. Corwin | 08/20/2006

(4 out of 5 stars)

"***SPOILERS BELOW***

Ok, I know what you are thinking. Haven't we seen this movie before? There is Back to School, Old School, Van Wilder, Animal House, just to mention a brief few. Along that vein, the new release Accepted starring Justin Long (Ed, The Mac Guy, and Dodgeball) the lovely Blake Lively(Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants), and Jonah Hill (the crazy fishdisco shoes customer from 40-year old virgin), offers a story of misfits who rebel against convention and eventually succeed over the tweedy, repressed school administraters, but this time there's just a bit more heart and less vulgarity.

Bartleby Gaines (Justin Long) is not a dumb kid or a real screw-up. He enjoys life and school, and has good friends like Shrader, football star "Hands," and smoking hot Yale obsessed geek Rory. The only thing he hasnt accomplished besides wooing the beautiful Monica is getting into a college, and his dad is obsessed with the idea. To get him off his back, Bartleby uses photoshop to make a fictional college, Schrader builds a website, and next thing you know Dad is happy, so happy that he wants to drop Bartleby off at school. So finding a decrepit lunatic asylum, Bartleby and friends spruce the place up, hire some foreign language kids to act like students and Schrader's lush, cranky uncle to act as dean, and try to pass the test. His parents are convinced. And life is good until he opens the door and 400 kids who couldnt get in anywhere else arrive for the start of orientation. 400 kids with 10,000 checks, which apparently buys a lot of kegs and dorm room supplies. Apparently Schrader made too good of a fake website. Facing a moral dilemma, Bartleby decides after some agonizing, that they must continue.

Since this is a movie of course they decide to keep the fraud going. Joined by Rory, who didnt get Yale and wants to just meditate, "Hands" who blew out his knee and wants to do art, and the bizarre foodie Glen, who discovers a gift for cooking, Bartleby creates a fun environment where people enjoy life, learn about oddly mundane things, but gain self-worth at the same time. Classes include meditation, tanning, bikini watching, and Rock Your Face off 202, where budding Mick Jaggers strut their stuff. Most of all though, the misfits and outcasts who came to the school find a place where they arent losers. They fit right in. As in the other films, the bad guys, played by Boston Legal vet Anthony Heald, and some Aryan frat boy, expose Bartleby and crew, and they have to go in front of a board to keep their school. With impassioned reasoning, Bartleby and crew win a year to prove their school is a valid institution. The misfits win again.

This is a clever movie. Justin Long brings the right amount of confidence, cockiness, and charm to the role of Bartleby, and Jonah Hill has multiple good scenes as Shrader(ask me about my wiener!), who faces the dilemma of joining the evil frat or staying with his true friends. Cinematography is decent, the soundtrack fits, and there are some winning and some familar moments. A lot you have seen before, but enough of it is fresh, and the actors are charming enough to pull off their own film, which makes for a nice, laugh-filled Saturday at the theater.

A.G. Corwin

St.Louis, MO"

Reminiscent of Old School and PCU

K. Hinton | Atlanta, GA | 11/25/2006

(3 out of 5 stars)

"Reminiscent of PCU and Old School, Accepted is part of the new generation of college movies. When he isn't accepted to any of the eight schools to which he's applied, Bartleby Gaines decides to create his own school--the South Harmon Institute of Technology (S.H.I.T.) In order to make it look legit, he has a friend create a website that details the school's mission statement, etc. What he doesn't expect is that other students will see the website and wind up applying. Before he knows what's up, his school has more than three hundred students with paid tuition and he has to design a curriculum.

This movie is funny and full of entertaining moments. As Bartleby is quick to point out, plenty of well-known people didn't go to college (Pocahontas, Corey Feldman, and Corey Haim to name a few). It's nice to see a movie that doesn't glorify the fun you'll have in those years and instead shows an honest depiction of the stress, lack of sleep, and workaholism that come with your first year of college. If you like movies like Old School and PCU, then you'll surely like this one."

Have you got Hobo Stab Insurance? ...

Steffan Piper | Palm Desert, CA | 02/05/2008

(5 out of 5 stars)

"Accepted is probably the best executed teenage coming-of-age film since Ferris Bueller's Day Off. This film could've easily been titled "Bartleby Gaine's Big Plan" and no one would've complained ... well, maybe no one. "Accepted" is just fine.

Heavily laden with enough social commentary that through the humor, you won't be able to ignore it or tune it out, and you might be made to feel uncomfortable if you're the person that sold out, or drifted through the hell that Bartleby Gaines is trying to save you from. It's not Lenny Bruce or Noam Chomsky, but you can definitely sense it bubbling below the surface.

So, what happened to all the young teens from days-gone-by who grew up in the newly constructed suburbs and identified with movies like Ferris Bueller's Day Off, Sixteen Candles, Pump up the Volume and Better Off Dead? I can tell you. They all ended up selling out and moving into newly constructed tract homes, deep in the nether regions of the ever increasing perimeter of modern suburbia or rather, Urban Blight. They all sold out to lame jobs, lame spouses, bought lame rent-to-own furniture and either made a lot, or lost a lot during the dot-com bubble, and then lost whatever else they had left during the real-estate bubble. Is that close to accurate? Probably too close for some.

These days though, film makers are pawning off trash like 'The Naked Mile', 'Freddy got Fingered' and 'Cruel Intentions', which are not even worth linking, but a necessity to mention. These are poor, trite and dull comments within this genre.

So, what's the message in this film? Well, according to Lewis Black it's: "You better enjoy the next four years, because after that, you're effed!" And of course, that's only the beginning: "Don't come crying to me about what you want to do with your life! Get a Clue!"

Yes, that's what he said and he took absolutely no prisoners in doing so. The fate that now awaits this soon-to-graduate generation is probably going to be a lot darker and a lot more menacing then the life that they grew up in, but don't worry - with mass-merchandising, you'll always have Target, Wal-Maze and a few DVD's to watch. But maybe someone will take a cue from Bartleby Gaines and learn that living is sometimes more important than killing yourself to live.

This is a really enjoyable movie and the Special features are worth the price of the disk alone. Not that you'd want the just the special features with no film, as that would be lame, but many of you might be used to that. There are also some brilliant one-liners in this that really make you split into two with laughter.

During the deleted scenes there's a segment with Lewis Black swearing so much that it's one long continuous beep and could be easily confused with a TV test signal.

"

Scores pretty high on the comedy finals

Daniel Jolley | Shelby, North Carolina USA | 02/16/2007

(4 out of 5 stars)

"Let's say you've been something of an underachiever in high school, living a Ferris Bueller-like life and not exactly hitting the books very hard. You're a pretty cool guy, but now it's time to face reality. The closest you've gotten to the class hottie is her front lawn (which she flirted you into mowing for her) and - horror of horrors - every single college you applied to has turned you down flat (which is going to come as quite a blow to your parents). What do you do? Well, naturally, there's only one thing to do - have your nerdy best friend (Jonah Hill) create a fancy web site for a nonexistent college, fake an acceptance letter from said college, and use dad's tuition money to lease an abandoned mental hospital that you can clean up and pass off as an actual educational institution. It helps if you have a few friends joining you in this whole crazy scheme - friends like Hands (Columbus Short), who lost his athletic scholarship because of an injury, Glen (Adam Herschman), who probably can't even spell college, and Rory (Maria Thayer), a totally cute redhead who only applied to one school (Yale) and had her cherished dreams dashed at the manicured hands of smarmy Ivy League administrators who probably all talk like Thurston Howell, III. Certainly, it takes some work to turn a filthy, abandoned loony bin into a "college" impressive enough to fool your parents when they drop you off, but it's going to be all fun and games after they leave, right? It might be - if about 300 other folks didn't show up with acceptance letters and tuition money in hand (seems that good old Sherman made the college web site a little too functional).

Bartleby Gaines (Justin Long), the brainchild of this whole fake college dream, doesn't have the heart to turn all these students away from the hallowed halls of South Harmon Institute of Technology - these are all people who want to learn but have no chance of ever getting into a real school. Bartleby is totally BMOC, and his ideas to let the students choose what they want to do goes over really big. Who wouldn't want to learn how to rock your face off in the afternoon and then settle in for a leisurely night of Babe Watching 101? Okay, so they don't have any tests, or books, or even a faculty - apart from their dean (played to hilarious effect by Lewis Black), who just left a promising career as a bitter shoe salesman - but these crazy misfit kids actually start to learn a few things. Even the students over at the prestigious Harmon College start mingling around the place, including Monica (Blake Lively), the aforementioned hottie who starts thinking Bartleby is a better guy than her conceited future lawyer of a boyfriend.

Yep, things are looking pretty good for old Bartleby and friends. Then, of course, the world crashes in on them when reality, in the form of Dean Van Horne (Anthony Heald) from Harmon, calls Bartleby's incredibly huge bluff. Will this be the end of the South Harmon Institute of Technology forever? Will this bold experiment at untraditional higher education simply disappear, breaking the hearts and thwarting the minds of all the unacceptable students S.H.I.T. accepted? Will Monica, in disgust at such rank duplicity, abandon Bartleby before he even gets a chance to get to second base with her?

Obviously, Accepted has one of the most farcical plots you're likely to come across, but it's a pretty darn good comedy that plays better than you would expect, especially when it gets that whole underdog thing going. You can't help but like Bartleby and company, the outrageous diversity of the student body serves up many a memorable character (such as the A.D.D. kid, the big, menacing guy most likely to go crazy in boot camp like that soldier in Full Metal Jacket, and a young lady who just gave up stripping to go back to school). You even have Deal or No Deal's Lisa, who trades in her revealing dresses for an even more revealing bikini. You might even say the movie makes an actual point or two about the system of higher education, which has certainly been known to turn away kids who may struggle but really want to learn in favor of some students who get in to good schools because of connections or money alone and then sleepwalk their way through four years of highly structured classes. Don't hold me to that "this movie actually has something to say" thing, though. Accepted is really all about the comedy, and I must say it certainly kept me well entertained throughout."

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