Accepted
Seen 4 September 2006 at AMC Loews Boston Common
* * * * (out of 5)
Accepted has one thing going for it from the beginning. Despite all the normal trappings of a silly teen high school/college movie, it recognizes from the get-go that the super-stress situation that some students put themselves into when it comes to college applications is total crap. It’s completely unnecessary for the process to be as painful as it is for some people. And remember, unnecessary pain can be mined for comic genius.
Bartleby Gaines (Justin Long) just wants to be like any other kid, and get into college before the end of his senior year. Easier said than done. After being turned away by every single college he applied to, disappointing his parents to a previously-unheard of degree, Justin makes a desperate plea to buy himself some time – he fabricates an acceptance letter from the South Harmon Institute of Technology (yep… S.H.I.T.), a fake sister school to Harmon College (a pretty blatant riff of Harvard). Naturally, his parents are thrilled and relieved, and the pressure is off of Bartleby – until his dad wants some more information about the prestigious institution that he’s never heard of. Bartleby enlists his best friend Sherman (Jonah Hill) to create a website to continue the lie, and some other friends to help him turn a run-down mental facility into a faux college campus. All of it works to fool his parents, but he makes one wrong move: the website includes a button that says, “Acceptance is one click away.” Enter all the other students just short of the standard college line who need a place to be come September. Once they all show up at Bartleby’s new doorstep for “orientation,” he tried to break the news to them. But he created the lie in order to get his parents off his back, so who is he to send all these others back into the clutches of disappointment? So he enlists Sherman’s crazy Uncle Ben (Lewis Black) to be acting dean and faculty member, and starts an alternative education format where students decide what they want to learn, a format that – strangely enough – just might work. But it’s all still a lie, and God knows it’s going to catch up with him one way or the other.
Now, I never had an issue getting into college. I was lucky: I did well enough on my SATs that those alone got me into the school I wanted to attend. My admission process was pretty painless, since I only applied to two schools. But I had friends who applied to upwards of 15 schools. That’s 15 applications, 15 application fees, 15 essays to write, 15 campuses to potentially visit… It’s a big, inefficient headache. All of my friends who wanted to go to college are there, but I certainly know some who got discouraged in the early goings of the decisions, and certainly some like Bartleby’s friend Rory (Maria Thayer), who banked on one Ivy League and was devastated to be turned away. So Accepted has some good points in its ideas. Given the abysmal retention and graduation rates at some colleges and universities, one would think the institutions would try to cater to students, and make it relatively painless to get there, so long as the students were willing to work hard once they WERE there. But exclusivity is the name of the game, and every year, thousands of students are left behind because they fell short of the line that they were told made them “good enough.”
And there’s some merit to the self-education idea. People learn best when they are invested and interested in the subjects they’re studying. Sure, some of S.H.I.T.’s classes might not be exactly perfect, but along the way, most of the students seem to stumble upon a worthwhile venture that they wouldn’t be given the opportunity to explore otherwise.
Read the rest at HBS!
* * * * (out of 5)
Accepted has one thing going for it from the beginning. Despite all the normal trappings of a silly teen high school/college movie, it recognizes from the get-go that the super-stress situation that some students put themselves into when it comes to college applications is total crap. It’s completely unnecessary for the process to be as painful as it is for some people. And remember, unnecessary pain can be mined for comic genius.
Bartleby Gaines (Justin Long) just wants to be like any other kid, and get into college before the end of his senior year. Easier said than done. After being turned away by every single college he applied to, disappointing his parents to a previously-unheard of degree, Justin makes a desperate plea to buy himself some time – he fabricates an acceptance letter from the South Harmon Institute of Technology (yep… S.H.I.T.), a fake sister school to Harmon College (a pretty blatant riff of Harvard). Naturally, his parents are thrilled and relieved, and the pressure is off of Bartleby – until his dad wants some more information about the prestigious institution that he’s never heard of. Bartleby enlists his best friend Sherman (Jonah Hill) to create a website to continue the lie, and some other friends to help him turn a run-down mental facility into a faux college campus. All of it works to fool his parents, but he makes one wrong move: the website includes a button that says, “Acceptance is one click away.” Enter all the other students just short of the standard college line who need a place to be come September. Once they all show up at Bartleby’s new doorstep for “orientation,” he tried to break the news to them. But he created the lie in order to get his parents off his back, so who is he to send all these others back into the clutches of disappointment? So he enlists Sherman’s crazy Uncle Ben (Lewis Black) to be acting dean and faculty member, and starts an alternative education format where students decide what they want to learn, a format that – strangely enough – just might work. But it’s all still a lie, and God knows it’s going to catch up with him one way or the other.
Now, I never had an issue getting into college. I was lucky: I did well enough on my SATs that those alone got me into the school I wanted to attend. My admission process was pretty painless, since I only applied to two schools. But I had friends who applied to upwards of 15 schools. That’s 15 applications, 15 application fees, 15 essays to write, 15 campuses to potentially visit… It’s a big, inefficient headache. All of my friends who wanted to go to college are there, but I certainly know some who got discouraged in the early goings of the decisions, and certainly some like Bartleby’s friend Rory (Maria Thayer), who banked on one Ivy League and was devastated to be turned away. So Accepted has some good points in its ideas. Given the abysmal retention and graduation rates at some colleges and universities, one would think the institutions would try to cater to students, and make it relatively painless to get there, so long as the students were willing to work hard once they WERE there. But exclusivity is the name of the game, and every year, thousands of students are left behind because they fell short of the line that they were told made them “good enough.”
And there’s some merit to the self-education idea. People learn best when they are invested and interested in the subjects they’re studying. Sure, some of S.H.I.T.’s classes might not be exactly perfect, but along the way, most of the students seem to stumble upon a worthwhile venture that they wouldn’t be given the opportunity to explore otherwise.
Read the rest at HBS!
posted by Matt S. at
8:50 AM
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