It amused me...

So I was getting ready to take in my first show at work last night... I come out, and make my normal group announcement. The group turns around, and I'm looking at this guy:



Yep. I took Feedback through the TOMB. Very exciting. It was amusing to me, because I actually just watched the finale of the show about a week ago. He's a very nice guy... smart as hell... the impression I pulled off the show more or less matched the actual man (Matt) very nicely.

Thus my run-in with the pseudocelebrity ends.

By the way... he (and his wife and in-laws) totally made it out alive.

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!

The Descent

The Descent is the perfect set-up for a horror movie. It starts out with the now-tired formula – six attractive women doing something dangerous. It takes a normal twist – one of them makes a seriously misguided error. Something bad happens – they’re trapped, with no way out, and no way to get help. This is normally the part where the killer/monster/virus/insane clown slaughters them all, one by one. But in most horror movies, the villain never has to deal with anyone who kicks nearly this much ass.

The story, for what it’s worth, revolves around Sarah (Shauna Macdonald), a young woman who’s dealt with way too much trauma in her young life. Year(s) earlier, Sarah was in a car accident that left her husband and her young daughter dead, something from which she still hasn’t fully recovered. As an attempt to further that recovery, she’s meeting five friends in the woods in America to go cave diving. They’ve always had a good time with this sort of thing, and it seems like just the right move to get Sarah back into life. Led by Juno (Natalie Mendoza), they arrive at camp for the night to drink and prep for the day ahead. There we see a little more of Sarah’s fractured emotional state, through her nightmares about the deaths of her family.

The next day, they head out for the entrance to the cave they’re going to explore. At first, it’s all more or less fun and easy, nothing the girls can’t handle. But when squeezing through a particularly tight passage, Sarah gets stuck and starts to freak out. Beth (Alex Reid) tries to help her through it and rejoin the others, difficult in the claustrophobic tunnel.

And then the damn thing starts to collapse.

They race out and regroup, now realizing that the entrance they came through has been sealed shut. It’s OK, because there are other entrances to the cave system they were talking about exploring… oops. We’re not in that cave system! Juno switched it last minute in order to make the trip more exciting, so that they could “discover” this system together and have a truly unique experience. Needless to say, this pisses everyone off, and the friendships start to strain under such a high-pressure situation.

And then they hear something. And see something. And it wants them out of its cave.

This is the flow of The Descent, done in brilliant fashion. Everything goes from fine to terrible in a matter of minutes – there’s no release before the tension builds again; every possible bad thing gets dumped on these women within a ten minute span. Writer/director Neil Marshall has no issue showing EXACTLY how bad this is getting, either. This is one of the most cringe-worthy horror films I’ve seen in some time, and not just for “the big scares.” In fact, more cringes come from real life injuries, accidents that put something outside the human body that has no reason to be outside the body. It’s gross, and really, really effective.

Read the rest at HBS!