Reviewed - Accepted: HAVING demonstrated his flair as a screenwriter with the John Cusack movies Grosse Point Blank and High Fidelity, Steve Pink makes an entirely inauspicious directing debut with Accepted. This time Pink is working from other people's material, and amazingly, given its flimsiness, it took three writers to stitch the script together.
The central character, Bartleby Grimes (Justin Long) is a feeble imitation of Matthew Broderick's wily Ferris Bueller. By the end of his high school years, Bartleby is running a lucrative business manufacturing fake ID cards for fellow students. When turned down by seven colleges, he comes up with a wheeze to appease his parents.
He invents a college, the South Harmon Institute of Technology, and the script milks its acronym for cheap gags. Bartleby takes over a disused psychiatric hospital as a front, sets up a fake website, and persuades a cynical ex-teacher (Lewis Black), now a shoe salesman, to pose as the dean. The fake college becomes a haven for other rejects from the educational system.
Bartleby's best friend, the overweight but bright Sherman (Jonah Hill), who used to play in a Cranberries tribute band, gets a place at a real college, where he is subjected to the humiliations of fraternity initiations. Some heavy moralising inevitably lurks around that corner, and this inane and scrappy movie ladles it on in dollops, extolling the virtues of a "liberal" education (skateboarding and partying classes) over the formal process of an actual college.
The History Boys, out next Friday, tackles a similar message with infinitely sharper wit.
