Customer Reviews

Accepted (Full Screen Edition)

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***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

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.

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.

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.

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.

The South Harmon Institute of Technology (S.H.I.T.) will become a campus you will wish to visit and revisit again and again and the following are the reasons why.

Occasionally when you go to review something you are taken completely by surprise. Accepted is one such movie. Both the movie and the features on the DVD will be completely unexpected. I was expecting a frat party film along the line of Animal House or The Revenge of the Nerds series, and ended up with something closer to With Honors. The movie actually deals with some great questions - questions about personal integrity, traditions, growth and values.

This DVD is packed full of special features with something for everyone, such as commentaries, deleted scenes, gag reel, music videos and more. The best part of the fun is the self-guided tour of the campus. The virtual tour of S.H.I.T. takes you through the main sets, with mini commentaries on parts of the film that took place on these sets.

Justin Long and Lewis Black lead an all-star comedic cast in a romp through University life, as if the students ran the show. The gag reel will have you on the floor laughing as the cast takes the jokes on and off screen to extremes.

The feature commentary with director Steve Pink, and stars Justin Long, Lewis Black, Jonah Hill and Adam Herschman is a barrel of laughs; they seemed to have as much fun commenting about the film as they did on screen during the actual movie. They spent time mocking commentaries on DVDs, critiquing scenes and joking with each other. Early on they say if you make it through the commentary you will need psychiatric help, and though that may be true for their characters and the actors themselves, the commentary is hilarious.

These and the other no-holds-barred bonus features push this DVD from being a renter to a purchase. This is a film you will watch over and over again. It will be great for impromptu movie nights and to put on when you want a laugh after a hard day in class, or after working on that paper that would just not be written. This film will help remind you why you are really in university and what is the real purpose and goal in life.

Pick up the DVD - it will bring you hours and hours of entertainment!

(First Published in Imprint 2006-11-24 as "Accepted Defintely passes!')

In the tradition of Animal House, there have been a few great college movies here and there. I was pleasently surprised that this was right up there with them.

Bartelby has been rejected by every college he applied to, as have his friends. Instead of wallowing in misery, he gets a friend to create a website of a fake college to escape the wrath of his parents. They rent an abandoned psychiatric hospital, clean it up, and create a fake college from the ground up. Unexpectedly, hundreds of other burn outs who also didn't get accepted show up, as acceptance is just one click away. Bartelby and his friends are forced to create a class schedule and activities, run a business, and compete with the inevitable rival frat house on the real college campus across the street.

What was so hilarious about this movie is the fact that even for a moment, Bartelby and his friends thought they could get away with this. Not just for themselves, but for all those hundreds of people who also showed up. There is the obvious comic talent of Justin Long and the man they hire to be their dean, Lewis Black, along with the rest of the cast. Plus the set up of the fake college is hilarious : a half pipe for skateboarding, swimming pool with an open bar, etc. Good times.

This movie is a nice end of the summer funny movie. Much like many of the underdog movies, accepted is a movie in which a group of rejected nobodies build something that is larger that any differences. Justin Long plays Bartleby Gaines, a High school senior that has cruised through high school putting forth little effort in formal studies and grades and more into deception and dilenquency. Finally, as pressure bear down on him from his parents, he get the final letter of rejection from his college choices. So, how does he face his parents, especially his father. How does he say that he is really a screw up and missed college? Well, he tried honesty for a couple of days atleast. But, in the age of technology and with his cunning powers of planning and deception, he spins a sceme to create his own College, the South Harmon Institute of Technology. Yeah, Far fetched scheme. So, how can he pull off this big, of course, with a little help from his friends. His Best friend, Scherman Schrader, who is actually attending the real Harmon College, uses his computer saviness and creates the college website, and his friend Monica finds the building, an old pscyh hospital just south of the Harmon College campus. Well, Bartleby's parents by the story, and pay his first semester tuition, deposited into his phoney bank account for the school, and the process of building begins. One deception and illusion after another, his parents by in hook,line, and sinker, and he is dropped off to his first day of college. Unfortunatly for Bartleby, his friend Sherman made the website to accurate and interactive, and Bartleby suddenly finds himself surrouned by hundreds of other college rejects that ended up getting accepted online at South Hampton Institute of Technology. How does he get himself out of it?...well, why not go with the flow...and the money. So Bartleby is somehow swept into the world as a College director. The rest of the movie is a series of ups and downs for Bartleby and his friends, especially Sherman, who is busy trying to fit in and join a frat at the real Hampton college. Unfortunately, the harmon college Dean has got word of this other school, and him and his student community group are out to get the land that the new school is on to expand their own campus. So, in all their are a bunch of different themes going throughout this movie. I won't spoil the rest of it for you, but it definitly is worth a viewing. In all, it has a theme similar to Revenge of the Nerds, but on a much larger scale. Nerds was a movie in which a bunch of underdog got together and created a fraternity that triumphed over adversity. Well, this movie is similar to that, only on a larger scale and modernized for this era. So if you enjoyed Revenge of the Nerds, than this is another great underdog story. I can't wait until the DVD is available, and hopefully it will be available as an unrated/extended version as well.

Accepted is an enjoyable comedy, although a little hard to believe. Bartelby B. Gaines is a high school senior who has one major problem. He hasn't been accepted into any of the college and university's that he applied to, not even the state university that was his fall back choice. Tired of not having an answer for the "Where are you going?" question and dismayed at disappointing his parents Bartely B. comes up with an idea. In the beginning it's just an acceptance letter. He creates a letter stating that he was accepted to South Harmon Institute of Technology. He even has his friend create a website. Then he starts to think his idea might really work. When his father hands him a check to pay his tuition in full he decides to create a real college. He leases an old dilapidated school building that was once a mental facility and creates a college--dorm rooms and all. The plan just keeps going and going. Students enroll and they even find a dean. Before he knows it he has thousands of students show up at the made up school.

The film is hilarious and comes from the same studio that released American Pie.
I really loved this movie.

DVD special features include
Deleted Scenes
Gag Reel
Reject Rejection-The Making of Accepted
More

The film's soundtrack is pretty hot too and includes songs from Modest Mouse, The Hives, Citizen Cope, Weezer, and Ryan Adams among others.

Accepted is rated PG-13 and is now available on DVD.

This is yet another college movie in a long line of Many! In fact plot device and even certain scenes are rip offs of other college movies. In this film Justin Long plays Bartleby Gaines a Graduating High schooler who gets rejected from every college he applies to. He then decides to make up a college to quell his parents disappointment of his ongoing rejections. With the help of friends they create a functional web sight and acceptance letters. The also buy the property for the school, a defunct mental hospital and refurbish it to look like a real school. But the big problem happens when the funtional websight is just a little to functional and hundreds of students show up with their acceptance letters and fully paid tuitions, whoops and to make matters worse the Dean wants the property that the new school sits on for other purposes, and gets snobby frat boys to do his bidding.
Just like in other films this movie has similiar plot devices;
In Revenge of the Nerds the Nerds have to prove themselves a true Fraternity, In Van Wilder, Van has to prove that he can do the work and graduate and Even in Old School, Luke Wilson and crew have to prove that they are a real Fraternity. And so, in Accepted, Bartleby has to prove That the South Harmon Intitute of Technology is a Real and accredited school.
Subsequent plot devices; In Animal House, Dean wormer gets the snobby frat boys to discredit the Delta house, In Old school Dean Pritchard gets the head of the student council to discredit the Luke Wilsons Frat house. In Accepted the dean charges the head of the snobby frat house to discredit the S.H.I.T. One scene inparticular is a blatent rip off fromt the Film Back to school with Rodney Danger Field, where the Frat house is throwing the "best party of the Year" but its actually pretty boring because everyones at the other party. Even Van Wilder took that idea from Back to school with his roller disco party.
All that said, this movie is still very funny. I had tears coming out of my eyes, watching all the antics these guys get into. The Characters are colorful just as colorful as all the characters in revenge of the nerds, if not wackier! and just to make this deal even sweeter, Lewis Black (political and crudely tell it like it is comedian) lends his talents as the Dean of this imaginary school, hysterical! I can't wait for this one on dvd. I may even go see it again when it actually opens next week ( I love advanced screenings and free tickets! thanks Lazer 99.3) Bottom Line.....Fun and very funny!