Accepted (Widescreen Edition)

Accepted (Widescreen Edition) Review

Accepted (directed by Steve Pink) is a humorous, thoughtful and smart take on college and what it truly means to achieve in life.

Bartleby Gaines (Justin Long) is a smooth talking, intelligent but lazy high school graduate that finds himself in a bad predicament; he is rejected from every college he applies to. To keep himself from becoming a failure in the eyes of his overly demanding parents (Mark Derwin and Ann Cusack) he creates The South Harmon Institute of Technology, a fake college. To the dismay of his best friend Sherman Schrader (Jonah Hill), he accepts himself into the college along with his friends (Maria Thayer, Adam Herschman and Columbus Short).

But when more than 100 students show up on the first day Bartleby must go to far greater lengths than he imagined to keep the charade up.

The movie's opinion on college and academics is refreshing. The college application process is brutal. Qualified students get turned down. Then there are students who slack in high school but are searching for a second chance. Bartleby's `fake' college shows that there are students who can succeed and discover themselves in college regardless of their past performances. It's good to know that there are colleges out there that accept even those that didn't get straight A's in high school or a perfect ACT score. In the process his college that was essentially fake at the beginning becomes more real and turns into more than merely a scheme to fool his parents.

One of my favorite characters in the movie is Glen played by Adam Herschman. His one liners and ability to snag pretty college co-eds is hilarious. He is a suave man that doesn't appear to be one. He proves that looks don't count half as much as personality.

Bartleby is another surprise. He is lazy but any audience member will be able to spot the genius bubbling under the surface. He also has witty and clever one liners that bite through the stereotypical Harmon students and the restrictions colleges place on students.

The only problem with Accepted that bugs me is the concept. It's unrealistic that they are able to start a college no matter how much money they have in their possession. The accreditation is also far-fetched. But it is a movie and I am willing to suspend reality. Movies are allowed to push the limits. The social commentary on colleges shows that reality was tested for a reason; to illustrate that while the movie's concept doesn't always make sense, neither does real life.

Accepted (Widescreen Edition) Feature

ACCEPTED

Accepted (Widescreen Edition) Overview

Unable to get accepted at college, Bartleby Gaines creates a fictitious one to impress his parents, but the word gets out and other students want to a

Accepted (Widescreen Edition) Specifications

Justin Long has been hovering on the edges of movies like The Break-Up and Dodgeball, providing little comic bursts that are often funnier than the rest of the movie. In Accepted, Long plays Bartleby Gaines, a fast-talking slacker who, when he gets rejected by every college he applied to, invents a phony college to get his parents off his back. Unfortunately, the website his best friend creates is too effective--hundreds of other rejects apply and are accepted. Instead of revealing the hoax, Gaines decides to forge ahead and let the students create their own curriculum, little suspecting that their school is obstructing the expansion plans of the nearby snobbish college. Accepted is much better than you might expect, given the low bar set by most campus comedies; it aims for, and sometimes achieves, the blend of slapstick and social satire that Animal House embodied. Long proves to be a charming leading man without losing his quirky comic sense and the supporting cast is consistently entertaining, particularly stand-up comedian Lewis Black, who delivers a variety of sardonic rants about society. Accepted's critique of conformism is glib--you wish they'd given it a little more bite--but it's still valid and a pleasant sliver of substance in an otherwise vapid genre. --Bret Fetzer