Starring Justin Long, Jonah Hill, Anthony Heald, Blake Lively, Lewis Black, Adam Herschman, Columbus Short
Written By: Adam Cooper, Mark Perez, Bill Collage
Directed By: Steve Pink
Studio: Universal
Buy on Amazon.com link

Accepted is another college comedy movie that will make you laugh, but it doesn’t seem very original. The premise of the story seems original but stuff that happens in the movie isn’t.

The movie is about Bartleby “B” Gaines, who just graduated high school and starts applying to colleges & universities around his area. He gets a bunch of rejection letters back and doesn’t know what to do with his life. He ends up making up a fake college to fool his parents and get them to respect him. The name of the college is called South Harmon Institute of Technology (short for S.H.I.T). His parents want to see where the college is so Bartleby’s gets the help from his friends to find a place that they can fix up. They find an old abandoned psych ward that they make into a passable college (with the help of his parents’ tuition check). B’s friend Sherman helps him make the website and ends up making it a fully-functional website where people can apply. Well one day when B and his friends are working on the building FOR S.H.I.T, 300 or so students show up for orientation and enroll in the school. They decide to let everyone stay since they have all been rejected by prestigious colleges. The dean of the college is Sherman’s drunken, slacker Uncle who sleeps in a trailer. The teachers are the students themselves, and they pick out which subjects they want to know more about. Harmon College is the snotty school that everyone got rejected from, and that school tries to get South Harmon shut down. Besides that, Bartleby has to worry about the parents finding out about the school being a fraud as well. That’s pretty much what Accepted is about.

I thought the movie had a lot of funny moments, but by the first five minutes I could tell what was gonna happen in the end. The overall plot hasn’t been done before but all the stuff in-between has been done. The preppy college kid trying to go after the nerdy student, the hot ex-girlfriend of the preppy college kid going out with the nerdy guy, a big party with lots of hot chicks and a band, the preppy kid ratting out the other college kids to their parents…the list goes on and on. But the movie is entertaining and has a lot of funny moments. I wish the movie was rated R because if you’re gonna make a college movie, might as well go for the gusto. Have it be raunchy, show some nudity, and have lots of cursing. It’s just not the same where you see a college movie and it’s PG-13. But they do say a lot for being a PG-13 movie, they could have said a lot more if it was R though.

Accepted had some heart in the movie and that’s what made American Pie movies so good. You had jokes in the movie, but it just wasn’t some tits and ass movie. The people in the movie were rejects, losers, non-conformists, special, etc. and didn’t fit in with the typical college groups. I’d probably would have attended this school because I hate the typical college lifestyle. I was an art major yet hated going to art galleries and showings, go figure! I liked how there were no teachers in the school and they can learn what they want. Which doesn’t seem so hard to believe since some college courses were just as much as a joke. But with S.H.I.T, you can learn what you want within your own schedule, and at your own pace. You don’t have to go to unnecessary classes like gym if you’re an art major (yes I was made to take fucking gym!). So having a students’ college run by students doesn’t sound like a bad idea after all. Is it possible? I don’t know, if it’s somewhat regulated with people that overlook things but don’t get in the way. Then I can see something like that being a reality.

Bonus features for Accepted were um, acceptable? Har Har! Sorry about that. No really, the extras were pretty cool and had some funny things in them. The deleted scenes and gag reels were good, and showed the actors improvising on & off screen, as well as goofing off. There’s a making of featurette which was ok, and there was some featurette about newbie actor Adam Herschman. There are one or two other things on the DVD but I didn’t watch them.

If you like college comedies like Animal House, Old School, Back to School, and American Pie 2, than you’ll probably like Accepted. It’s a little bit tamer than those movies but it’s still entertaining nonetheless. Check it out on DVD now!

Features:
Deleted Scenes
Gag Reel
Reject Rejection: The Making of Accepted
…and More!

Audio:
ENGLISH: Dolby Digital 5.1 CC
SPANISH: Dolby Digital 5.1
FRENCH: Dolby Digital 5.1

Video:
Widescreen 2.35:1 Color (Anamorphic)

Subtitles:
English, Spanish, French

Favorite Scenes: I liked when they discovered the psych ward, and the bikini watching class was nice to watch as well.
Rating: PG-13
Running Time: 93 minutes
Extras Rating:
Overall Rating: