This is about the time that most high school seniors start worrying about getting college acceptance letters. They’ve taken their standardized tests, written their essays, and submitted their applications; all that’s left is to sit around and wait for answers.
A majority of those who apply to college will get into a school. It might not be Princeton or Harvard or their first choice, but they’ll get in somewhere. Meanwhile, if the writers of the 2006 comedy Accepted are to be believed, those who don’t get into any schools at all might just create one of their own to fool their parents.
Plot summary (with possible spoilers): Justin Long stars as Bartleby Gaines, a smart kid who just didn’t apply himself in high school. As a result, he doesn’t get into any colleges at all, not even his safety school.
After facing the disappointment of his father Jack (played by Mark Derwin), his mother Diane (Ann Cusack), and even his little sister Lizzie (Hannah Marks), Bartleby decides that he has to prove to his family that he’s not as much of a loser as they think he is. So he gets his friend Sherman (Jonah Hill) to set up a website for a fake school, called the South Harmon Institute of Technology (SHIT). Bartleby then creates a logo, prints out an acceptance letter, and proudly shows it off to his parents.
As with all parents in teen comedies, Jack and Diane are dumb enough to buy the prank.
When Bartleby’s other friends Hands (Columbus Short) and Kiki (Diora Baird) hear what he has done, they beg him for fake acceptance letters to fool their parents as well. Bartleby reluctantly agrees, but then the friends realize that they’ll need to take their prank a step farther because their parents will naturally want to drop them off at campus on the first day of school.
So they lease an abandoned mental hospital with the tuition payment that Bartleby’s dad made, and spend a lot of time cleaning it up to make it look like a typical college dorm. Bartleby even gets Sherman’s uncle Ben (Lewis Black) to pretend to be the Dean of Students for a day.
Bartleby, Hands, and Kiki think they’re home free after their parents leave, but then something unexpected happens. Hundreds of other students arrive at the SHIT campus. Apparently, Sherman accidentally made the application form on the website clickable, so everyone who applied received fake acceptance letters.
The rest of the film then deals with Bartleby’s attempts to turn SHIT into something resembling a school. The students create their own classes, take turns teaching each other, and of course party. The conflict comes in when a group of frat boys from a different college down the road figure out what’s going on and try to get SHIT shut down.
My Reaction: The premise of Accepted was just so ridiculous that I had couldn’t get into the film at all. First off, I think every high school senior knows that community colleges are available for those who either can’t afford to go to a four-year school right away or don’t have the grades to get into a four-year school quite yet. No one would go to all that trouble of “founding” a school just to fool their parents. Give me a break.
Even if I were to let that part slide and consider that Bartleby was the kind of guy who would take the latter route, I still couldn’t believe anything that happened after he printed out the fake acceptance letter. You mean to tell me that his father gave him a tuition check right there on the spot? Yeah, riiight! What parent in their right mind would make the check out in their kid’s name?
Also, there’s simply no way that several hundred kids would cooperate with each other so smoothly in that kind of setting. The film portrayed SHIT as a freakin’ utopia where everyone pulled their own weight and no one slacked off at all. Nor were there any fights, thefts, arguments, complaints about roommates or any of the other minor conflicts that normally happen in dorms. Again, things wouldn’t unfold this way in the real world.
And the ending was pure crap as well. There’s no way a “school” like SHIT would receive accreditation, probationary or otherwise. Come on!
While there were a few funny lines along the way, on the whole I thought Accepted was about as good as the school name that Bartleby came up with. I give it 3.5 stars out of 10.