Have I mentioned

how much I love The Stranger's film reviewers?

Accepted
dir. Steve Pink

Accepted, less a movie than a stupid piece of shit, has thrown me into a mighty rage. I know some of you harbor secret teen feelings for Justin Long—fine, he's perfectly lovable—but unless your name is 'Justin Long's Mom' and you're paralyzed from the eyeballs down, you need to let this one go.

Ostensibly a critique of our nation's higher-education system (oh, the elitism!), Accepted is about a bunch of horrible, entitled, middle-class teens who don't get into college for perfectly legitimate reasons. Well, boo fucking hoo. You're such a smarty-pants that you only applied to Yale? Your bad! Busted rotator cuff busted your sports scholarship? How about some studying, champ? Oh, you just didn't try that hard? Wow! Fuck you!

To appease their grumpster, goal-oriented families ('Get a job! Wear pants! Blah blah blah!'), the kids invent a fictional college ('South Harmon Institute of Technology' or SHIT, if you're into uproarious chuckles), renovate an abandoned mental hospital, and pocket the tens of thousands of dollars in tuition money that the oppressive 'rents toss their way. Did somebody say pizza party?

Accepted would be just another dumb loser comedy if it didn't have such a destructive chip on its shoulder. When it's not insulting those who actually worked hard and enjoyed college, Accepted farts boldly in the face of anyone facing real educational hurdles (stop crying, poor people!). Screenwriters Adam Cooper and Bill Collage (whose other collaborations include New York Minute and 2008's much-anticipated Untitled Brett Ratner Project) want their movie to be irreverently anti-intellectual and heroically antiestablishment, but it's neither. It's just pro-lazy. Tired of being 'told what to learn,' the self-proclaimed 'SHIT-heads' create their own course catalog, which unironically includes 'Hooking Up,' 'Wingman-ing 101,' and 'Walking Down the Road Thinking About Stuff.'

I wish it were possible to punch a movie in the face (can we get to work on that, science?). LINDY WEST