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I was in a video store the other day and overheard a mother and teenage daughter looking for a good rent. The neo-person pointed at one title and asked, “Is this a true story?” Mom replied, “It’s a documentary.” The child furiously screwed up her brow and demanded, “What’s that?”
Which has just what to do with reviewing the much-ballyhooed prep raunch-a-thon American Pie, exactly?
Obviously, the youth market isn’t getting enough smart comedies.
Touted as being this year’s There’s Something About Mary, and it’s producer/director team Chris and Paul Weitz as the next Farrelly brothers, American Pie, like real estate, can be boiled down to three things: location, location, location. As in, where are the main characters going to find somebody to have sex with, where are they going to take them to have sex, and where are they going to assemble afterward to talk about having had sex. Really. It’s about four Michigan high school guys who are practically on the verge of a cyanide spritzer because graduation is a few weeks away and they’re still virgins. One desperately joins the jazz chorus looking for a loose bohemian type, since the artsy girls aren’t familiar with his naive jock rep; another, the horny pastryphile of the film’s title (if nothing else, this movie may do wonders for Pepperidge Farm and Sara Lee among the hyperhormonal set), invites a zoftig Czech exchange student (the script calls her “Czechoslovakian,” even though there is no such country anymore and hasn’t been since, maybe, you could last find a part in Phil Collins’ hair; I’ve got a friend from the Czech Republic, and if he’s any indication, they take their distinctly separate cultural identity from Slovakians as seriously as would the citizens of Traveler’s Rest if suddenly they found themselves annexed by Greer) to his house to study, then webcasts her while she changes clothes in his room; the “smart” member of the quartet pays a quasi-worldly female friend $200 to spread rumors about his physical endowment; and the only one with a girlfriend tries every trick in the book (literally -- his older brother clues him in to this Holy Grail of sub rosa sex manuals, with handwritten entries such as “The Tongue Tornado,” hidden like a Dead Sea Scroll in the school library) to get her to give it up before they separate for college.
Then, just when you think, there is absolutely no redemptive quality to this muck besides a few well-timed guilty laughs, fatigue from the pressure of their sophomoric competition inspires a miraculously intelligent revelation. As one of them says, “I’ve never even had sex, and already I can’t stand it.” Then they all go get laid on prom night.
Granted, one of the biggest mistakes almost every human being makes is to forget exactly what the natural chemical insanity of post-adolescence felt like (which is understandable; sexual amnesia is a defense mechanism to help us get through life without obsessing over all the stupid things we did as teenagers). An oft-quoted statistic says men think about sex every 24 minutes; ergo, the rising average age of the world’s population means, to make that figure work out, young men must be thinking about it, what, every five or ten seconds -- which is about how they’re depicted in this movie. And on that purely prurient level, American Pie does generate a giggle or two. But it also has lengthy scenes built on semen-laced beer, laxative overdosing, and of course dessert molesting, so don’t take that as an endorsement. It is little more than a latterday Porky’s with internet access. Compared to ...Mary, it lacks that film’s over-the-top energy and visual absurdity.
But what are you gonna do? Relatively nobody’s been going to see clever teen comedies such as Rushmore and Election (the latter also co-starring Chris Klein, who plays the singing lacrosse-player in Pie, as a wide-eyed ingenuous jock, a role he’s a natural in). The critical fanfare for those films came from adults, who don’t make up the majority of the filmgoing market; meanwhile, American Pie ruled the box office its first weekend out. It looks like the future of the Weitz brothers, who previously wrote Antz, but somewhat oddly selected a script by someone else for their own first film, is secure.
At times like this I’m glad I’m not a parent. D
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