I normally don’t do reviews because I think pretty much everything that I see on the movie screen today pretty much sucks but certain current events made this seem necessary so I’ll give it a try. If you don’t want to read the review I suggest you skip right to the anecdote section of the write up. Here goes.
Review
Accepted was a movie released in 2006 starring a bunch of people I never heard of with the exception of Lewis Black. In keeping with that the soundtrack also lists songs and bands that I also never heard of except for one song by Green Day.
The plot centers around a bunch of potential college freshman except for the fact that they’ve been turned down by every college in the country. So, in order to please their parents they set up a fictional college on the internet called South Harmon Institute of Technology (S.H.I.T) and lo and behold it’s not long before they’re inundated with kids from across the land who are in the same situation and are clamoring to get in. They consist of the stereotypical stoners, geeks, jocks and other assorted misfits.
Once they start arriving in droves they lease an abandon psycho ward and start making it look like a college campus. They start a school newspaper called the S.H.I.T. Rag and their mascot is the S.H.I.T. Sandwich. Since they have no curriculum or for that matter, teachers, they let the “students” decide what they want to learn and let them teach themselves. Here’s a sampling of what they came up with.
Taking a Walk and Thinking About Stuff
Foreign Affairs: Hooking Up Overseas
Rock Our Faces Off 222
How to Blow Stuff Up Using Only Your Mind
To make a long story short they eventually get busted by a neighboring school and shut down. However they appeal to the State of Ohio Board of Education for an accreditation hearing and plead their case. To the surprise of no one watching the movie they are granted a one year probationary period to give this new method of learning a chance and everybody lives happily ever after.
Anecdote
This has been a pretty rough week for my kid. She’s still showing some side effects after suffering a concussion as a result of getting in a car accident last week. As a result she had to miss some school and had to take some time off from her job.
Yesterday was her first full day back at both and I decided to drop by and see her at work just to see how she was doing. Along the way she related a story that I thought was pretty funny. It seems that she volunteered to work on this years school play. They’re putting on a production of The Curious Savage and she helped with setting up the stage. For her efforts her name appeared in the playbill that listed the actors and their roles as well as the stagehands. Since she’s a senior they asked them about their future plans and where they planned on attending college. Since Anna was out she jokingly told one of her friends that she planned to attend the South Harmon Institute of Technology (S.H.I.T.) and they published that in the playbill.
I don’t know if that means she’s getting her sense of humor back or if it’s the lingering effects of the concussion. Either way, it’s also a pretty good indication that she inherited a fair share of her fathers genes.