I Love You, Beth Cooper

I Love You, Beth Cooper (2009)

Written by Larry Doyle, based on his novel of the same name

Directed by Chris Columbus

            Chris Columbus, what has happened to you?  You are responsible for one of the highest grossing movies of all time! You directed not one, but TWO Harry Potter Movies!  How can you make a film that was as boring as this? 

            Listen, I know, being a 24 year old male, I am absolutely not the target audience for this flick.  There are two reasons I watched this.  One, my girlfriend wanted to, and two, Hayden Panettiere (hereby referred to as “Panties”, because her real name is unpronouncable, and impossible to spell).  Now, don’t get me wrong – it wasn’t terrible.  But it was boring and generic.  Let me explain.

            As is typical for teen comedies, the first ten minutes of this are simple character exposition.  First we meet the weird, possibly homosexual, best friend of our main character.  Then, in an impossibly long graduation speech (which you may have seen some of in the trailers, it’s where our protaganist professes his love for the titular piece of ass), we meet our nerdy main character.  Here, he is played by Paul Rust, whose nose deserves it’s own zipcode.  Not that I didn’t like the guy, he was unusually nerdy and awkward, but had great comic timing.  There are just times when his nose takes up the whole screen, preventing me from seeing Panties.  You soon meet Panties’ two hot friends, one of which is borderline retarded, but has massive cans, and the other one is “misunderstood”.  She also represents the flick’s only black character.  After twenty minutes, the movie derails into a series of vignettes in which we are supposed to actually look past Panties’ hotness, and notice her personality.  Unfortunatly for the movie, Panties is a terrible actress, and the character is a vain, psychotic bitch.

            I think what I really didn’t like about this flick was the tone.  It seems like the filmmakers were trying to make a satire of teen comedies.  In the opening speech, the main dude rails on most of the typical teen comedy clichés, making you think that the rest of the movie will have similar jokes (i.e. be good).  Not so.  Most of the humor in the first half is very slap-sticky.  For examply, Beth Cooper drives like a psychopath.  There’s a scene in which the main dude gets hit in the face with a cork from a champagne bottle.  There’s a rabid racoon in one scene.  Beth Cooper’s boyfriend is a caricature of “mean guys” and has a permanent scowl on his face.  Actually, there’s a ten minutes chase scene where he and his ‘roid head buddies chase our main dude.  Maybe it’s just me, but I don’t respond well to slapstick humor.  It’s childish, and when you’re trying to make a movie for teenagers, it’s useless.  There’s also many scenes that are parodies of real teen comedies like Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (actually, the main dude’s dad is played by the always awesome Alan Ruck, from Ferris Bueller) or Sixteen Candles.  About halfway through the flick, they abandoned the slapstick tone, and the movie just became a series of serious conversations between the main dude and Panties, most of which consisted of laughable dialogue and very little chemistry.  The main dude was basically a stalker.  I don’t know about you, but I would find it very creepy if somebody had a poster of me above their bed.  Panties thought it was cute.

            Since I started writing this review, I have come to an important conclusion.  I didn’t like this movie.  There were a few laughs, yes, but this movie failed at everything it tried to do, save for making Hayden Panettiere look hot.  I can recommend it for that reason, and that reason only.