A fun sex comedy that has survived better than most others. Denis is a brainiac, who tells the entire school, that he loves Beth Cooper, local hottie and dream girl to whom he has never spoken. Beth and her fellow hot-girl friends decide to follow up on this and take Denis out to a party. Thus begins a crazy graduation night, that involves parties, nudity, bullies and beer aka all the requisite ingredients for a teen sex comedy.
With Beth dragging Denis along to all the stops, while driving like a maniac, she has the perfect mixture of ingredients to be a manic pixie dream girl. I actually will not fight anyone, who thinks she is just another MPDG. That's perfectly fair. I think, however, she subverts in some interesting ways even if others might argue that maybe it is not enough. The whole point of this movie is that Beth isn't a dream girl. She's a real person. She drives like a maniac, not because she's quirky but because she's a bad driver. She makes bad decisions (that ostensibly she might need to be rescued from), but she feels trapped in her role as the hot girl everyone wants. She's even got personal family life issues that affect her outlook and perspective.
The opening of the movie is about Denis coming out of his shell but the rest of the movie is about him learning that Beth Cooper is more than the girl on his ceiling poster.
There's a side-plot that I hate. One that showed up in 1997's In and Out that I, again, absolutely despise. It was nearly subverted here, but the plot point is if someone calls you gay, it's because you're gay. No matter how you act or what you say or how you feel or what your life has been. They are never wrong. If someone calls you gay in act one by the end of the movie you will be gay. Rich, aside from the "Let's sword-fight with our boners" flashback isn't really that gay. Yet for some reason people look at everything he says as if it's really gay but most of it wouldn't be looked at twice if not for the speech and the non-digetic history. It would have been a better movie if Denis had been wrong on all of his speech subjects. The graduation speech would have needed to be a little bit different. But it would have given the movie a stronger point rather than just fleshing out Beth it would have shown that Denis was the one with blinders on. But hey maybe next time. Guess in 2009 we weren't there yet. Or at least that's what I might say if 2006's John Tucker Must Die didn't exist. There's an aspect of this movie that like it's main character puts Beth Cooper on a pedestal and now I suppose it serves as an archival representation of a collective way of thinking that isn't as mainstream anymore.
Hayden and Paul have solid Beauty and the Beast chemistry. I think there's a lot of stylistic choices the movie makes that I like. Unfortunately while it's certainly not as bad as some sex comedies I've rewatched from my younger days this one isn't nearly as great as i remembered it and this wasn't top tier in my rose tinted perspective to begin with.
Review by wolfkinBlockedParent2021-12-21T16:03:30Z— updated 2023-10-21T20:42:40Z
A fun sex comedy that has survived better than most others. Denis is a brainiac, who tells the entire school, that he loves Beth Cooper, local hottie and dream girl to whom he has never spoken. Beth and her fellow hot-girl friends decide to follow up on this and take Denis out to a party. Thus begins a crazy graduation night, that involves parties, nudity, bullies and beer aka all the requisite ingredients for a teen sex comedy.
With Beth dragging Denis along to all the stops, while driving like a maniac, she has the perfect mixture of ingredients to be a manic pixie dream girl. I actually will not fight anyone, who thinks she is just another MPDG. That's perfectly fair. I think, however, she subverts in some interesting ways even if others might argue that maybe it is not enough. The whole point of this movie is that Beth isn't a dream girl. She's a real person. She drives like a maniac, not because she's quirky but because she's a bad driver. She makes bad decisions (that ostensibly she might need to be rescued from), but she feels trapped in her role as the hot girl everyone wants. She's even got personal family life issues that affect her outlook and perspective.
The opening of the movie is about Denis coming out of his shell but the rest of the movie is about him learning that Beth Cooper is more than the girl on his ceiling poster.
There's a side-plot that I hate. One that showed up in 1997's In and Out that I, again, absolutely despise. It was nearly subverted here, but the plot point is if someone calls you gay, it's because you're gay. No matter how you act or what you say or how you feel or what your life has been. They are never wrong. If someone calls you gay in act one by the end of the movie you will be gay. Rich, aside from the "Let's sword-fight with our boners" flashback isn't really that gay. Yet for some reason people look at everything he says as if it's really gay but most of it wouldn't be looked at twice if not for the speech and the non-digetic history. It would have been a better movie if Denis had been wrong on all of his speech subjects. The graduation speech would have needed to be a little bit different. But it would have given the movie a stronger point rather than just fleshing out Beth it would have shown that Denis was the one with blinders on. But hey maybe next time. Guess in 2009 we weren't there yet. Or at least that's what I might say if 2006's John Tucker Must Die didn't exist. There's an aspect of this movie that like it's main character puts Beth Cooper on a pedestal and now I suppose it serves as an archival representation of a collective way of thinking that isn't as mainstream anymore.
Hayden and Paul have solid Beauty and the Beast chemistry. I think there's a lot of stylistic choices the movie makes that I like. Unfortunately while it's certainly not as bad as some sex comedies I've rewatched from my younger days this one isn't nearly as great as i remembered it and this wasn't top tier in my rose tinted perspective to begin with.