“College” flunks out

.5 out of 5 stars

This fall, incoming freshman trickle into the University, excited to live away from Mom and Dad and meet new people. Meanwhile, seniors are clinging to the joys of college life, which will disappear after graduation. Each class is starting the year off in different ways, but there is one thing they all have in common: We’re in college to learn, but we’re also here to party.

College-based films have a long-standing tradition of emphasizing the seemingly care-free lifestyle that you can really only get away with while enrolled in establishments of higher learning. It’s an appealing subject to document. After all, what 18-year-old can’t associate “We’re going streaking!” with the film “Old School”? And who hasn’t wondered if Greek life is really anything close to “Animal House”? The most recent movie in this over-saturated genre comes to us from writers Dan Callahan and Adam Ellison, who had no previous writing credits whatsoever before they penned the disaster that is “College.” After the first few moments of the film, it’s not hard to see why this movie was teetering dangerously close to straight-to-DVD territory.

“College” embodies all that is wrong with the so-called “boy humor” movies with limited plots: an abundance of swear words, gross-out gags and usually at least one naked chick. Who should be more offended by the film? Women, for the obvious misogyny that is passed off as buddies having a good time, or men, for a movie industry that thinks they are dumb enough to find this crap entertaining.

Most importantly, the film leans heavily on making fun of sexuality. At a time in which same-sex marriage is slowly gaining support, why are films still being made where accusing one character of being gay is deemed funny? In a 94-minute film, I counted 14 different times where the core of a joke was blatantly homophobic – about 14 times too many.

Leaving aside – as hard as it is – the completely unfunny and offensive subject matter of the jokes, the film also fails to meet any of the criteria for a legitimate movie. I’ll put it in a way that any of the film’s idiotic characters can understand: The acting sucks and even as a broad satire of academia, the film goes above and beyond anything that can be remotely identified as college life. At the fictional Fieldmont University, parties have limitless supplies of fancy mixed drinks, women tend to walk around topless if they aren’t busy riding the stripper poles in cages hung from the ceiling, public sex is pretty much everywhere and model-hot girls are out on the prowl for overweight and geeky guys who don’t look a day over 15. Academics are, at best, an afterthought. When one of the main characters blows his scholarship interview, the response from his friends is to get over it and get drinking. Real life and real people just don’t work that way.

“College” is unoriginal, unentertaining and unpleasant. The only reason I didn’t walk out of the theater during the movie – something I have never done – is that I needed to know just how bad the movie is in order to warn others against it. As a proud and, hopefully, educated student at the University of Michigan, the best way to rationalize our awesome lifestyle is not to support films like “College.”