This second-tier Marx Brothers movie still holds up, which is remarkable considering that it came out in 1932 and carries a title (it means “nonsense”) that sounds as outdated and cheesy as She’s All That. The movie explains it all, but it’s just a nice way to get a disparate group of people into a campus acting like jackasses together, the kind of people who one normally doesn’t see in college movies outside of Revenge of the Nerds. So filmmakers came up with Accepted, which somehow pulls off its preposterous premise: Long plays a guy who doesn’t get into any of the colleges he applied to, so he starts a fake college near his house and accepts as many rejects and misfits as he can handle before the whole scheme blows up in his face. When this Justin Long vehicle was released in 2006, it was a period in which a “Justin Long vehicle” was a thing, high-concept comedies were the norm, and the usual tropes of college movies had been played out. PCU attempts to make fun of everybody, not just SJWs, plus it’s pretty great when George Clinton and the P-Funk All Stars show up to play an impromptu concert and unite all political agendas under one roof, one nation under the groove. Port Chester University’s attempts to be inclusive, as well as its being the hotbed of left-wing protests, are thoroughly mocked by the screenwriters and the protagonists, led by a frat dude played by a way-too-old Jeremy Piven and Jon Favreau as a dreadlocked stoner. But now, in retrospect, PCU can be seen for what it is: the rare attempt at a libertarian comedy. When it came out in the ‘90s, PCU felt like (and was thusly marketed) as an Animal House for the ‘90s, depicting a college’s most squalid, quasi-fraternity and how it just wants to party down in the face of a stuffy, PC-to-a-fault, “political correctness”–enforcing administration.
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