Teen comedy. When every college turns him down, Bartleby 'B' Gaines (Justin Long) decides to make one up. Welcome to South Harmon Institute of Technology, where the students teach the classes, the Dean lives in a trailer out the back, and Bartleby's on the way to scoring with the girl of his dreams. From . Justin Long has been hovering on the edges of movies like The Break-Up and Dodgeball, providing little comic bursts that are often funnier than the rest of the movie. In Accepted, Long plays Bartleby Gaines, a fast-talking slacker who, when he gets rejected by every college he applied to, invents a phony college to get his parents off his back. Unfortunately, the website his best friend creates is too effective--hundreds of other rejects apply and are accepted. Instead of revealing the hoax, Gaines decides to forge ahead and let the students create their own curriculum, little suspecting that their school is obstructing the expansion plans of the nearby snobbish college. Accepted is much better than you might expect, given the low bar set by most campus comedies it aims for, and sometimes achieves, the blend of slapstick and social satire that Animal House embodied. Long proves to be a charming leading man without losing his quirky comic sense and the supporting cast is consistently entertaining, particularly stand-up comedian Lewis Black, who delivers a variety of sardonic rants about society. Accepted's critique of conformism is glib--you wish they'd given it a little more bite--but it's still valid and a pleasant sliver of substance in an otherwise vapid genre. -- Bret Fetzer Synopsis What happens when you want to go to college but no school accepts you If you're Bartleby Gaines (Justin Long), you invent a fictitious university and create your own destiny. Accepted follows the Ferris Bueller-esque Bartleby as he and his assembled crew of college rejects dupe the world by building the South Harmon Institute of Technology from scratch. There's his nerdy friend Sherman Schrader (Jonah Hill), who is actually enrolled in the well-established Harmon College across the way but who helps Bartleby with the logistics the hyper-smart Rory (Maria Thayer), who put all her eggs into one basket and got rejected by her dream Ivy League school Hands (Columbus Short), a football player who lost his scholarship when he blew out his knee Glen (Adam Herschman), a former convenience store employee who is about as dumb as they come and, finally, Uncle Ben (Lewis Black), a former academic who gets talked into become the makeshift school's dean when he gets fired from his latest job selling sneakers at the mall. What begins as an innocent ploy to make his parents happy quickly spirals out of control when Bartleby realises that several hundred kids have shown up for orientation. As he digs himself into a deeper and more irrevocable hole, something strange happens: Bartleby realises that he's actually onto something. Steve Pink's Accepted is a light-hearted comedy that has its heart in the right place.
