FAVORITE FILM NUMBER 10: Orange County (2002)
It may come as a shock, but my own personal experience of applying to college (during my senior year of high school) was actually not that bad. I'm not sure why that was, but for others, though, "bad" would be an understatement, and there are a number of reasons for that. For some people, it was the low SAT scores or the onslaught of rejection letters. For others, though, there were, of course, those infamously sluggish guidance counselors who unintentionally made the process all the more agonizing. However, while I'm sure the latter was, still is, and will continue to be extraordinarily frustrating and exacerbating for many people in real life, in the movie world, i.e. Jake Kasdan's Orange County (2002), the latter is downright hilarious.
The movie, which takes place in Orange County, California, is the story of Shaun Brumder (Colin Hanks), an overachieving high school student and aspiring writer with his heart set on attending Stanford the fall after his graduation. When not hanging out with his air-headed surfer buddies, Lonny (Bret Harrison), Arlo (Kyle Howard), and Chad (R.J. Knoll), or getting intimate with his girlfriend, Ashley (Schuyler Fisk), Shaun is either busy reading books or writing college essays. Thus, it comes as no surprise when Shaun's guidance counselor, Charlotte Cobb (Lily Tomlin), tells him that he is a "shoo-in" wherever he applies. However, things suddenly go awry when Cobb accidentally mails the wrong transcript and Shaun, thus, isn't accepted into Stanford. Of course, it doesn't help that everyone in Shaun's family has idiosyncratic issues: his brother, Lance (Jack Black) is a drug-abusing couch potato who lies around in his underwear all day, his mother, Cindy (Catherine O'Hara), is an alcoholic, his step-father, Bob (George Murdock) is incapacitated, and his biological father, Bud (John Lithgow), doesn't support his aspirations to be a writer. Nevertheless, with the exhausted help of his family and friends, Shaun does what he can to fix the mistake Cobb made and hopefully be admitted into Stanford.
Why is this film one of my top ten favorites? Is the reason because it's a touching, powerful work of thought-provoking, cinematic art? No...the reason is because it's exactly what it intends to be: lighthearted and funny! There are not many comedies nowadays that actually make me laugh (Sweeney Todd, Kick-Ass, and Tropic Thunder being the few exceptions), and for those that do, it's not the uncontrollable, gust-busting and tear-shedding type of laughter that we all seek that I succumb to. To be blunt, the reason why is that most comedies are either horrendously lazy & obnoxious (i.e. The Hangover) or are filled with uncomfortably contrived jokes that don't fit inside an otherwise dark and dramatic story. Oftentimes I'm left completely baffled, wondering to myself why more films can't be as fun, frivolous and silly as Airplane (1980), Naked Gun (1988), Austin Powers (1997), Meet The Parents (2000), or any of the Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, or Marx Brothers films. Thus, when films like Orange County come along and pleasantly surprise me I give them unmitigated appraisal.
So what is it about Orange County that makes it such a hilarious film? The answer to that question can found by answering another question: What is it about any comedy, joke, or humorous situation, story, or person that makes us laugh? Some would say that we laugh when we're trying to cover up own our feelings of sadness or pain. Of course there are plenty of instances when that is simply not the case. My feeling is that we usually laugh when there is a sense of irony or incongruity to something: e.g. a macho man in a dress and high heels, a dog in a polo shirt and sunglasses sitting at the steering wheel of a car, or the tragic demise of a great leader who slips on a banana peel and falls a towering one foot to his death. Another reason why we laugh, according to many, is that it makes us feel better about ourselves to snicker at those whom we consider to be "inferior." Mean-spirited? Yes...very much so, and oftentimes to a frightening degree. However, there are many characters that no one has or would ever have a problem ridiculing: Homer Simpson, George Costanza, and Happy Gilmore, just to name a few, and in Orange County, that type of humor is exactly what we get.
Orange County caters to the common stereotype that people from rich, coastal communities are stupid and superficial, and a number of moments in the film brilliantly exemplify that. During one scene, one of the "air-headed" surfers rides a mountainous wave during a hurricane, and the last words he casually utters before meeting his maker are: "Dude, this is extreme!" During another scene, an English teacher idiotically rattles off a number of films that (according to him) were inspired by Shakespearean plays, including Gladiator, Waterworld, and Chocolat. There is a scene when the Dean of Admissions at Stanford accidentally ingests ecstasy, and another in which a person gets high and "accidentally" sets a building on fire. Cobb, the ditzy guidance counselor, is always worth a belly laugh or two, as are Shaun's family members. In fact, the goofiest sequence in the movie occurs when Shaun tries to put on a good impression for the president of Stanford and his wife. When they arrive at his house (much to his horrified chagrin), Shaun tries desperately hard to make sure his mother, brother, and stepfather remain quiet and don't embarrass him. Of course, this doesn't go as planned, and Shaun watches in shock and dismay as his mother puts on a lively, drunken performance, his brother (in his underwear), after performing a cartwheel over his bed, interrupts Shaun's meeting to ask where his drug-related urine sample is, and his stepfather starts banging on the windows.
Delivering sharp, well-executed jokes and hilarious performances, Orange County is an example of comedy at its best.
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