Orange County

OK first of all I just want to give the disclaimer that under ordinary circumstances, I would never voluntarily watch a movie like this. Only under special extreme circumstances, which in this case consisted of me being really violently ill in bed, and flipping on the TV to HBO in a desperate attempt to distract myself from the misery, and then accidentaly dropping the remote under the bed which there was no way I was about to go scuttling under in my condition. So anyway.

This movie is about some bourgeois surfer kid whose best friend dies, and then he finds this random book on a beach, and decides he wants to go to Stanford to meet the author and Become A Writer himself. The thing about Being A Writer in real life is, it’s not something you can buy and pay for in a prestigious college. As the man Charlie Parker said “If you ain’t lived it, it’s not gonna come out on your horn”. But this is Hollywood Cinema and this kid is convinced that this is the way to go so he buckles down, becomes a National Merit Scholar, etc. He submits an application to Stanford but his transfer counsellor is conveniently insane and sends the wrong one, and the movie pulls all sorts of other stuff out of it’s butt to make sure that this really simple oversight can’t just be corrected by a phone call as it would be in real life. So this kid goes through greater and greater degrees of hijinx and comedically disastrous follies in an attempt to impress the Stanford president and Dean of Admissions. Eventually he decides that since he just wants to write about all the quirks of the drunkard indulgent people around him in Orange County, he might as well just stick around there. Probably he goes on to have a nice career writing for Vanity Fair or something, I guess.

Anyway I’m sure that the writer/director/whoever thought that the whole of the country would find the lives and struggles of spoiled little L.A. suburbanite spawn of the nouveau riche to be really compelling and something we can all identify with, but unfortunately they’re not and we don’t. Another problem is that it is supposed to be a comedy, yet the movie is not funny at all, which is a puzzling conundrum (Jack Black gets the closest to eliciting a smile or two, but even he can’t help this one). The biggest problem of all, though, is that I think this film was actually funded by the record companies as basically one giant promotion for the song “Butterfly” by Crazy Town. You can’t go ten minutes in this movie without it either being played, or one of the characters singing it completely out of nowhere. When that is the most memorable aspect of your movie, you have really, really not done well.

Update 01 / 26 - I just looked this up on Imdb, I previously did not realize what a nepotism festival this film is. Tom Hanks’ son is the star, Sissy Spacek’s daughter is his girlfriend and the guy who directed it is Lawrence Kasdan’s son.

Links :

* Orange County Film Project