American Pie

viewed January 13, 2000 on video

For full information about this film, click here

Saw this with my friends who wanted to find something light on the last night of my friend's visit.  We didn't expect it to be this lightweight. Unfortunate thing was that it did get ponderous at the end, preaching out such maxims as it's okay to lose your virginity just for the sake of losing it... and even when moments of tenderness were achieved it seemed like lame attempts at redeeming itself for all of its gaucheness.  Strangely though it wasn't outright hypocrisy; they were able to make it come off as well-meaning hypocrisy.  

My favorite sequence -- and every boy's, I'm sure -- was with the Czech girl undressing in the boy's room while the whole neighborhood watched via the Internet.  It was just brilliantly realized, and truer to the lusty boy spirit of the film than anything else.  Had the movie ended there it would have been better than what we end up having to sit through.

In general the guys have no charisma -- the guy from "Party of Five" is really flat here. Chris Klein, who was so good in Election, sort of embodies film as a whole -- well meaning, generic and stupid.   Mena Suvari, who looked so scandalously sexy during Kevin Spacey's fantasies in American Beauty, here looks like a toad.  Eugene Levy offers a lot of weight as a flustered dad trying to come to terms with teaching the birds and the bees.  More scenes with him would have been adequate and appropriate moralizing for this circle jerk of a film.

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