Orange County - an underrated teen classic?

This teen comedy was released in 2002 and made a respectable $41 million at the US box office. It was directed by Jake Kasdan who made the also underrated Zero Effect and it went more or less straight to DVD in the UK after a very limited cinema release. This is a great shame as its one of the smartest funniest teen movies ever made.

Shaun Brumder (Colin Hanks) is a 17 year old surfer living in Orange County living a care-free existence with his friends who’s life changes completely when his surfer buddy Lonni dies and he then finds a book buried on the beach by Marcus Skinner. After reading the book he is inspired to become a writer and gives up surfing. He has his heart set on going to Stanford University after graduation to study writing under the author of the book who lectures there. As graduation looms and his fellow students start to learn that they have been accepted/rejected to their respective choice of college, he finds out to his horror that he has been rejected from Stanford due to the inept guidance councillor sending them the wrong transcript.

What follows is Shaun’s increasingly desperate attempts to secure his place at Stanford aided and hindered by his permanently wasted brother Lance (Jack Black), his alcoholic mother (Catherine O’Hara) workaholic father (John Lithgow) and animal lover girlfriend (Schulyer Fisk).

 
The best thing about this film is it’s so different from all the other teen comedies produced since American Pie scored big at the box office. There is no gross-out humour or teens hunting for sex. Instead the focus is on not a geek or a jock but an average kid with dreams of not following the heard and who finds high school life fairly superficial.  The characters in this film are all very well drawn and performed to perfection by the actors who play them with Jack Black being a standout along with Catherine O’Hara and John Lithgow. Colin Hanks is also very good in the lead and reminds you of his father’s early comedic performances during the 80’s. There are also great cameo’s from Harold Ramis as the dean of admissions at Stanford who is accidentally fed some ecstasy pills, and Mike White the writer of the film who also wrote the script for Richard Linklater’s School of Rock, as a possibly illiterate high school English teacher.

The film has several great comedy scenes and one in particular is a little seen comedy classic where Shaun has two members of the board of admissions at Stanford over to his house and they are horrified by his dysfunctional families behaviour.

Overall this is a film I would recommend to anyone who doesn’t like the typical teen comedies of the noughties seen so far. Films that seem to rely on smut rather than actual laughs brought on by great characters in genuinely humorous situations are very rare these days. If you are a teenager who feels that they are not really understood and find the usual teen comedy a bit too dumb for your liking you might actually relate to this lost classic too.

Trivia: Jack Black is writer Mike White’s next-door neighbor; his part in the movie was written specifically for him. Surprisingly little was improvised.

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