Post Grad

It's no secret that August is usually the month of summer when the studios dig through the bottom of the barrel on their release schedules, but to be honest, we've been pretty lucky so far this year. We got Funny People (Okay, so that technically came out July 31st, but it's close enough to August, darn it!), Julie and Julia, District 9, and Inglourious Basterds. Even indie favorites like (500) Days of Summer and The Hurt Locker are starting to get wide releases. I was starting to feel a little spoiled. Good thing Post Grad is here to remind me what the month of August usually means for film.

Don't let the movie's ad campaign fool you into thinking this is a story about a recent college graduate who is looking for her place in the world, finds employment impossible, and has to move back in with her family. This premise is merely a launching point for one of the most banal romantic comedies to come along in a while. The whole thing plays out like a failed sitcom pilot stretched to feature length. It's a shame the movie never finds a human angle that would have made it work. Post Grad centers on Ryden Malby (Alexis Bledel), who has been a star student throughout her entire school career. She got the right grades, the right letters of recommendation, and even though she barely missed being valedictorian of her graduating class to her life-long academic rival (Catherine Reitman), she's still confident when she strides into the interview at her dream job at a publishing company. Her rival ends up getting the job, she can't pay for the luxury apartment she picked out for herself, her car gets totaled in an accident, and Ryden is forced to move back home.

It's a situation many people Ryden's age probably find themselves in, and walking in, I had hoped the movie would deal with it honestly. All hope for honesty flies out the window when we meet her family. Her dad, Walter (Michael Keaton), is a bungling dreamer who hopes to make his fortune selling novelty belt buckles. It's later revealed that the buckles he bought from a dealer were stolen, and he gets arrested in a pointless subplot that goes nowhere and has no real resolution. Her kid brother, Hunter (Bobby Coleman), is a weird little boy with a passion for licking people's heads and sock puppets. His contribution to the plot is that he wants his dad to help him build a soap box racer. They end up building one out of a funeral casket they happen to have lying around the house. (I wish I was making this up.) She has a mom (Jane Lynch) and grandmother (Carol Burnett), but they don't contribute much. Ryden also has a best friend named Adam (Zach Gilford from TV's Friday Night Lights), who is in love with her, but she sees him as just being a companion. He's been accepted to go to law school in New York, but he sticks around so he can be her confidant, I guess.

The screenplay by newcomer Kelly Fremon seems much more interested in Ryden's love life, than her career problems. That explains why her job hunt is all but forgotten about for most of the film's middle portion, and instead focuses solely on her trying to decide which guy to go with. You see, there's a cute older guy named David who lives across the street (Rodrigo Santoro). Ryden meets him when her dad accidentally runs over the guy's cat, and they have to hold a funeral for it. This leads to Ryden and David having sex on his inflatable couch. Their relationship progresses, and Adam feels hurt. Ryden tries to apologize, but Adam won't answer his phone, so she decides to do the most logical thing - Swipe an ice cream truck and interrupt his basketball game by declaring her apology over the truck's loud speaker. (Once again, I wish I was making this up.) Adam accepts the apology, but wouldn't you know it, he decided to go to law school after she hurt him that night. By this point of the movie, Ryden has gotten that dream job at the publisher (her rival got fired), and now she has to decide wether she should stay at her successful job, or quit and leave everything behind to follow Adam to New York.

That's the kind of climax that makes audiences want to throw stuff at the screen. If that's not bad enough, the conclusion also relies heavily on mistaken identities and the age-old Idiot Plot, where all the problems and misunderstandings would be solved if one character would say something, and the other character would listen rather than jumping to the wrong conclusion and running away. I disliked Post Grad pretty much all the way through it, but its final moments made me downright hate it. It doesn't treat its own subject matter with an ounce of respect or integrity, I only laughed one time during the cat funeral scene, and the script reads like a bunch of bad romantic comedy cliches stitched together. There's also not a single thing about the movie that stands out, or is even noteworthy. Everything's average at best, including the performances. Maybe it's the fact that it's director, Vicky Jenson, is working in live action for the first time here. (She's previously worked on animated films like Shrek and Shark Tale.) Whatever the case, absolutely nothing works.

The movie tries to be quirky with its humor, as if it's trying to distract us from how boring the central romance is. It ends up being a lost cause. Post Grad is the kind of immediately disposable entertainment that August is meant for. It doesn't have anything new to say, and doesn't do anything particularly well. It's simply there to make you wonder who gave the project the green light. Considering what movie theaters are charging these days, it's too expensive to sit through a movie just to ask that question to yourself over and over.

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