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A true PCU for the WB
St. Paul native Worm Miller flounders with this conservative look at sober dorm hijinx
By John Behling
Published:
Thursday, October 2, 2003
What does a unicycling dweeb bearing sausage say to you? Does it say, hilarious on-the-edge college sex comedy? Or does it say grotesque stereotypes slid through a pathetic, overworked script with all the comedic friction of a pebble dropping from Hollywood's loosest rectum: the college sex comedy.
The '90s were a joke as far as teen comedies are concerned. Instead of "Animal House" and "Porky's," we had "Can't Hardly Wait" and "American Pie." These lighthearted, anaesthetized forays into coming-of-age woes were really more about the character types identified in the "Breakfast Club" than about the factors that unify us all: getting messed up and getting laid.
In a world where race and sex barriers are dropping, should piddly class and status separations continue to fuel increasingly inane, boring and conservative college flicks? Haven't we learned anything from "Revenge of the Nerds," where a tray of joints loosened the bow-ties of a cloistered nerd community and incited an all-night freak fest?
In the slush of non-stop teen comedies there really isn't a universe I can stand. There's "Empire Records," where "real life" issues like career frustration and suicide melt away to a roof-top rock concert. Or "American Pie" with its get-laid-or-bust, then learn a lesson mentality. With "Porky's" and "Animal House" long left to the shelves, it doesn't seem like there's room in our culture for unapologetic booze-sucking jerks who stick it to the dean and just don't give a damn, but who fall short of Bret Easton Ellis's post-modern party, screw, yawn, repeat attitude from "Rules of Attraction."
As with the last National Lampoon's film, �"Van Wilder," �"Dorm Daze" doesn't challenge the current college comedy aesthetic. In fact, it plummets a rung further down the ladder, sliding into a dimension of UHF hell. In short, the WB has invaded our Cineplex and we can't change the channel.
"Dorm Daze" opens with a whimper of radio-soft power chord pop and an unexplained daylight photo-op for scantily clad, kooky-costumed college kids exploding onto the front lawn of some supposed frat house in the middle of the day. For all we know a proper college party could be going on there, but instead the camera cuts away to a dorm where everyone is getting ready to go home for Christmas vacation.
The next image is the Dweeb Newmar (Tony Denman best known as the foul-mouthed brat Scotty in "Fargo") fumbling his way across campus on a unicycle, armed with a large piece of sausage. The whole movie can be explained by this one shot.
Putting a dweeb on a unicycle is like putting earmuffs on a deaf person and yelling insults at his backside. Denman's vulgarly forced dweebishness is painful, even insulting. Like a stretched and re-stretched and re-stretched stereotype, Newmar is a dishwasher-melted gumby doll, horrific, nightmarish and not at all funny.
Now let's talk about the sausage. Why oh why would a sex comedy need a link of sausage? How could the phrase "Would you like to eat my sausage?" possibly be misinterpreted by a classroom of caffeinated fourth graders? With sausage in hand, writers Patrick Casey and Worm Miller (a St. Paul native, sadly) wear their inept writing on their sleeves. They use a pair of catty gossip queens to blow everything out of proportion, churning "funny" situations out of misunderstandings while clogging our minds with their revolting valley-girl-ism and chugging carts of ice cream into their anorexic frames.� �
And this tameness feeds the overall sitcom aesthetic. The world of "Dorm Daze" is soft-light and low-contrast, looking like an out-of-print video version of the film, recovered from the comedy section of a run-down video rental store fifteen years later. The scoring is the convoluted mental soundtrack of a Seinfeld-raised, Ferris Beuller poser. It's almost as disturbing as the Sung-in theme music yodeled by Jim Carrey in "The Cable Guy."
It was like watching the WB network manifest itself on screen. It was like watching the television generation, fueled by harmless teen melodramas and reality television fodder give birth to a new animal altogether.
But paranoid cultural fears aside, there's nothing disturbing about the content of "Dorm Daze."
American Pie had a man penetrating a pastry.
Van Wilder had a surprisingly wicked semen joke (also involving pastry).
"Dorm Daze" isn't without its own semen joke, it's not anything that would make your typical R-rated audience blush. In fact, there really isn't anything coarse about "Dorm Daze" at all.
But what is friction to a movie anyhow? Why should a film be coarse, vulgar, or even slightly difficult to digest? Why do we need to be grossed out in gross-out? Should I politely remind the writers that friction is what makes sex pleasurable? Do I need to pull a rolling diagram down over the blackboard before a snickering eight-grade sex ed class and point out the basics? This, Mr. Miller, is a penis.
By keeping sex, drugs and alcohol at arms length, "Dorm Daze" is an attractive vessel for conservative anti-sex propaganda. In the end, the only one who gets laid is the one who believes he has found "his special one," much like the conclusion of the first American Pie movie, and in a greater sense, the American Pie franchise. Even in our generation's most redeemable gross-out series, the lead marries the first woman he's ever slept with. So under the banner of a wild-and-wacky college sex romp we get more of what we'd expect. Silliness not rowdiness, a seventh-grade understanding of sexuality and a couple of scattered, uncomfortable laughs where a sore stomach and tears running down my face might have been.
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