A love letter to average films
Jack Black is high, standing in stained y-fronts and a sleeveless sweatshirt, hand scratching his post-coitally ruffled hair, telling Ben Stiller’s incredulous fireman that the fire raging behind him was started by an erstwhile lover.
‘So you’re saying you weren’t in the building with that woman?
‘na-uh, not I. Alright, she started it, alright? Because she was like I hate my job! I’m gonna burn this mother down! And I said you better not! You better not!’
‘She said it was an electrical fire.’
‘It was. Total electrical fire, it was like the switches had sparks coming out of the sockets. It was like the 4th of July man!’
Once upon a time this section of dialogue, along with the entirety of 2002’s teen-comedy Orange County, was firmly lodged in my brain, word for word. The film tells the story of a college application mix-up, leading to protagonist Sean Brumder’s ill-fated attempts to get himself into an Ivy League university, plagued by the well-intentioned misbehaviour of his dysfunctional family. In the Summer of 2002, if I heard someone talk about writing, I’d have John Lithgow in my head spluttering, ‘what have you got to write about, you’re not gay, you’re not oppressed!’ If a family member asked what had been spilled on the sofa, I’d have Catherine O’Hara telling them to, ‘relax, it’s just piss.’ When my parents would warn us that polite company was on the way to our house, I’d silently tack on, ‘and if they like us, they’re going to help get me into Stanford!’ in the voice of Colin Hanks.
Orange County is objectively not a great film. It is also objectively not awful. With a stellar cast but bloated script and odd juvenile diversions, it is endlessly quotable but fails to be more than the sum of its parts. Its critic and audience scores on that great aggregator of filmic gatekeeping, Rotten Tomatoes, are 47 and 61% respectively. Common Sense Media, the moral watchdog for anxious parents, summarizes the film’s opening in a perfectly dry and factual reading of its zany banality: ‘This movie begins with a comic death in a surfing accident, followed by a funeral at which female mourners wear black bikinis’ adding that Jack Black, ‘as always, even with terrible material, is a joy to watch.’
And joy was the overriding emotion that I felt watching Orange County for the eighth day in a row, having extended an overnight stay at a friend’s house by a week, mesmerized by our first experience of the type of comedy borne out of the SNL and Second City stables. This pre-dated the ubiquity of shows such as Parks and Recreation, The Office or 30 Rock. We were genuinely amazed that anything this funny could exist, experiencing the movie in a pure form, completely naive and oblivious to the Caddyshacks and National Lampoons that had come before. We watched it enough times in the coming months to quote every line verbatim, playing out set pieces and taking multiple characters apiece for no-ones entertainment but our own.
Another friend, another summer, another film; this one a well-loved VHS copy of Adam Sandler’s Happy Gilmore, the unlikely success story of a rough-and-ready ice-hockey player taking on the stuffy establishment of PGA golf. We watched it endlessly, viewings well into double figures before my dad pointed out, exasperatedly, that they weren’t even playing on a real golf course. It was an error that I hadn’t even registered. Realism was most definitely not the appeal here.
To this day, if you were to ask my wife which movie I would be most likely to pull a quote from, it would be an unholy trinity of Orange County (Move man, you’re blockin’ the tube!) Dumb and Dumber (wanna hear the most annoying noise in the world?) or, curveball, Christmas romcom The Holiday (ooooh, someone’s having a partay!) These films are connected only by the fact that I have watched them religiously at key moments of life, sickened myself on their most memorable sections before resigning them to the hindmost part of my long-term memory. They are decidedly average. This then, is not only a love letter to average films, but a defence of their right to exist. In a world where we feté Oscar-worthy performances, salivate over the neon weirdness of the latest A24 release or expect binge-worthy TV to share the scale and ambition of Hollywood blockbusters, I believe that there remains a space for bang-average films. A chuckle in place of a laugh, a hamburger in place of a steak.
