I Get Neck When I'm Travelin'

I Love You, Beth Cooper (2009)

Rating ... F (3)

Less an actual movie than a former DCOM star's wannabe-risqué coming-out party and a chance for director Chris Columbus to logroll John Hughes (and his teen angst turf) for writing the movie that made him famous, I Love You Beth Cooper begins and ends with allusions to Crowe's Say Anything without ever developing a coherent personality in between. The story can be briefly summarized as the raucous graduation-day adventures of Denis Cooverman (Paul Rust), a class valedictorian who spends his time at the podium to profess his infatuation - clumsily equated to love - with head cheerleader Beth Cooper (Hayden Panettiere). This all becomes irrelevant as I Love You Beth Cooper quickly becomes notable not for its transparent composition of 80's movie staples but rather its gratuitously offensive type-branding and endless parade of "jokes" about cow paddies, closeted gays, and tactless nerds.

Though the film flaunts its encyclopedic knowledge of teen movie territory - its shoutouts to Risky Business and Dead Poets Society are identified the moment they come out of Alan Ruck's quixotic cool dad's mouth while those to films like Heathers are mercifully implicit - Beth Cooper seems more keen on slamming both genders with spite played off as nostalgia. Denis's aforementioned speech gets the ball rolling as he prattles bitterly to his fellow students, obnoxiously classifying them as jocks, preps, and geeks while offensively asserting bullcrap Freudian psycho-profiles beneath the archetypes. The stuck-up, anorexic bitch is haughty because she is attempting to disguise her lack of self-worth, and the school's uptight principal spurns his mid-ceremony bout of radicalism because her own advances at love were scorned during her high school hey-day. Though the film repulsively reduces her presence to a derisive non-sequitur, Beth Cooper's most odious allegation occurs when it affirms its own stereotyping via Denis's encounter with the school reject, a sexually abused boy who confides in Denis at a party even as the film mocks his predicament.

If there's anything more insulting than Beth Cooper's characterization by contempt - look no further than Denis's loser protag, entirely typified as a nerd prone to high-pitched squealing, bumbling about without social grace, and wearing humiliating underwear - it would have to be the film's agenda of pandering to adolescents who are under the assumption they're grown-up. Beth Cooper's garishly immature adults - from the gym teacher who encourages a trio of late-twenties students-cum-marines to assail our hero to Denis's own parents, embarassingly encountered in the middle of roadside spooning - serve to contrast to how the teenagers somehow forge meaningful relationships in one night. The extent of this process is either the film's token gay guy in denial who gets his wish fulfillment on with two horny high school ditzes and comments "Maybe I'm bi!" or Beth Cooper's stock social butterfly who only sees development when writer Larry Doyle takes an earlier throwaway joke about her dead retarded brother and laughably attempts to fashion it into a subplot about self-confidence. Midway through the film one of Cooper's bimbos in tow offers Denis tampons for his nosebleed, making one long for She's the Man where the joke was originally purveyed. That film was humorous and sincere in its depiction of teenage relationships, with a specific understanding about how gender roles were sexual guidelines for confused youngsters but at the same time could cause people to feel trapped and must often be abandoned to salvage romance. By comparison, Beth Cooper's frivolous typecasting only feigns insight about coming-of-age and can't even be bothered to grow up as little as its big girl star Hayden Panettiere.