not horrible nor great

This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

It really made me laugh, but for some moments I was tearing up because I could relate so much.

While it is a pity that the story wasn't told with more visual finesse, this is trivial compared to our real-world problems. It takes a good movie to put that into perspective.

Charlie Thurber (Luke Wilson) is a teacher at Grey College looking to get tenure in a few months. His students like him but he needs to publish. His Bigfoot-obsessed friend Jay Hadley (David Koechner) fails to get tenure. He's a disappointment to his Princeton professor father (Bob Gunton) in retirement living. His sister Margaret (Sasha Alexander) wants him to pay his share for their father. He calls Beth (Rosemarie DeWitt) on a TV charity drive trying to start a relationship over the phone. Then the school hires Yale English grad Elaine Grasso (Gretchen Mol) to be on the same tract as Charlie.Charlie is a bit too pathetic which gets a little tiresome. He would be funnier if he's darker. Luke Wilson needs to get some edge. Koechner is trying to be funny. The students don't have any big standout. This comedy feels a little incomplete. It's not dark enough to be a black comedy. It's not odd enough to be quirky. It's just not quite funny enough.

I found this movie hilarious. I came across it on Cinemax. I had never heard of it; but I found myself laughing all the way through. Whoever wrote it is a genius. The boyfriend from Yale always plays funny parts; i.e. Reno 911 & Eastbound and Down. Whenever I see him in anything, I start laughing before he speaks. I know he is going to be funny. I haven't seen Luke Wilson in anything lately, and I know he is a funny actor. He is very monotonous, but the looks on his face are what kill me. And David Koechner acting like an idiot is also something you can always count on. He is crazy. I saw him on Funny or Die in skits called Men of unquiet desperation, or something like that. He played a parking attendant, and I could not stop laughing. He is also someone who makes me laugh before he even starts speaking.

In a fictitious small college in the United States, a mediocre professor of English literature (played by Luke Wilson) see his job threatened because tenure is soon up, and the university has decided to bring in to compete for his job a supposedly brilliant as well as beautiful young professor from Yale (the lovely Gretchen Mol). This is supposed to be an affectionate satire of the academic world in the US, but I found little affection in what I see. As for the supposed humor, I don't recall laughing once at this movie. Seeing these people with their ridiculous trappings, the vain and pompous administrators, it is clear these professors and administrators add very little value to the rest of the society, yet they live not badly and with a certain status. While the movie obviously exaggerates, from what I read is a not altogether incorrect depiction of life in the rarefied US academic world. Are academics smart people? It doesn't seem so from this movie. Here they look pretty pathetic. It's funny how the Gretchen Mol character is repeatedly described as super smart, when she seems to be the typical dumb blonde (she is the most likable character in the movie, though). The Luke Wilson character, though not entirely unlikable, is a man in his late thirties that is still single and unattached, without any real prospect of improving his life, if anything, it is clear that his life would go downhill from here. The character of the anthropologist friend is downright pathetic (and the big foot thing? what was about that?). The dean and the old lady playing the academic director were also repellent characters. Clearly most of these people could not get a job outside of academia. Seeing this movie, I understand why more and more people believe that tenure should be abolished.

Maybe it's the Wilson factor or maybe it's the music that made me think of Wes Anderson right away. It wants to be Rushmore but it's not as quirky, bitterly funny and brilliant. The characters are trying to be odd but they are more cliché than anything else: a bigfoot hunting professor on xtc is almost childish and would fit in a highschool flick. I am fairly surprised this movie made it to any film festival at all. There was hardly anything entertaining about it and in the end i found it hard to stay engaged. Too bad, the storyline has potential for a whoppin' comedy. I wonder what Anderson would have made out of this one.