The Worst Idea Of All Time - REVIEW: Van Wilder

Episode Date: April 1, 2020

This was originally a pay-walled episode available only to Patreon supporters. Please consider if you can #PayTheBoiz at patreon.com/join/TWIOAT.A love letter from Timbo and a somewhat scathing critique from Guybo on the matter of 2002's Van Wilder. This film has a special place in Tim's heart but that is not enough to elevate Guy's true ambivalence for this piece of early 2000's cinema gold. Incredible stereotypes, terrible acting from Tara Reid, problematic jokes and the undeniable charm of Ryan Reynolds await you. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Where can I find Van Wilder? In the Guinness Book of World Records, man! On the ride to do it alive! From National Lampoon. My name is Van, and this is my home. I love this place. His popularity is unrivaled. I would like to be your assistant.

What can we do for you? I want to take you through the God Wash, baby, you know? And get you to wax. Oh, mommy. His coolness is unquestioned sick boy how you doing that oima really worked thanks and his exploits i'm doing a human interest piece on you well i'm flattered i'd love for your piece to be on me our legendary take your clothes off i'm not taking off my clothes uh well it is the naked mile run everybody else is in their birthday suit except that guy this spring van is still in school for the better part of a decade

he'll be cut off dad a place to stop payment on this semester's check hello and welcome to this patreon pal episode of the worst idea of all time featuring Guy Montgomery, Tim Batt and a dog. Woof woof. You might hear Rufus come through on the record. He is a little pup and I can't leave him alone at the moment. So he's hanging out, spending a lot of time in the Little Empire Studios. Or does that mean that Rufus saw some dog representation while watching Van Wilder Party Liaison with you, Tim?

Sadly, not. Because I watched it last night when he was sleeping in one of his brief two-hour windows. Ah, okay. Well, look, to start things off, obviously the movie that we have been asked to watch is Van Wilder, Party Liaison, a 2002 film from Harvard's National Lampoon Production Company.

I don't know if they're associated with Harvard anymore. Now, before we get into the nuts and bolts of the film, Tim, I feel like partially this must have been chosen because you have a relationship that's been publicized on various different episodes of the podcast with this movie we're in absolutely was it in your final year of high school i i think it might have been second to last oh yeah it was one of the two either seventh form or sixth form you persuaded your media studies teacher to use this movie as a source material for what sort of essay or study? Yeah, so what it was was I really enjoyed media studies. I was a pretty good student.

And Big D, as I called him, I want to say I started that nickname for him, which persists to this day. Mr. Neal was what everyone else called him i i want to say i started that nickname for him which persists to this day mr neil was what everyone else called him um but derrick entrusted to me the decision uh on what movie we were going to study i didn't actually realize this at the time but it was kind of for the big exam at the end of the year um for for like a film study and And I said, Van Wilder, please. And he said, I've never heard of it. Let's do that. And then we did. We watched it. We critiqued it.

And then a whole lot of students from Onslow College in Wellington that year wrote an essay about a movie that has dog semen buns being consumed as a college prank. dogs semen buns being consumed as a college prank and uh the new zealand qualifications authority wrote a sternly worded letter to my school um saying hey don't can i say understandably so big d do we call this teacher yeah i don't doubt that this guy was fun but you know uh to be a good teacher you've got to be a teacher first and a friend second. I think I watched this movie around about its release date, but watching it through the eyes of an adult, I don't know that this is fit for critical discussion

and secondary examinations. It definitely wasn't't and i don't think he thought that it was either but it was kind of one of those things where the school schedule is so packed that once we had spent like you know two periods watching the thing that time was down the drain so it was already a sunk cost we had to make something with it we couldn't just start another movie so we just had to roll with it with due respect if you're talking about high school media studies i don't think time is such a precious commodity that you can't claim those two periods back i don't know man i don't know all i all i can tell you is the way i saw it at the time uh it's been many years but um i was

you know i was pretty proud of the fact that I managed to get a letter for the school. That was good. Undoubtedly. I feel like part of the inspiration for wanting Van Wilder to be the case study for your class was probably taken, you know, it was probably inspired by some of Van Wilder's behavior, his sort of legendary status on campus tertiary campus but campus all the same yeah and and you sort of you know as any what you would have been i guess 16 17 yeah and you know you would have you would have wanted to walk in his walk a mile in his shoes from memory my brother john gave me this movie on dvd uh for like christmas or something and he said

this is a movie that i watch when i can't be bothered going to university and then it sort of inspires me to go so he gave it to me and uh i loved this movie straight off the bat and can i tell you guys with the fullness of time i still fucking love it i hadn't seen it in about six or seven years i could quote pretty much every line i i knew every um uh inconsistency and mistake that's in the film even before i fired the thing up that's how many times i've seen it i and i was waiting for my previous love of this film to be sort of rectified because i i understand it is not a great piece of cinema necessarily but nah man i fucking still love this movie i can't look at it objectively it is too embedded into my my psyche growing up but um so that's why i'm real keen to hear what you have to say because i just

had a fucking good time watching an old classic uh look it was it was pretty uh it was not challenging to get through a breezy you know 92 minutes and pacey the thing keeps moving and uh certainly there were you know parts of it that were familiar you know like around the same time we've got road trip we've got american pie uh all sorts of you know we've got not another teen movie scary movie like it's even though those two are of a slightly different genre they're all in a very familiar wheelhouse which makes it uh i think in a similar way even though i wasn't as familiar with van wilde a very easy watching because it's like you're watching the same tropes the same gags play out and it does tickle some uh nostalgic part of you that's like

oh yeah i remember these movies uh could you but beyond that beyond the nostalgia buzz could you not uh did you enjoy it at all just on its own merits uh no no not at all oh gutted what about the undeniable charm of ryan reynolds yeah look there's uh there's no denying that ryan reynolds is a very charismatic guy um and like yeah i mean you can't even even this movie couldn't bury how charismatic he he genuinely is but uh i you know and like they they they paint like you know the the who's the guy who's tara reed's boyfriend the med student okay let's get into it guy let's explain what this movie is for those who haven't seen it and it sounds like this is going to be a real worst idea 50 50 on the

fence as to whether or not you should rent this thing. Van Wilder Party Liaison is a movie about a guy called Van Wilder, portrayed by the uber-talented Ryan Reynolds, who is a guy who's been at university for seven years, and he just hangs out. Everyone loves him. He's very integrated into all the different parts of the school. He is the big man on campus. He runs fundraisers for the swim team.

He connects people to partners who get married he is just like a central nucleus through which all parts of the school run um and he's he's having a great time he loves his life and the movie follows the events of gwen who is played by tara reed who we will talk about in depth very soon uh she writes for the school newspaper so she's a student journalist uh very ambitious very highly strung and she gets tasked by her editor to write a huge piece on van wilder this guy who everyone kind of knows and loves but doesn't know very many details about his life and so she um begrudgingly sets off on what she thinks is a soft news piece and predictably he ends up hitting on her and she's got a boyfriend called richard

who is uh in medical school i guess yeah i keep calling him pre-med i'm not sure what that means in american terms he's like he's a medical undergrad who's looking to yeah get placed in some nice department i don't know northwestern he is interviewing to go to northwest northwestern which i think is in new hampshire and so uh follows the events of basically will they want they with van and gwen while rich Gwen, while Richard is the antagonist, he's the foil for Van, and they are playing pretty high-stakes pranks on one another throughout the film

and sort of trading places for Gwen's affections. That is more or less the entire film, would you say? Yeah, absolutely. You've got Cal Penn thrown in there for good measure as his assistant's assistant sorry jesse pinkman's in this movie which i never knew so watching it recently there's there's a line in the movie um right at the start where we're at a party i think it's at van's apartment or might be somewhere else and uh um his dad van's dad enters in to come and find him

because it's been revealed that van's dad has been paying for his college tuition the whole time and didn't really notice and it's been brought to his attention he's like fuck that my son has been there for seven years i'm cutting off the checks and he walks in and he goes up to a passed out um college frat boy who turns out to be jesse pinkman which i never realized before and he goes can you tell me where i can find van wilder and jesse pinkman says yeah in the guinness book of world fucking records this is the raddest fucking dude alive and then passes out again jesse heard the voice i was like it's jesse pinkman and then i looked it up and it is jesse pinkman's a character, of course, from Breaking Bad.

For those of us like me who haven't seen it, a quick Google search told me it's Aaron Paul, who's also known for voicing Todd in BoJack Horseman. Yeah. Yeah, look, what I was going to say, I mean, I think you've captured, you know, the essence of the film. Lord knows how, because, you know,

it's quite a complex storyline and there's high stakes and a lot of twists and turns to navigate they do a great job of painting the pre-med student what's his name again?

Dick Richard did you even watch the movie pre-med Dick? and another note which I hadn't noticed in my multiple previous watches of this film

because they only refer to it two times in the movie, his last name is Bag, so they named him Dick Bag, which I thought was a nice touch. Yeah, it's a great gag, Tim. He does a good job of, like, he's the prototypical, you know, frat boy arsehole who I feel like, in terms of the history of cinema, Bradley Cooper really captured best in Wedding Crashers as Todd. Do you see that they are in the same canon of frat guy villains?

Man, I cannot remember Wedding Crashers. I watched it once, incredibly hungover many years ago. I would say, for reference, Wedding Crashers is probably my Van Wilder, even though it's years later. It's a movie that I have a crazy sort of, I've seen an unholy amount of times. I used to watch it when I was hungover relentlessly. Three years after Van Wilder it came out.

And I did enjoy that, but I felt, yeah, I just, I don't think time has been particularly kind to Van Wilder, party liaison. It's certainly not a movie you could release today. That's undeniable. It's kind of too dumb. I think more than anything,

you can talk about all the social mores that we have now, but I think realistically this movie is too stupid to be released in one age to the cinemas. It's a throwback to a different era, right? And that is one thing I did enjoy in watching it, was just how there was just so nothing. It was so stupid. And, like, it does feel like it's harder to find something like,

you know, something like this where there's not some sort of heavy-handed or some sort of through-line or to to latch on to i mean i guess they do sort of tie it up at the end with a be yourself grow up i don't know what would you say i guess the moral of van wilder is um it's all about your own potential and believing in yourself and not being afraid i guess i guess it's about not being afraid of pursuing things because for gwen it's like don't be afraid of breaking up with your boyfriend and actually going after this wildcat van even though you think it's risky and for van it's like don't be afraid of actually graduating and getting out into the real world because uh because you'll be fine yeah um did you know that this this as unlikely as it sounds this film is based on uh real life

inspired who who where have you read this and who do they say it's inspired by uh is a rolling stone article about who a guy who's now quite a successful comedian called burt kreischer ah have you not heard of Bert? I've heard of him entirely divorced from his college days, just as a presence in the world of stand-up comedy. So he, I'm like 99% sure I'm thinking of the right guy, he's got a story which is sort of commonly referred to online as the greatest story ever told, about how he went to Russia on a high school trip and got drunk with a bunch of

mobsters and held up the train with them which i do recommend that lots of people call out the veracity of the story but for entertainment value it is undeniably fucking excellent so you should you should check that out there's another guy who was kind of knocking around at the same time that this movie came out called Tucker Max. Do you know Tucker Max? I remember Tucker Max. Yeah. So for those who don't know, Tucker Max was, I mean, I guess now we call him a famous misogynist. Absolutely.

In a way, he sort of apologized for his past life i think but he was this incredible asshole who was just this womanizing college frat boy but he fucking had the like a real gift for the written word and he used to pen these stories which were back in the old days of the internet and he had a website of his own, which is essentially just a blog of his exploits going to parties. I'd shudder to, you know, go back and read some of his work now, but I remember in high school

just fucking loving the stories he was telling about these wild nights out. Do you know, yeah, I remember around that time, you sort of, Tucker Max, then also Maddox, who called himself an internet pirate, you sort of, Tuckermax, then also Maddox, who called himself an internet pirate, they sort of ruled the roost. And although Maddox was sort of more geekier and steeped in like internet culture,

Tuckermax's was just like regaling stories of this. At the time, you know, what was this fantasy life of just being this absolute monster who was rolling around college parties and being the worst possible dude yeah uh medics was the guy who had like a bunch of slogans and t-shirts going it was like for every animal you don't eat i'll eat 10 or something right like he just used to go vegetarians and vegans and shit yeah um i yeah he he also I remember what rose to prominence

in my world was he had a very funny web page which was I can like reviewing kids art and it was just like all these different children's art and he was just calling it all fucking terrible which pretty prescient I guess you know

like that sort of humor is still present but anyway he also had a a darker side um but yeah this is all in the same wheelhouse so this burke christian story that russia story i don't know about but like there was a quite a famous rolling stone article about his time at a university in uh somewhere in florida that is purportedly meant to have inspired Van Wilder and you can see how in 2002 your pair, Ryan Reynolds and Tara Reid together

you put the National Lampoon which I suppose that their brand might have still had some value back then on top of it and you've got a modern day animal house i guess in a sense yeah definitely yeah but more moralistic you've got to say because

for all the um things we're saying about how this movie has dated terribly and i think this is what i liked about it at the time it's like it's very kind of jocular and macho and stupid and boyish but it does kind of it does have a warm heart to it like it's not um i don't think it's fuck i well i want to say even now like it's not super problematic is it or is it no it's pretty problematic tim okay fine but um you know it's got like that it does it does have a heart it's this movie will defend that. This movie definitely has a heart. And Van Wilder as a character has a heart. And I think that a lot of that is down to the heavy lifting

of Ryan Reynolds' magnetism and skills as an actor. But, man, I don't know. It's impossible for me to judge this fairly. Like I said, it's too steeped into my like reptilian brain but i didn't think this was bad at all i really enjoyed watching it no and in fairness to you it's not problematic and it's uh like overall as a as a piece of art it's like it's more like the the jokes du jour of the time have aged terribly uh as society you know like as uh punching down has fallen out of vogue and uh you know a lot of the laugh lines are at the expense of people who uh have shortcomings in their lives

in the film uh but like that's true i would i would not disagree that van wilder as a character in spite of this is still incredibly likable which is a credit to ryan riddle's uh and you know it's a very uh basic and male skewed view of the world and university specifically but um everyone's apart from like you know specifically designated antagonist in the form of dick bag uh everyone's hearts are in the right place you know and i did very much enjoy the presence of whoever the guy who plays the sort of uh he's the crotchety university professor who van wilder keeps stealing his park the dean well he wasn't the dean though he was like just some low-level economics professor but he was like when i saw him i don't know what he's familiar from but but i was like oh yeah this is you know everything was very comfortable it was it wasn't difficult to

get through the 90 minutes it just also wasn't enjoyable yeah so that's professor mcdougall who sort of takes the um the spot of that classic dean position which is is in all of these movies there's always like in uh animal house I'm pretty sure it's the Dean in old school it literally is the Dean of students who's played by Jeremy Piven yeah fuck man

what were the jokes that you remember laughing at when you first saw it that you were excited to see again and delivered oh god um okay so well all i get all i can really tell you is the ones that really like got me this week i don't know it's um it's just a little the little like looks there's a look to camera that ryan reynolds does which sort of takes you back to like ferris Bueller, that whole breaking of the fourth wall thing.

What are the good, there's just a lot of like good little kind of character actor interactions. I thought that the, the back and forth between he and Ms. Haver, who's this like old, old, old,

old woman who works in university who um he hits on and then they end up fucking so that he can get an extension on paying his uh semester's tuition and she's she's hilarious man i think she's so funny it's such a like you know broad comedy role that she's been asked to do but i reckon she's she's great when she like pulls off her wig and just puts it in his drops it in his lap and he just looks terrified there's just so many little things like that man ryan reynolds is very good with playing with others tara reed on the other hand fucking doesn't even act in this like she is just reading lines she is so far and away the worst performer in this film by such a huge margin it is insane to me yeah um i'd just like to say before we do dig into tara reed's performance that uh like listening to you affectionately reminisce on the film does tell me just how deep you are in with this movie

because uh well you know while the comic objective of the scene you described was clear to me and i suppose on some level the idea of some hot young ryan reynolds you know having sex with an elderly woman is funny if only because it's unlikely it did not uh it did not grab my heart the same way it did yours it's funny because it is a turning of the tables it is it is a funny power dynamic where he rolls in there legs akimbo ready to you know bat his eyes and and get what he wants because that's what he used to and then he gets fucked over and uh and the old woman takes advantage of him and i think that is a funny flipping of the tables in this film i did just the way they're like his when he he walks out of the room and he just looks soul shaken it's yeah

i don't know it's it's a good it's a good little power play the the the callback to that scene actually did get a laugh out of me when he's stating his case of why he shouldn't be thrown out of the university later in the film. And on the jury of professors, she sits there and she does a quite promiscuous and suggestive tongue waggle at him. And I laughed then, and part of the laugh, it was just pure paint-by-numbers joke-telling and movie-making, but part of the laugh did stem from remembering their sexual tryst earlier in the movie.

I got you, guy. I got you. Yeah, it did get me. Now, Tara Reid was a name I had not thought of, nor an actor I had seen in a pretty serious amount of time. And just a very cursory look at a Wikipedia page led me to what is undoubtedly a very depressing but also hilarious gossip tidbit, which is in the year 2016, Tara Reid and an actor who's someone named Dean May

were throwing off a TV show called Marriage Boot Camp Reality Stars because it was revealed they were not in a relationship. Oh, no. Tara Reid. Tara Reid, she's had some troubles, eh? She's kind of one of those forever in the headlines celebrities, eh? Not to the extent of some, but certainly I don't think her career, she came out like a bottle rocket and was sort of typecast. I mean, because remember she was in The Big Lebowski.

She was Bunny Lebowski in The Big Lebowski, yeah. And then on the back of that remember she was in the big lebowski um she was bunny lebowski in the big lebowski yeah and then on the back of that she was an american pie and then you know she did have this incredible run sort of into the early to mid 2000s where she was sort of uh one of hollywood's it girls but as you say and observed in van wilder uh i don't know nothing yeah i don't know that performance ever caught up to it like i remember really thinking she was quite good in the big lebowski and i remember enjoying her although i haven't watched them for a long time in american pie part of that enjoyment probably was like you know stemmed from the fact i was a young adolescent boy and she was pitched as this this very attractive dream girl and uh my very small reptilian hormone adult and horny brain,

just imagine, you know, I was not watching anything for acting performance at that point. But yeah, her career has not taken off. And I think in Van Wilder, you do see evidence of why that may be because she is literally reading off cue cards next to ryan reynolds face um she's finding it in to the max there's a few scenes when she was in the office acting as a journalist against the newspaper the student newspaper boss which i sort of uh could get into that guy was good didn't you think yeah her editor he just had such a great it was kind of like he

was in a slightly different movie because he had such a good naturalistic style. It was just like, oh, fuck, I'd buy this for sure. Absolutely. But I mean, did you think that her and Ryan had chemistry in any way? Well, the only chemistry that was there was stuff that Ryan could manufacture

with, you know how many start does your does your fandom of ryan reynolds start before van wilder or van wilder where it all began because oh do you know he got a grip on you and he never let go correct two guys and a girl it was probably my first exposure to ryan reynolds and when on the tally, I was like, this kid's going places. I would have been about nine or something. But he was like, immediately, he just was so my cup of tea. Like, he's so warm and charming and cheeky and hilarious in everything that he does. I really dig him.

And so I saw this as like this is the fucking dude and that's why i was so absolutely excited about deadpool and i wasn't let down by the first one but the second one wasn't quite as good but always tricky to pull off that difficult sophomore album didn't they make more deadpool how do you mean like a third one uh no they've had a couple bites of the apple with the character within the marvel universe so he's been in some of the other x-men movies but they kept fucking it up um like they'd introduce him in wolverine movies and stuff but like in one of them for example quick detour he's called the merc with the mouth right that is wade's one of his nicknames it's one of deadpool's nicknames in um the comic books because he's like famous for his quips

and his his little asides and then one of them fucking have him on screen for like 30 seconds and then glue his mouth shut it's like no you've that that's kind of one of his superpowers that he's really fucking hilarious and you've literally taken his no, that's kind of one of his superpowers, that he's really fucking hilarious, and you've literally taken his voice away. That's insane. So they had to retcon the whole thing. When was that? Was that before Deadpool was released?

That was before Deadpool was released. So that was in, oh, I'm going to get this wrong. It was like The Wolverine, I think. Because Ryan Reynolds is dear to your heart in the same way that Deadpool is dear dear to ryan reynolds heart yeah yeah yeah but yeah so you can see the through line there and deadpool's always been a fucking cool character like you know ryan reynolds or not he's a very very unique voice in the x-verse in the x-men universe because he's got all these things about him that are like completely different

all the x-men are very earnest you know like you've got professor xavier who's who's this kind of christ-like savior figure and you've got scott summers cyclops who's who's this kind of leader um who's kind of like a captain america super earnest rally the troops dude and deadpool is um first of all a character who is aware that he is inside a comic book and he does these like fourth wall breaks inside the panels where he talks to you the reader and he's just fucking funny and he can't be killed pretty much so so you've read the books um i'm like i'm a little brushed up on it i haven't i haven't read all of it so we never brushed up on it you by the time you heard that Ryan Reynolds sort of that Deadpool was his thing

you you had independent fandom of both of them yeah yeah definitely so that was like a very exciting time for you yeah but it also made perfect sense that he would love that because it's like

it's the same sort of humour as him right it's good, it's the same sort of humor as him, right? It's good shit. And especially after him in the Blade trilogy, was he in two of them? I think he was in two and three, and he's ripped to fuck. You're like, this dude can pull it off. Yeah, Ryan Reynolds to me is like,

I'm sure he'd be fun to to have dinner with uh like not even one-on-one i just mean if you were at a dinner party and ryan reynolds was there you'd be like oh yeah this guy's gonna joke around the whole time but he's never quite uh seized me in the way i think he's he's he's got to you i've always admired how handsome he is i mean that is undeniable yeah i think he was the sexiest man in the world one year, People magazine. You know, as far as I'm concerned, he could very well be the sexiest man in the world every year.

But, yeah, he doesn't quite, I don't know, I have never followed him from project to project. He's always been... Watch him and Google some interviews. Watch him on, like, Graham Norton, watch him and google some interviews watch him on like graham norton watch him interacting with with hugh jackman and the thing about ryan reynolds as well is that it's it's not for nothing like his whole and this is you know slightly dark but his whole kind of comic persona and the reason he makes all these jokes and stuff harkens back to his um

troubled childhood and his relationship that he had with his dad so it's all like he's just he's a very he's a goodie he's a good he's a good kind of character as ryan reynolds i love him i love i love that you love him tim i will say that i also uh very much enjoyed and i think this is what placed van Wilder in the same wheelhouse and made the time go by so quickly as American Pie and Road Trip the soundtrack was incredible fuck yes it was how good is the soundtrack on this movie

I used to listen to it all the time like I downloaded all the songs in it and I'd listen to it heaps when I was in high school you could put this on if you can find it I'm sure someone's put it together on spotify walk around and for a day you would be living inside of an early 2000s frat boy comedy like it is crazy how much that music captures not just an era but like a feeling within it. Yeah, exactly. That's so well articulated. And I think that's why I fucking dug my hooks into this movie so deep as well,

because you know how important soundtracks and music and scoring is to me in a film. Oh, absolutely. And this just nails it. Yeah, it sounded like one some 41 song 12 different ways but uh to their credit you know that that works and that's what the movie called for i i would love to know what cal penn uh thinks about his experience like i guess he he loved it because he did a sequel right there was a second van wilder that centered around his character rise of taj i think it's called because and i did watch it at some point

but it is fucking brutal it's terribly bad well i'm i'm embarrassed to say but i remember uh i'm only embarrassed to say with the information i have now but uh a lot of the laugh lines i remember from when i first saw the movie were from taj from cal penn specifically uh through this sort of thick put on indian accent uh like saying i want to study the great american art of muff diving like that's funny though that is funny that is in bit but you know like there was there was social capital to be gained by wheeling that out you know at morning tea time in front of the fellas i mean i didn't know you some chums on the first 15 did it uh i don't think the first 15 were listening to me and the boys doing our movie impressions but certainly amongst the fellas i was already friends with it did nothing who were

those people standing was Was that Drama Club? No, it's not Drama Club. I don't know that the Drama Club were watching Van Wilder. Take me there. We're in high school. Who are you hanging out with? Who are the fellas? So I'm pretty sure... From whence do they roam?

This is the first year of high school. So this is not any one group, but it's like I was socially fluid and that I was friendly with, but not close to, you know, I like to think all groups. You're jocks, you're cool guys, you're theater geeks. And then I had my own very close group of friends. A real Van Wilder of a man at high school was Guy Montgomery.

You only get value out of one impression per group. So I would wheel this out in front of anyone who would listen once. I also did a... Hold on, hold on, hold on. So you would do the Indian accent that Cal Penn does? Well, yeah. So I want to study the great American art of muff diving. If Van Wilder ever came up... accent that cal pin does well yeah so i want to study the great american art of muff diving you

know if van wilder ever came up and you know i think the reason why i gravitated towards impressions and if i found one from a movie that everyone knew i latched onto it was because as you know tim i wasn't allowed to watch tv when i was younger and like everyone would watch tv by the way young parents or parents to be-be, heed this warning. Guy Montgomery is what happens when you remove screen time entirely. Yeah. And so I would watch people doing impressions of shows, and often I would lie about having seen something that I hadn't seen

just so that I could feel like I was part of the conversation. But that just made it worse because then I'd sit through like 20 minutes of impressions and jokes that I don't know or remember, but pretending to laugh at the right moments. It was a nightmare. So if ever I could sink my teeth

into one that I could, you know, I could actually contribute, I'd get very excited. Fair enough. I'm not surprised. So Guy, do you have a shining light

of this movie? It seems like as an entire piece you did you weren't thrilled with it uh i i gotta say just for the sheer idiocy of the humor and how much it reminded me of a time when i found that sort of thing funny the first shot on the gargantuan prosthetic balls that Van Wilder's dog has raised a very loud chuckle from me. And in seeing them and immediately remembering that they were going to be emptied later in the film, sort of... Yeah.

All of that, to me, it did have me laughing. So we should talk about that scene actually shouldn't we because this is sort of um one of the scenes that the movie is really famous for and remembered for and i i'm not a huge fan of the scene but you know there's a lot of pranks in this movie back and forward going between van and richard and one of them is that van wilder has a what kind of dog is it like a um french bulldog or something sort of in that family a big fat puggy looking thing huge testicles which undeniably hilarious and which spoils a very good line uh van wilder's friend who i really should know the name of but i

can't remember his name goes um you really got to have that guy noted and van without missing a beat just goes it's up to him yeah i thought that was good anyway they um end up buying a bunch of cream filled donuts removing the cream and then jacking off colossus the dog into those cream donuts and then dressing them up so they look normal again delivering them to the frat that richard is the president of and then all the boys are tucking in uh with greater plum to these uh freshly inseminated donuts and then there's polaroid pictures at the bottom showing the process of how they got made which leads to the greatest uh inconsistency or like camera mistake of this movie which is when genie gets spewed on by one of the

guys and they don't even cut away they cut to another shot of her where she gets spewed on on the opposite side they just go from one shot to the other so so that's there yeah that that is that in there. Sorry, I was just trying to do something. I missed a key linking part of your story while remembering all of the details as I was trying to figure out who exactly the character you were referring to is. He's called Techie.

No, he's called Hutch. Hutch, yeah, yeah, yeah, Hutch. But he was played by a cast member from MTV's Real World. Oh, true. A guy called Tech Holmes. I did wonder what came of this guy, who he was. So is he acting now or is he kind of one of those, I'm doing air quotes, like a personality type dude?

His Instagram bio reads, television producer for The La mob on true TV. I don't know that he's up to an awful lot. Hey man, he's a TV producer. That's something he's making. He's making television. Good on him. Yeah.

He is hyperlinked for his Wikipedia page leads to the real world MTV as opposed to his own personalized entry. So it's hard to know exactly how it's going. media page leads to the real world MTV as opposed to his own personalized entry. So it's hard to know exactly how it's going, but, um, you know, judging by the Instagram photos,

he appears to lead a happy life. And, uh, good to hear. I'm not upset about that. Tim, what was your shining light? Uh, it's because I truly do buy into this movie and i love this movie it is when so there's a um

the kind of crescendo of this film of all the bad stuff happening the all is lost moment is that one of the pranks richard plays on van wilder is that van has organized a party and um for for money because that's how he's paying for his college tuition at this point and richard sneaks in a whole bunch of little kids and gets them fucking hammered on jagermeister and then calls the college police on him and so he gets snapped out for underage drinking at a party that he was in charge of and that's how he gets uh expelled and then there's so he's packing up all his stuff and there's kind of this brooding montage of him looking sad and packing up all his shit. And then it goes to Taj, who's sitting in the...

Taj, by the way, who's played by Cal Penn, is his assistant for the duration of this film. So the very start of the film opens up with an audition process of all these people trying to get hired for the spot of Van Wilder's assistant. So he's kind of his his pa slash ea for this film so we got taj sitting in the library by himself surrounded by books uh and he's looking in the student handbook which is this huge tome for the university and he finds a clause a potential out and he's so excited and he runs back to van and he says van look you can appeal the expulsion within 48 hours it says here right in the school charter and then van says no it's all done i'm done with the school it's all over and then um taj gives a big speech and then they walk outside to look

at the hallway and everyone's holding a school charter where they too have found the clause that will help van wilder stay at the school just a little bit longer and they're all coming in. And he says, get me the law club. And I love that, man. I love that. Van Wilder returning to his previous position of power. You just buy into that moment of the movie.

Yeah. It's a genuine, yeah. I am taking the movie on its own terms i'm like yeah that's cool man it's inspired and then the head of the law club is like i don't know if it must have been an ode to uh jackie chiles who's the the lawyer from seinfeld who speaks in very quick pace and sort of and with big words um but it's got to be a direct reference to him because it was like they literally lifted the character and cast a younger guy to play him and then they do a fun oj joke as well anyway well that's all part of the same thing because

jackie childs the lawyer from seinfeld was based on uh i can't remember his name, Johnny someone, who was the OJ lawyer. Right. It's all very neatly wrapped up for you. There was one thing I did take issue with in the movie, Tim, amongst, you know, many legitimate gripes, just a logic thing. Yeah. At the start, you know, he walks out,

and he's pantsless for some reason when he's trying to talk a nervous freshman on his first day at school. He's climbed to the top of one of the buildings and is threatening to jump. Van Wilder approaches him and sort of, with his sage words of wisdom, tells him everything's going to be okay, not to get too worried about it all.

And then the guy, he sort of like, he turns away from him like, yeah, job well done. That guy's not going to jump. And the guy he sort of like feels he turns away from him like yeah job well done that guy's not going to jump and the guy then jumps um which if i'm going to be honest with you uh given the tone of the movie i thought was a joke and it made me laugh uh but then i see that he's jumped onto a small trampoline a net net. Yeah, but... I don't think he was aiming for that tramp... You know, and everyone reacts as though Van Wilde

has done this great public service by saving this guy's life. But the fact he jumps at all when he could have turned around and safely descended the building tells me that's not what the guy wanted at all. I hear you. I hear what you're saying. And when you break it down like that, it's basically making a joke out of suicide,

which is no laughing matter. And, you know, to my detriment, that's not even what I took issue with. But I was just like, this doesn't make sense, logically. And then later on in the movie, the same guy's seen wearing a T-shirt when everyone's rallying behind Van

so he can stay in the school, saying Van saved my life. And I'm like, has he bought in to this misguided mythos that him jumping off the building was the only way for him to keep living the only the only reason this is illogical is because you've decided in your mind that he wasn't aiming for the net why would you risk it when you can just walk back down yeah i don't know it wasn't a net it was like a tiny circular exercise trampoline this isn't fucking schindler's list all right it's a national lampoon cash grab they're just trying to make money somehow in this post chevy chase era yeah and to their credit they made 38 million dollars against a

budget of 5 million well fucking well done to everyone except tara reed who i thought really was phoning this in and didn't deserve it no you know what also well done to tara reed for having a career that got her to the point where she got cast uh i'm i remembered at the end when she shows up with the the the lays for that party, as though she's made a decision that she's going to be with Van. I remembered that from my childhood, and I was sort of like, oh, that's right, what a sweet and iconic moment for it to all come flooding back.

So well done. Well done to the Patreon pals for choosing such an easy-to-watch film for us. This, I feel, was a real favor to me, and I really do appreciate it. You are all very special and lovely people. I won't say that often because sometimes you throw us real dungas that are super long and super terrible. But I'm very grateful uh i i am marie condoing the whole community we have on patreon i'm holding you close and you are sparking me joy so let's keep holding on to it and keep each other around well uh is that is that it tim

i want actually to do one thing before we go. I, I, I want a final assessment of the film from you. Give it a, um, how many, uh,

how many Tara's read out of a hundred would you give this? No relation to James Reed, by the way. I don't even understand. I don't even understand what a Tara's read is, but I would give it, uh, 30. It's the plural of Tara read.

30's pretty low, man. I feel like we should be grading it on a scale of millilites or something, from zero to 100. What isn't appropriate? How many fucking red bear pong cups is it out of nine wait six wait ten it's still i'm trying to think of the configuration it's out of six right you usually have three layers so one then two then three sometimes then four you're overthinking it the movie's no good

it's not it's good it's all right watch the movie everyone but please please don't think less of me when you do that's all i have to say i'm giving this nine out of nine red cups. Jesus.