"Orange County" could have come out a lot better if it didn't take itself so seriously. It attempts to actually teach a moral lesson and make you believe in the dilemma of its main character, but its weird obsessions with certain odd themes (hispanic maids?!) and nonsensical plot points leave you wishing it would just stick to pure comedy.
While I don't like picking apart "hard to believe" aspects of plots in comedies, some portions of this movie just left me scratching my head:
1) The curious overuse of Crazytown's "Butterfly" as background music. I understand it was a trendy song in 2001, but it appeared prominently in not one, not two, but THREE separate scenes of the movie -- including one where a Stanford airhead announces, "It's our song!!" This song's record label must have paid someone off well.
2) I'm supposed to take this "aspiring writer wants to get into Stanford so badly that he goes there himself" theme seriously. However, once he gets there, he obnoxiously shows up uninvited (late at night, no less) at the doorstep of the Dean of Admissions. They never explained why this couldn't wait until the next morning. Why would someone serious about getting into that school almost surely kill his chances of getting in by portraying himself as some sort of freaky stalker?
3) I don't get this whole thing with the hispanic maids. It wasn't funny, and I guess we were supposed to learn that rich people in Orange County can't take care of their own families and basic needs, so they pay their hispanic maids to take care of their kids and hold their lives together. It wasn't funny, and it really did nothing for the plot.
4) The sex scene with Jack Black was disturbing. To me, he came off as a slovenly pervert, and no woman in her right mind would jump his bones when he climbed in the window and dropped his pants. To think that Jack Black naked makes a woman drool in uncontrollable lust stretches ANY for of imagination.
These are just some examples of scenes that either made no sense, or just didn't fit.
The thing that bothered me the most is that the whole plot itself didn't make sense. If the high school sent the wrong transcript, it would be the school's responsibility to clear up the error with the colleges it sent the erroneous transcripts to. An admissions mistake is not uncorrectable, and could obviously be fixed if it was simply due to a transcript error. This whole "trip" wouldn't have been necessary, nor the right way to go about things.
Yes, yes, I'm analyzing this a bit more than it deserves. I've seen many comedies which, while admitting to not being entirely serious, don't leave you scratching your head asking, "Why'd they do that?"
While I don't like picking apart "hard to believe" aspects of plots in comedies, some portions of this movie just left me scratching my head:
1) The curious overuse of Crazytown's "Butterfly" as background music. I understand it was a trendy song in 2001, but it appeared prominently in not one, not two, but THREE separate scenes of the movie -- including one where a Stanford airhead announces, "It's our song!!" This song's record label must have paid someone off well.
2) I'm supposed to take this "aspiring writer wants to get into Stanford so badly that he goes there himself" theme seriously. However, once he gets there, he obnoxiously shows up uninvited (late at night, no less) at the doorstep of the Dean of Admissions. They never explained why this couldn't wait until the next morning. Why would someone serious about getting into that school almost surely kill his chances of getting in by portraying himself as some sort of freaky stalker?
3) I don't get this whole thing with the hispanic maids. It wasn't funny, and I guess we were supposed to learn that rich people in Orange County can't take care of their own families and basic needs, so they pay their hispanic maids to take care of their kids and hold their lives together. It wasn't funny, and it really did nothing for the plot.
4) The sex scene with Jack Black was disturbing. To me, he came off as a slovenly pervert, and no woman in her right mind would jump his bones when he climbed in the window and dropped his pants. To think that Jack Black naked makes a woman drool in uncontrollable lust stretches ANY for of imagination.
These are just some examples of scenes that either made no sense, or just didn't fit.
The thing that bothered me the most is that the whole plot itself didn't make sense. If the high school sent the wrong transcript, it would be the school's responsibility to clear up the error with the colleges it sent the erroneous transcripts to. An admissions mistake is not uncorrectable, and could obviously be fixed if it was simply due to a transcript error. This whole "trip" wouldn't have been necessary, nor the right way to go about things.
Yes, yes, I'm analyzing this a bit more than it deserves. I've seen many comedies which, while admitting to not being entirely serious, don't leave you scratching your head asking, "Why'd they do that?"