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When I was watching “National Lampoon’s Van Wilder”, I became nostalgic of the innocence found in “American Pie” where human semen was somehow baked into a pie. In “NatLamp”, dog semen is conveniently sprinkled on top a pastry. Are we simply biding our time until the protagonists of teenage gross-out comedies are implanting semen from turtles straight into their stomach lining? “National Lampoon’s Van Wilder”, a watered down version of “National Lampoon’s Animal House”, follows the exploits of Van Wilder (played by Ryan Reynolds); who has been the biggest man on campus for a glorious seven years of accumulating undergraduate education. He has absolutely no intentions of graduating, and who can blame him? He possesses notoriety, wealth, girls, and pretty much the adoration of the whole campus except for his professor who’s parking space he commandeers and a wretched fraternity that he attends. At heart, Van Wilder is the quintessential nice guy which is a big risk for a movie like this to take; he rounds up the funds for the swim team, attempts to save suicidal pupils, and throws epic keg parties.
Ryan Reynolds seems to be quite literally born to play Van Wilder. Van is simply a Permanent Student chasing a degree, not a devious slacker. He lacks some of the expected levels of excitement, and Reynolds (from ABC’s “Two Guys and a Girl”) doesn’t help out because he offers no spice at all. Typical leading man. That isn’t the role for which this movie desperately needs a maniacal character actor. Someone like Jack Black would have crushed this part.
Is Van Wilder unrealistically perfect? That’s what Gwen (Tara Reid) is thinking. She’s a journalism student that wants to do a serious profile on Van for the campus publication. She, of course, is the girlfriend of the disgusting frat boy and, of course, her research makes her fall head over heels for the real Van Wilder while hating his persona. You might remember Tara Reid as the stunning actress from “Josie and the Pussycats” and “American Pie 2,” but most of the time she just looks like she’s trying too hard to copy a candid shot of Renee Zellweger smiling.
That leaves, let’s see, Taj, the Indian-American who gets the part of Van Wilder’s assistant, and spends most of his time with a thick accent listing synonyms for the term oral sex. I am not going to argue since the hero’s sidekick in any film of this kind is always some lunatic whose libido is out of control, and at least this film has non-traditional casting. (Casting directors have a Catch-22. If they cast a white guy, everyone wants to know why he needed to be white. So they cast an ethnic guy, and people start whining about how negative the stereotype is. Perhaps the solution is to cast the ethnic guy as the lead and the white guy as the gaga sex-obsessed idiot.) The film is a total barf-fest that seems to obey the MPAA rules which allow filmmakers to do virtually anything with bodily functions provided they are not linked to healthy sexual activity. The film contains semen, bare breasts and butts, epic flatulence, bizarre forms of masturbation, public nudity, projectile vomiting, and an extensive soundscape of deep, roaring poop, which, with all due respect to the routine of a Port-a-Loo serviceman, is like watching him work in reverse.
Large testicles of Van Wilder’s pet bulldog are shown and this falls under the National Geographic leak. The MPAA is most probably thinking, “if there were dogs in the audience, we would certainly not let them see this.” As for the rest of us, we are left wondering, why in the world will anyone allow this.
As Bob Patterson from the website Delusions of Adequacy puts it, “This film will get a very strong five from most college age film fans who are not offended by vulgar humor.” Why the more mature viewers decide to do the unthinkable, like literally lifting yourself by the bootstraps in this case. While this is clearly the review the movie is to blame, which I fully confess. The sliding rubric remains a blur in my mind. Do we measure an openly gruesome film by the fact it gets you ralphed up? In order for Patterson’s reasoning to work, one would have had to be offended by bad van and not one much older.
I found “National Lampoon’s Van Wilder” to be such a daunting ordeal to sit through that had someone not forced me to sit through the film, I would have tried escaping by lifting myself out of my chair by my bootstraps.
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