Delicious!

Rating: 8/10 (8 January 2000)

A film worthy of repeated viewing again and again, and the nudity is not the reason. It's a movie written expressly by guys for guys, but somehow women like it as much as men do. The movie has so many scenes of absolutely hideous embarrassment alternated with scenes of triumph. There were somewhere around ten times in the movie when I started shaking my fist and going, "Yeah, baby!" Why? Becausen this is a movie that so many guys my age (I'm 18) can relate to. We cringe with embarrassment beyond what we've ever known when we see Kevin get caught spouting off about trying for a sexual homerun; we cheer when we see the guy get the girl not because she coerced him into saying "I love you" but because he truly was interested in her. This is immensely gratifying for us to see, partially because we never see it in real life. For fans of the movie "Swingers" I would highly recommend this as a guy movie.
Storywise, this is very well written. As noted above, there are some similarities to "Swingers" - obvious scenes when you can't help but feel sorry for the guy acting too effeminate or being too much of a pushover - to be contrasted with scenes (like Mike's dancing in Swingers) where you want to stand up and cheer. It's the tension between these moments of "I can't watch this!" to "You just learned how to be a man!" that gives this movie its great appeal to me. When I first heard of the movie, I swore that I would never see it. I heard of scenes with a pie, of awkward porno-magazine distribution scenes, of the endlessly repeated "Band Camp" lines, and of a guy using a tube sock to encase something other than his foot. Yes, these are indeed gross, but you must realize they are realistic gross. Whether or not they cross into gratuitousness is up to you, but I feel that this film's reputation as "The Most Dangerous Film to Our Youth of All Time" is undeserved. The gross scenes appeal only to the easily-titillated, or social reformers who need an excuse to impose some more limits on what we watch. Watch it for yourself, and how you really think. You'll find it worthwhile.