American Pie

by D. K. Holm

ince when did audiences become boosters of popular films? Since when did they attend movie screenings as if they were in the big arena, watching World Wrestling Federation hulks banging into each other like sumo wrestlers on crank? At a recent advance screening of American Pie, the audience cheered the movie before the credits even came on. They whooped and cheered and fist fucked the air as if their favorite sports hero or band member were about to step forth from the curtains. They acted less like movie goers, skeptical but interested, than investors in the corporation that made the thing, willing it to succeed so that their personal prescience and money handling could be confirmed as brilliant.

But that's the way it's been with movies in recent years—ordinary citizens read the Monday morning groses the way they used to read the box scores. This sense of personal involvement with the success of a movie, which takes as its corrolary the outrage when a favorite is ignored at the boxoffice, has been brewing for years. Mostly it's thanks to the national magazines and entertainment TV shows, which treat each new movie, at the behest of the studio publicity departments, as if it were a major cultural event, or at the very least, the arrival of Hitler at the Luitpoldhalle. American Pie is a nice little film, but is it really worth both the media push in its favor and the compliant exultation of the masses?

But then again, what other form could the response to American Pie take, after the weeks of subtle propagandizing? Commercial after commercial has run; magazine article after article has heralded director Paul Weitz and credited screenwriter Adam Herz, who have been associated with all of five films between them, as the new hottest team in Hollywood. And the reviewers have gotten into the act as well, indicating that, yes, American Pie is crude, vulgar, and has the necessary ingredient of all contemporary comedies, human sperm, but also has a certain sweetness, a kindness, and it most important of all gives the teenage girls in the film credit for having a lively sexuality, as if the movie were really titled, Porky's: This Time it's the Girl's Turn.

As a matter of fact, American Pie is all those things. It's not brilliant at all those things. Sometimes it's not even competent at many of them. The film comes across almost as the crude teen comedy you could take your parents to, and I'm not so sure that's a good thing. But in the end, the film itself is less important than the prefabricated response to it.

As a recent advance screening ended, the audience, torn between its eagerness to join the budding traffic jam outside, and its desire to make known its abject approval of the film, cheered and hollared their satisfaction with deep, gutteral roars. This is not to say that they honored the men and women who had made the thing and whose names were rolling above their eyes, were they to turn those orbs to the screen instead of the aisle where they strove to join the throng. I doubt if many of them could name the stars they had just cheered, much less the director or writer. But that is unimportant. Their team had won. American Pie had "done" what it was suppose to do, which was to deliver something vaguely American, modestly funny, but decidely triumphant .

For full cast and credits for American Pie, visit the Internet Movie Data Base.

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