Yes,
what really is a Hoya, but Rob Crabbe might not get that. He is under extreme
pressure from his alumni parents to get into Georgetown, but he keeps blowing
the interview—and everything else he tries this very bad day—over and over
again. For some cosmic reason, his high school angst fest keeps resetting
whenever he can’t hold his horses, which happens pretty frequently in Dan Beers’
somewhat naughty high school genre comedy, Premature
(trailer
here), opening
tonight at the IFC Center.
Crabbe
is a diligent kid with all the right extracurriculars for a college application,
but the wrong ones for impressing girls. He only has two real friends, the
sex-obsessed Stanley, who seems to be on the cusp of graduating into a Kevin
Smith movie and his conspicuously cute platonic girlfriend, Gabrielle. He also
tutors a fake friend, Angela Yearwood (a.k.a. Afterschool Special), the school’s
promiscuous hottie. Crabbe is to be interviewed by Georgetown alumnus Jack
Roth, but he always starts off on an embarrassing foot, because of a bullying
incident (by the volleyball team of all people). On the upside, Yearwood
finally invites Crabbe over to her house for a tutoring session, which is where
Crabbe’s cosmic Etch A Sketch usually gets cleared.
There
is no denying the obvious: Premature is
a fluid-obsessed teenage sex comedy co-written and directed by a guy named
Beers. Tailor your expectations accordingly.
If perchance you are looking for some relentlessly shameless laughs, it
aims to please. Beers and co-screenwriter Mathew Harawitz rather cleverly adapt
the Groundhog Day concept to high
school, finding fresh ways to make sex jokes, while still maintaining a relatively
innocent heart.
As
Krabbe, John Karna is clearly trying to be the next Jason Bateman, but he is
way too low-key and reserved. You’d probably pick on him too, if you had the
opportunity. However, Craig Roberts makes amends for walking around looking so sad-eyed
and sensitive in the annoyingly precocious Submarine
with his wonderfully foul-mouthed and energetic turn as best-bud Stanley.
Katie Findlay also displays a winning screen presence as Gabrielle—almost to a
problematic extent, far outshining the campus bombshell-temptress. Yet, perhaps
the film’s MVP should go to Alan Tudyk as the wildly unstable Roth. Just as he
did in Tucker & Dale vs. Evil, he
shows a real knack for creating outrageous characters that are still profoundly
decent.
