Chapter Two
American Pie 2
By Brett Ballard-Beach
April 12, 2012
BoxOfficeProphets.com
“And this one time, at band camp, I stuck a flute in my…”
--Willow Rosenberg (er, Alyson Hannigan) says the word “pussy” and my pop culture universe shatters significantly on July 9, 1999
“Do you realize, Brett, you’re so smart you could do anything you want with your life?”
--Statement of (relative) fact/unintentional curse from a seventh grade female classmate, uttered without any particular malice, but which still stung for a 12-year-old who wanted to be known for more than academic prowess. Looking back I think it has been my own personal “may you live in interesting times” fortune.
“Why don’t you do the world a favor and take yourself out of the fucking gene pool?”
--Probably the harshest thing ever hurled at me anonymously, in reply to one of a myriad number of personals ads I placed on Craigslist, post-divorce. To this day, I remain a little uncertain if it was being suggested I should off myself, or simply refrain from procreation. I failed miserably per either interpretation.
“Looking back on it is like watching a black and white foreign film without subtitles in a language I no longer understand.”
--Possibly apocryphal. I swear this is courtesy of Uma Thurman in the mid-to-late-‘90s discussing her 18-month marriage to Gary Oldman (between 1990 and 1992) but I have never been able to find it again for verification. Still, it’s a hell of a simile.
I am as excited to see American Reunion as I was for Scream 4 last year, which is to say, tremendously bouncy. I have a lot of affection for the characters and the actors, if not all of the films themselves, and, like the original Scream trilogy, American Pie, American Pie 2, and American Wedding - above all else - serve to remind me how long ago 10-15 years feels. Anyone who has followed Chapter Two consistently since May 2009 can consider this the final part of my origin story: the rebooting/reimagining/continuation of a long-dormant franchise.
Looked at in one way, the American Pie films have kind of a funny habit of running closely alongside major events in my life the last decade-plus, with one of them inextricably bound in up in an annus horribilis condensed down into a manic 24-hour lump sum. Looked at in another way, what follows is navel-gazing and nostalgic reverie of the highest order. But where some may only glimpse a fresh-baked apple pie humped before its time, I see a connection with my personal history.
American Pie came out only six weeks before I became engaged to my girlfriend at the time. (The film we went to see the evening of my proposal: The Thirteenth Warrior. Of which I remember nothing, except that we missed the first 15 minutes because I remembered the time wrong from the paper - which never happens, so it must have been a sign, right?) We had been dating for over two years and betrothal seemed the most sensical act in the “logical progression” of things. And if that perhaps strikes the reader as a less than compelling reason for nuptials, well… you have solid powers of observation. We watched American Pie in the crappiest of cut-rate flattop mini-plexes (the long-defunct Act III Southgate, off McLoughlin Blvd between Portland and Milwaukie) and had a fairly splendid time. I bought it when it was released on DVD and played it - or certain sequences therein - on frequent occasions for several years afterward.
American Pie 2 was released the first weekend in August 2001, slightly less than halfway through what turned out to be a 40-month single edit version of “’til death do us part” and precisely midway through our two years in Astoria, Queens, New York. Things were already beginning to strain by this point. Money had been tight beginning from the move out and even with both of us working (her full-time, me part-time until I completed my MA in Cinema Studies at New York University), there was never enough to be spent without always worrying that too much was being spent.
There was an increasing frequency in arguments about staying vs. moving back home vs. moving back home early vs. her moving back ahead of me to be near her family who she loved terribly and who drove her - and frequently me - up the wall. It wasn’t wall-to-wall misery, though. Not at any point. The best memory I have is of the first of our two winters 2000-2001, when the heater in the basement of our apartment building broke down and we were without hot water for two weeks through Christmas and New Year’s holidays. I remember boiling water on the stove and filling up the bathtub for her, probably about a dozen passes with a standard size teakettle. And at some point during one of those evenings, I was reading her one of Ebert’s columns, a remembrance of Cannes Festivals past, and I began laughing uncontrollably, tears streaming down my face, because I hadn’t read this dispatch yet myself and didn’t know what to expect. Laughter is contagious and pretty soon we were both howling.
The worst memory is of a Friday where I picked her up at work and when we got home, she just let loose with her anger and frustration and sadness and feelings of helplessness over how much she hated her soul-crushing job and being on the other side of the country from her family. It was a meltdown the likes of which I had never seen from her. She just wanted to crawl in bed and stay there. So we did. The kicker is that we had plans to go out that night.
We were going to go to a silly hipster club in lower Manhattan near where Claire Danes lived at the time to watch her guest DJ. I had even picked up a ridiculously awesome outfit on the cheap at a consignment store the previous weekend. I can’t claim a deficiency of selfishness. I had built up that night in advance as a chance for us – me - to do something atypical and being denied it wounded me a lot more than I was ever willing to admit. We saw American Pie 2 at the United Artists Kaufman Astoria Stadium 14, three subway stops from our apartment, most likely with one of the last “free passes” that I had received in the mail from a former manager of mine back in Portland. I had never viewed it a second time before this week, although I recall enjoying it, overstuffed and slightly cruder than the first though it was. More on my 2012 impressions a little later.
American Wedding came out less than 12 hours after I had left my wife, telling her I wasn’t sure of my feelings for her anymore because I had become emotionally involved with a co-worker. I lied by omission, leaving out the part about how I had already slept with this woman. The timing was particularly… egregious because we had closed on a house two weeks prior. A house I would end up sleeping in only 15 nights, and making payments on for two years.
I offer up no weak defense for my selfish behavior except to say that on one end I felt needed and wanted for once in my life, and on the other, it was a coward’s quick way out of a situation that was “logically progressing” with frightening speed: from the yellow lab puppy we bought the week we moved back from New York; to a house that we purchased simply because I was in the mortgage industry and for which I only had to cough up $100 of my own money; to a baby a year or two down the line that I was not yet prepared to have and wouldn’t ever be with my wife. (It’s no small irony, I feel, that my co-worker had been pregnant but had been in a car accident four months earlier, on April Fool’s Day, and suffered a miscarriage. If she had still been with child, would all of this have happened? But if not her, then…)
I watched American Wedding opening night, August 1, 2003, with this woman at the Regal Evergreen Parkway Stadium 13 out in Hillsboro, and remember next to nothing about the film as we were in the back row holding hands and making out and staring into each other’s eyes with the kind of feverish intensity usually reserved for liberal arts undergrads debating philosophy and drinking espresso into the dark hours of the night. After which we should have said our goodnights and gone our separate ways for the evening. After which instead we went back to her house and had sex. After which her husband showed up. And a week later, this information made it back to my wife, via a midnight phone call from the husband. The affair, which had lasted all of four weeks at that point, was already in its death throes, although it would drag on, in an increasingly self-destructive fashion and in a fairly unrecognizable form, for another six months.
All of which taken together offers a fitting valediction at the three-year mark for a column about - and its ruminations on a life lived in thrall to - first sequels and second chances. For here, to prove the oft-right F. Scott Fitzgerald just a little wrong, there are nothing but second acts. And in the case of this week’s installment, there is a second slice of American Pie.
Sometimes my deep thoughts strike me as particularly profound, whereas other times, no wishing in the world can accord them the meaning I would bestow on them, and they wind up like Jack Handey rejects unfit to fill even a subpar SNL interstitial. You are to be treated to one of the latter this time around. While watching American Pie 2, the following occurred to me: why is it so difficult to make an enjoyable sequel when you have brought back all of the characters, portrayed by all of the same actors who originated them, and you don’t create any fake drama (er, comedy) by having the characters behave in ways antithetical to their nature.
There is something to be said for the element of surprise no longer being there, but that’s not what proves troublesome to me. In the space of only 90 minutes (minus credits), the first American Pie movie finds something for all of its characters to do. They all feel crucial to the plot, all are given a memorable moment (or moments) to shine and the film hums along almost as a series of comic vignettes, strung together with little pretense for continuity or anything but the vague outlines of a plot. Watching it again this last week, I laughed and felt uncomfortable in all the right spots, but I also felt an unexpected warm glow - not simply for the nostalgia of watching and remembering a time 13 years ago, but because of my aforementioned affection for these fictional creations. And this exists, in large part because of screenwriter Adam Herz’s obvious affection for them. It is rare to find a mainstream American film - much less a sex comedy - that has such warmth and fondness for its characters.
American Pie 2, at nearly 20 minutes longer (in the unrated cut) feels overstuffed, less comedically sustained and struggles to find interesting things for the characters to do. Thus, Heather gets shipped off to overseas summer study and the only meaningful plot point that she and Oz are given is to be repeatedly thwarted in attempts to have phone sex. (There are few things as awkward and cringe worthy as Mena Suvari and Chris Klein engaging in long-distance dirty talk. Except perhaps the moments that aren’t supposed to be awkward - i.e. when they are making each other “hot.”)
When it opened, the second serving of Pie was only the third R-rated film ever to open at more than $40 million (it surpassed the previous summer’s Scary Movie and trailed behind Hannibal, released earlier in 2001.) As befitting a sequel that strives for bigger, better, and cruder, American Pie 2 ups the antes on both the humiliations of protagonist Jim Levenstein (Jason Biggs) as well as the series’ comic foil, Steve Stifler. For Jim, being caught masturbating in his room by his parents is one-upped in the sequel into being caught attempting sex with a co-ed on the last day of the freshman year by both his parents, and her parents. (These opening sequence embarrassments are as much a part of the series’ identity as the Scream franchise’s pre-title murders.) Similarly, attempting self-gratification via baked goods the first time around is transformed into a thwarted attempt at whacking off that results in one hand crazy glued to a porno videocassette and the other hand crazy glued to his manhood. Biggs may have limited range, but Jim fits him like a, um, glove, and his willingness to go bare-assed on multiple occasions is admirable.
Stifler, who as portrayed by Seann William Scott is both the series’ comic stealth bomb and its most excruciating character (it becomes harder and harder to separate the line between the two by American Wedding) suffers a pair of ritual humiliations each time: his friend/nemesis Paul Finch bangs Stifler’s mom and Stifler has a needlessly disgusting encounter with bodily fluids/excretions: accidental ingestion of semen in American Pie, unwitting recipient of a golden shower in American Pie 2, and purposeful munching of dog shit in American Wedding. (Along with Pink Flamingos and The Spy Who Shagged Me, I would include this as definitive evidence that there is nothing funny about ingesting shit. It finds the “if it bends it’s funny, if it breaks it isn’t” tipping point and breaks it but good.) A character like Stifler is perfect in small doses in a large ensemble because there are more than enough audience surrogates to share in mutual disgust. But his increased presence in American Pie 2, and finally his second lead (behind Jim) in American Wedding is simply too much of a good/bad/annoying thing.
In retrospect, I think the franchise was fortunate to have Paul and Chris Weitz as co-directors on the first film because they proved effortless at evincing natural performances from all the young actors, pulling out just the right raunchy/sentimental tone from the script and at straddling the line between comedy and awkwardness. Something else that is very upfront in the screenplay of American Pie and which gets scuttled in the second and third films (primarily because of the loss of most of the female characters) are the dual notions that boys and girls can be just as confounded about the complexities of sex, and that girls can be just as into wanting sex as guys without being branded as sluts and whores.
I don’t want to overstep by ascribing any sort of intentional feminist status to the film, but though the guys may want sex more than anything (or think they do), none of the female characters exists (solely) as a sex object and none are treated as a cautionary tale or object of derision, for wanting or not wanting sex. Even the most archetypal and stereotypical sequence - you have a hot female foreign exchange student naked, looking at porn, and masturbating on your bed - gets turned on its head when Jim shows up, all gangly and ready for heaven knows what kind of action, and Nadia demands that he get naked as well by doing a striptease. It’s the height of male fantasy crossed with the nadir of male sexual nightmare, but it’s funny and embarrassing and sweet too.
Herz deigns to up the ante in the sequel and American Pie 2’s centerpiece is a sequence that runs for nearly 12 minutes in the unrated version, and ends the first half of the film on a delirious comic high. Designed as an escalating series of truth or dares between Jim, Stifler, Finch, and the two women whose house they are painting, it provides some kind of demented definitive answer to the age-old question: How far will a guy go to watch two women make out? It also provides an analogue counterpart to Nadia and Jim’s antics being broadcast on the Web in the first film, via some walkie-talkies whose frequency gets picked up throughout the local vicinity. It’s vulgar and provocative and crude and unpredictable and it finds ways to push the audience’s buttons and get us to laugh at the audacity of the scenario.
What holds the whole affair back are two examples of weaknesses previously cited: There isn’t enough action to go around (Oz and Kevin are more or less bystanders to the whole affair and the frequent cuts to them angling to see inside the house are unnecessary) and because the women aren’t featured again (save for a sex coda), they aren’t able to emerge as defined in any way, despite holding the sexual upper-hand the entire time. These faults are most visible when pushed to their extremes in the third film’s similar sequence - the bachelor party gone awry - which makes no good use of any of the actors and leaves a distinctly unsavory aftertaste in one’s mouth.
Director J.B. Rogers - who has directed a few other films, but has most of his credits as first unit or second assistant director on close to 30 films, including nearly all of the Farrelly Brothers oeuvre - isn’t as deft at working his way through both the sentimental and the outrageous, as either set of brothers can be at the peak of their game. When the film engages in the former, it feels forced and when it goes for the latter, more often than not, it feels too boxed in, constrained by its very efforts to be naughty.
Unlike most of the 80 Chapter Twos I have weighed in on up to now, it isn’t easy for me to base an opinion on American Pie 2 solely on the film’s own merits. It shines brightly when compared to how dispiriting American Wedding comes off, but it remains on the fringes of the shadow cast by American Pie. I am able to transfer a lot of the excess goodwill from the first film on to the second, and if it’s sloppier and cruder and more weighted down with sequences that drag, it’s still time I consider well-spent in the company of the class of ’99 from East Great Falls High.
Epilogue: Apart from my strong desire to see American Reunion, the timing of the fourth (theatrical) installment in the series once again dovetails with real-life circumstances charged with emotion. Next year will be my 20th high school reunion, an event I do plan on attending, particularly since I did not go to my 10th. That fell upon the third weekend of August 2003, while I was in the midst of the events described earlier. And although my best friend was fervent in her desire to get me to attend, I opted for another friend’s wedding that was a late addition to the same weekend. And though I believe I made the right decision, there is a part of me that wonders what if I had gone and when asked “So what’s up with you?” took a sip of some frou-frou drink, made a slightly dramatic pause and launched into an impossibly tragicomic tale of transgressive sexual shenanigans, all-night soul-bearing phone calls, and the exhilarating/terrifying feeling invoked by taking a scorched earth strategy to everything I thought I knew about myself. After which I could pause again and ask “And . . . how are you doing?”
Postscript: But the reunion is a year away. The more relevant news is that another installment of the American Pie franchise is on the big screen and I am once again (almost) a homeowner, for the first time since 2005. If you are reading this on the evening of April 12, 2012, I may have just finished signing the title company escrow documents, meaning that on April 13th, my wife, my son, and I will be given the keys to our first home together.
Post-postscript: And the final ironic capper to it all? (C’mon, you knew there had to be one!): Last weekend, I had to contact my ex-wife for the first time in five years, to get her to give her verbal assent to Sallie Mae, thereby granting me the ability to make lower payments on the spousal consolidation loan we took out in 2002. The last time we had any contact, in 2007, was for a similar reason: I had to prove that I was the one making that payment so that it wasn’t counted as debt against her and her husband as they got approval to buy their first home together. We’ll remain tied together, even in divorce, for the next couple of decades or so.
“And like the book says, we may be through with the past. The past is never through with us.”
Next time: I kick off a rock n’ roll summer with the psychedelic 1968 feature that put a self-inflicted nail in the coffin of the “pre-fab” answer to The Beatles. Come back here for some Head. In 30 days.