So with colleges getting ready to star back up I thought it would be fitting to give you my top 10 favorite college themed films of all-time. So without further ado...
10. Van Wilder
This film is just flat out funny and it turned Ryan Reynolds into a star. Van Wilder revolves around the exploits of its title character (played by Ryan Reynolds), a seventh-year senior who's made it his goal in life to help each and every Coolidge College undergrad succeed in life -- or at least in bed. Van's charmed life seems to have an expiration date, however; his father (played by Tim Matheson) has cut off his presumably vast allowance. Financial insecurity doesn't phase the big man on campus, and he soon starts up a lucrative cottage industry as a planner of high-priced campus blowouts. When an enterprising reporter from the college paper gets wind of Van's liberal interpretation of the school's code of conduct, it seems his gig is up -- unless, of course, he can charm the hard-edged Gwen (played by Tara Reid) into accepting his uniquely skewed world view. Van Wilder has a rating of 18% on rottentomatoes.com.
9. The Social Network
This film is just amazing and it really gives us an inside look at one of the greatest inventions of all-time. "The Social Network" explores the moment at which Facebook, the most revolutionary social phenomena of the new century, was invented -- through the warring perspectives of the super-smart young men who each claimed to be there at its inception. The result is a drama rife with both creation and destruction; one that audaciously avoids a singular POV, but instead, by tracking dueling narratives, mirrors the clashing truths and constantly morphing social relationships that define our time. The Social Network was nominated for 8 Academy Awards including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor, Best Cinematography, Best Film Editing, Original Score, Best Sound Mixing and Best Adapted Screenplay while winning 3 (Best Film Editing, Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Original Score) and it has a rating of 96% on rottentomatoes.com.
8. Road Trip
This film is just absolutely hilarious and helped launch careers of several of the cast members. Cheating is when you're in a committed relationship and have sex with another person....It's not cheating if you live in different area codes, if you are too wasted to remember it. or if you are with two people at the same time because they cancel each other out. But it is definitely cheating if you videotape it and someone accidentally mails the tape to your girlfriend. This is what happens to Josh (played by Breckin Meyer, who must now drag two college buddies, and one not-so-eager-kid who happens to own the car, on a raucous 1800-mile road trip from Ithaca, New York to Austin, Texas to save his lifelong romance. Road Trip has a rating of 57% on rottentomatoes.com.
7. We Are Marshall
I love sports movies (especially football movies) and this one is just simply amazing, heartfelt and inspiring. A true story of tragedy, hope, and resilience comes to the screen in this sports drama. Huntington, WV, is home to Marshall University, a school where college football is a way of life. Huntington is also a town that learned to deal with tragedy in the fall of 1970 when Marshall's "Thundering Herd" boarded an airliner to return home after a football game in North Carolina. The jet crashed into a hill due to bad weather, and 75 members of Marshall's football squad and athletic staff died that night. The accident dealt a crippling blow to the city of Huntington, as well as Marshall's faculty and student body, and university president Donald Dedmon (played by David Strathairn) considered abandoning the school's football program. But instead Coach Jack Lengyel (played by Matthew McConaughey) was recruited from Ohio's College of Wooster to rebuild Marshall's football program. Lengyel was not naïve about the task ahead of him, and working beside Red Dawson (played by Matthew Fox), an assistant coach who narrowly missed the doomed flight and was one of the program's only survivors, he came to understand his job was not just to put a team on the field, but help a college and a community heal their wounds from the tragic accident. Together Lengyel and Dawson turned a handful of rookies and second-string players into a competitive team who in 1971 showed the world what they could do in a legendary game against Marshall's rivals, Xavier University. We Are Marshall has a rating of 49% on rottentomatoes.com.
6. Accepted
This film is absolutely ridiculous but it's just simply hilarious. Bartleby "B" Gaines (played by Justin Long) is a high school senior whose street smarts just never seemed to translate into the classroom, and whose bad luck in love has left him pining for the unattainable Monica (played by Blake Lively). When Bartleby and his rebellious crew of outcasts find the frequent college rejection letters they have all been receiving bringing endless grief from their disappointed parents, they soon band together to create the fictional South Harmon Institute of Technology. After creating a believable façade in an abandoned psychiatric hospital, employing the talents of a close friend's brilliantly subversive uncle (played by Lewis Black) to pose as the dean, and creating a phony website in order to sell the school to their parents, Bartleby and friends soon realize that all of their hard work has paid off in ways than they never imagined. With a variety of college rejects attempting to enroll in classes at the ersatz university and the skepticism of some privileged students from a nearby college drawing unwanted attention to the South Harmon Institute of Technology, Bartleby and friends find their ruse becoming ever more difficult to maintain. Accepted has a rating of 36% on rottentomatoes.com.
5. Revenge of the Nerds
This film is hilarious, quotable and one of the greatest films of all-time. The handsome jocks of Alpha Beta, led by Stan (played by Ted McGinley), run Adams College, which means that when they burn down their house after a stunt involving grain alcohol and an open flame, they kick a bunch of socially inept freshman out of their dorm and into the gymnasium. But sleeping on cots is only the beginning of their worries, as the so-called nerds soon become the target of pranks by Alpha Beta, assisted by Betty (played by Julie Montgomery) and the gorgeous gals of Pi Delta Pi. Instead of taking the abuse sitting down, the displaced freshman, led by Gilbert (played by Anthony Edwards) and Lewis (played by Robert Carradine), buy a ramshackle house, affiliate themselves with the only national chapter who will take them (the all-black Lambda Lambda Lambda), and use their superior intellect to launch a counterstrike. The bespectacled but loveable geeks set up surveillance cameras in the Pi bathroom and put liquid heat in the athletes' jock straps, then draft a sister sorority of misfits (Omega Mu) to strengthen their resources. The frats quickly become bitter rivals, and the goal is to win the annual fraternity decathlon, which involves such feats as a burping contest and a go-cart race, with bragging rights (and perhaps peace of mind) at stake. Revenge of the Nerds has a rating of 73% on rottentomatoes.com.
4. Old School
This film has a lot of memorable gut-busting moments and it has some very memorable quotes. A trio of twenty something buddies tries to recapture the outrageous, irrepressible fun of their college years by starting their own off-campus frat house. Mitch (played by Luke Wilson), Frank (played by Will Ferrell) and Beanie (played by Vince Vaughn) have all reached a crossroads in their lives. They can choose to be responsible adults, with wives, families and steady jobs--or they can postpone adulthood in favor of the reckless abandon of frat house living with all the fun and none of the education. No contest. Old School has a rating of 60% on rottentomatoes.com.
3. The Program
Like I said earlier I love sports movies (this is one of my top 10 favorite sports films) and this film is a perfect example of college football in the 1990's. Eastern State University isn't particularly notable for anything except its football program. Lately, even that hasn't been doing too well, and the athletic staff led by Coach Winters (played by James Caan) are under considerable pressure by the administration and alumni to bring in a winning season. To do that, he has to recruit some able, promising young players out of high school. It's not too surprising to learn that he will do almost anything to get these kids, and its even less surprising that, as long as they keep producing on the field, he and the college will overlook almost any obnoxious behavior the boys can perpetrate to the limit of their ability. The Program has a rating of 42% on rottentomatoes.com.
2. Good Will Hunting
This movie is so captivating and it has possibly one of the greatest performances by an actor who is one the best of all-time. 20-year-old South Boston laborer Will Hunting (played by Matt Damon), an unrecognized genius who, as part of a deferred prosecution agreement after assaulting a police officer, becomes a patient of a therapist Dr. Sean Maguire (played by Robin Williams) and studies advanced mathematics with a renowned professor Gerald Lambeau (played by Stellan Skarsgård). Through his therapy sessions, Will re-evaluates his relationships with his best friend Chuckie (played by Ben Affleck), his girlfriend Skylar (played by Minnie Driver), and himself, facing the significant task of thinking about his future. Good Will Hunting was nominated for 9 Academy Awards including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor, Best Supporting Actor, Best Supporting Actress, Best Original Screenplay, Best Film Editing, Best Score and Best Original Song while winning 2 (Best Supporting Actor and Best Original Screenplay) and it has a rating of 97% on rottentomatoes.com.
1. Animal House
This is one of my favorite comedies and one of my favorite films of all-time. National Lampoon's Animal House is set in 1962 on the campus of Faber College in Faber, PA. The first glimpse we get of the campus is the statue of its founder Emil Faber, on the base of which is inscribed the motto, "Knowledge Is Good." Incoming freshmen Larry "Pinto" Kroger (played by Tom Hulce) and Kent "Flounder" Dorfman (played by Stephen Furst) find themselves rejected by the pretentious Omega fraternity, and instead pledge to Delta House. The Deltas are a motley fraternity of rejects and maladjusted undergraduates (some approaching their late twenties) whose main goal -- seemingly accomplished in part by their mere presence on campus -- is disrupting the staid, peaceful, rigidly orthodox, and totally hypocritical social order of the school, as represented by the Omegas and the college's dean, Vernon Wormer (played by John Vernon). Dean Wormer decides that this is the year he's going to get the Deltas expelled and their chapter decertified; he places the fraternity on "double secret probation" and, with help from Omega president Greg Marmalard (played by James Daughton) and hard-nosed member Doug Neidermeyer (played by Mark Metcalf), starts looking for any pretext on which to bring the members of the Delta fraternity up on charges. The Deltas, oblivious to the danger they're in, are having a great time, steeped in irreverence, mild debauchery, and occasional drunkenness, led by seniors Otter (played by Tim Matheson), Hoover (played by James Widdoes), D-Day (played by Bruce McGill), Boon (played by Peter Riegert), and pledge master John "Bluto" Blutarsky (played by John Belushi). They're given enough rope to hang themselves, but even then manage to get into comical misadventures on a road trip (where they arrange an assignation with a group of young ladies from Emily Dickinson University). Finally, they are thrown out of school, and, as a result, stripped of their student deferments (and, thus, eligible for the draft). They decide to commit one last, utterly senseless (and screamingly funny) slapstick act of rebellion, making a shambles of the university's annual homecoming parade, and, in the process, getting revenge on the dean, the Omegas, and everyone else who has ever gone against them. Animal House has a rating of 91% on rottentomatoes.com.
10. Van Wilder
This film is just flat out funny and it turned Ryan Reynolds into a star. Van Wilder revolves around the exploits of its title character (played by Ryan Reynolds), a seventh-year senior who's made it his goal in life to help each and every Coolidge College undergrad succeed in life -- or at least in bed. Van's charmed life seems to have an expiration date, however; his father (played by Tim Matheson) has cut off his presumably vast allowance. Financial insecurity doesn't phase the big man on campus, and he soon starts up a lucrative cottage industry as a planner of high-priced campus blowouts. When an enterprising reporter from the college paper gets wind of Van's liberal interpretation of the school's code of conduct, it seems his gig is up -- unless, of course, he can charm the hard-edged Gwen (played by Tara Reid) into accepting his uniquely skewed world view. Van Wilder has a rating of 18% on rottentomatoes.com.
9. The Social Network
This film is just amazing and it really gives us an inside look at one of the greatest inventions of all-time. "The Social Network" explores the moment at which Facebook, the most revolutionary social phenomena of the new century, was invented -- through the warring perspectives of the super-smart young men who each claimed to be there at its inception. The result is a drama rife with both creation and destruction; one that audaciously avoids a singular POV, but instead, by tracking dueling narratives, mirrors the clashing truths and constantly morphing social relationships that define our time. The Social Network was nominated for 8 Academy Awards including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor, Best Cinematography, Best Film Editing, Original Score, Best Sound Mixing and Best Adapted Screenplay while winning 3 (Best Film Editing, Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Original Score) and it has a rating of 96% on rottentomatoes.com.
8. Road Trip
This film is just absolutely hilarious and helped launch careers of several of the cast members. Cheating is when you're in a committed relationship and have sex with another person....It's not cheating if you live in different area codes, if you are too wasted to remember it. or if you are with two people at the same time because they cancel each other out. But it is definitely cheating if you videotape it and someone accidentally mails the tape to your girlfriend. This is what happens to Josh (played by Breckin Meyer, who must now drag two college buddies, and one not-so-eager-kid who happens to own the car, on a raucous 1800-mile road trip from Ithaca, New York to Austin, Texas to save his lifelong romance. Road Trip has a rating of 57% on rottentomatoes.com.
7. We Are Marshall
I love sports movies (especially football movies) and this one is just simply amazing, heartfelt and inspiring. A true story of tragedy, hope, and resilience comes to the screen in this sports drama. Huntington, WV, is home to Marshall University, a school where college football is a way of life. Huntington is also a town that learned to deal with tragedy in the fall of 1970 when Marshall's "Thundering Herd" boarded an airliner to return home after a football game in North Carolina. The jet crashed into a hill due to bad weather, and 75 members of Marshall's football squad and athletic staff died that night. The accident dealt a crippling blow to the city of Huntington, as well as Marshall's faculty and student body, and university president Donald Dedmon (played by David Strathairn) considered abandoning the school's football program. But instead Coach Jack Lengyel (played by Matthew McConaughey) was recruited from Ohio's College of Wooster to rebuild Marshall's football program. Lengyel was not naïve about the task ahead of him, and working beside Red Dawson (played by Matthew Fox), an assistant coach who narrowly missed the doomed flight and was one of the program's only survivors, he came to understand his job was not just to put a team on the field, but help a college and a community heal their wounds from the tragic accident. Together Lengyel and Dawson turned a handful of rookies and second-string players into a competitive team who in 1971 showed the world what they could do in a legendary game against Marshall's rivals, Xavier University. We Are Marshall has a rating of 49% on rottentomatoes.com.
6. Accepted
This film is absolutely ridiculous but it's just simply hilarious. Bartleby "B" Gaines (played by Justin Long) is a high school senior whose street smarts just never seemed to translate into the classroom, and whose bad luck in love has left him pining for the unattainable Monica (played by Blake Lively). When Bartleby and his rebellious crew of outcasts find the frequent college rejection letters they have all been receiving bringing endless grief from their disappointed parents, they soon band together to create the fictional South Harmon Institute of Technology. After creating a believable façade in an abandoned psychiatric hospital, employing the talents of a close friend's brilliantly subversive uncle (played by Lewis Black) to pose as the dean, and creating a phony website in order to sell the school to their parents, Bartleby and friends soon realize that all of their hard work has paid off in ways than they never imagined. With a variety of college rejects attempting to enroll in classes at the ersatz university and the skepticism of some privileged students from a nearby college drawing unwanted attention to the South Harmon Institute of Technology, Bartleby and friends find their ruse becoming ever more difficult to maintain. Accepted has a rating of 36% on rottentomatoes.com.
5. Revenge of the Nerds
This film is hilarious, quotable and one of the greatest films of all-time. The handsome jocks of Alpha Beta, led by Stan (played by Ted McGinley), run Adams College, which means that when they burn down their house after a stunt involving grain alcohol and an open flame, they kick a bunch of socially inept freshman out of their dorm and into the gymnasium. But sleeping on cots is only the beginning of their worries, as the so-called nerds soon become the target of pranks by Alpha Beta, assisted by Betty (played by Julie Montgomery) and the gorgeous gals of Pi Delta Pi. Instead of taking the abuse sitting down, the displaced freshman, led by Gilbert (played by Anthony Edwards) and Lewis (played by Robert Carradine), buy a ramshackle house, affiliate themselves with the only national chapter who will take them (the all-black Lambda Lambda Lambda), and use their superior intellect to launch a counterstrike. The bespectacled but loveable geeks set up surveillance cameras in the Pi bathroom and put liquid heat in the athletes' jock straps, then draft a sister sorority of misfits (Omega Mu) to strengthen their resources. The frats quickly become bitter rivals, and the goal is to win the annual fraternity decathlon, which involves such feats as a burping contest and a go-cart race, with bragging rights (and perhaps peace of mind) at stake. Revenge of the Nerds has a rating of 73% on rottentomatoes.com.
4. Old School
This film has a lot of memorable gut-busting moments and it has some very memorable quotes. A trio of twenty something buddies tries to recapture the outrageous, irrepressible fun of their college years by starting their own off-campus frat house. Mitch (played by Luke Wilson), Frank (played by Will Ferrell) and Beanie (played by Vince Vaughn) have all reached a crossroads in their lives. They can choose to be responsible adults, with wives, families and steady jobs--or they can postpone adulthood in favor of the reckless abandon of frat house living with all the fun and none of the education. No contest. Old School has a rating of 60% on rottentomatoes.com.
3. The Program
Like I said earlier I love sports movies (this is one of my top 10 favorite sports films) and this film is a perfect example of college football in the 1990's. Eastern State University isn't particularly notable for anything except its football program. Lately, even that hasn't been doing too well, and the athletic staff led by Coach Winters (played by James Caan) are under considerable pressure by the administration and alumni to bring in a winning season. To do that, he has to recruit some able, promising young players out of high school. It's not too surprising to learn that he will do almost anything to get these kids, and its even less surprising that, as long as they keep producing on the field, he and the college will overlook almost any obnoxious behavior the boys can perpetrate to the limit of their ability. The Program has a rating of 42% on rottentomatoes.com.
2. Good Will Hunting
This movie is so captivating and it has possibly one of the greatest performances by an actor who is one the best of all-time. 20-year-old South Boston laborer Will Hunting (played by Matt Damon), an unrecognized genius who, as part of a deferred prosecution agreement after assaulting a police officer, becomes a patient of a therapist Dr. Sean Maguire (played by Robin Williams) and studies advanced mathematics with a renowned professor Gerald Lambeau (played by Stellan Skarsgård). Through his therapy sessions, Will re-evaluates his relationships with his best friend Chuckie (played by Ben Affleck), his girlfriend Skylar (played by Minnie Driver), and himself, facing the significant task of thinking about his future. Good Will Hunting was nominated for 9 Academy Awards including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor, Best Supporting Actor, Best Supporting Actress, Best Original Screenplay, Best Film Editing, Best Score and Best Original Song while winning 2 (Best Supporting Actor and Best Original Screenplay) and it has a rating of 97% on rottentomatoes.com.
1. Animal House
This is one of my favorite comedies and one of my favorite films of all-time. National Lampoon's Animal House is set in 1962 on the campus of Faber College in Faber, PA. The first glimpse we get of the campus is the statue of its founder Emil Faber, on the base of which is inscribed the motto, "Knowledge Is Good." Incoming freshmen Larry "Pinto" Kroger (played by Tom Hulce) and Kent "Flounder" Dorfman (played by Stephen Furst) find themselves rejected by the pretentious Omega fraternity, and instead pledge to Delta House. The Deltas are a motley fraternity of rejects and maladjusted undergraduates (some approaching their late twenties) whose main goal -- seemingly accomplished in part by their mere presence on campus -- is disrupting the staid, peaceful, rigidly orthodox, and totally hypocritical social order of the school, as represented by the Omegas and the college's dean, Vernon Wormer (played by John Vernon). Dean Wormer decides that this is the year he's going to get the Deltas expelled and their chapter decertified; he places the fraternity on "double secret probation" and, with help from Omega president Greg Marmalard (played by James Daughton) and hard-nosed member Doug Neidermeyer (played by Mark Metcalf), starts looking for any pretext on which to bring the members of the Delta fraternity up on charges. The Deltas, oblivious to the danger they're in, are having a great time, steeped in irreverence, mild debauchery, and occasional drunkenness, led by seniors Otter (played by Tim Matheson), Hoover (played by James Widdoes), D-Day (played by Bruce McGill), Boon (played by Peter Riegert), and pledge master John "Bluto" Blutarsky (played by John Belushi). They're given enough rope to hang themselves, but even then manage to get into comical misadventures on a road trip (where they arrange an assignation with a group of young ladies from Emily Dickinson University). Finally, they are thrown out of school, and, as a result, stripped of their student deferments (and, thus, eligible for the draft). They decide to commit one last, utterly senseless (and screamingly funny) slapstick act of rebellion, making a shambles of the university's annual homecoming parade, and, in the process, getting revenge on the dean, the Omegas, and everyone else who has ever gone against them. Animal House has a rating of 91% on rottentomatoes.com.
So ladies and gentlemen what are some of your favorite college themed films and what do you think of my list? Let me know in the comments section below and let your voice be heard.
Jonah Sparks
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