"Orange County"

Well, as teen comedies go, it's not as cheap, loud and sleazy as it might have been.

By Stephanie Zacharek

Jan 11, 2002 | "Orange County" is a feebly pleasant surprise: It's not as cheap, loud and sleazy as it might have been, but it's also too eagerly well-meaning and indistinct to really stick. It's a piece of mildly entertaining, inoffensive fluff that drifts aimlessly for 90 minutes before lodging in the cracks of that ever-growing category: unembarrassing but unmemorable little pictures that, had their directors and writers fought to take a few extra chances, might have been something close to wonderful.

Colin Hanks plays a suburban California surfer kid whose life is changed when he finds an ostensibly Salinger-esque novel half-buried in the sand. He falls in love with it, rereading it 52 times; its author, a fellow named Marcus Skinner, becomes his hero. Hanks decides he wants more than anything to get into Stanford University and become a writer himself.

By cutting out surfing and dedicating himself to his schoolwork, he earns terrific grades. There's nothing standing between him and Stanford -- other than a careless guidance counselor with a split personality (Lily Tomlin), his essentially decent but unhappy wino mom (Catherine O'Hara), and his perpetual-parolee brother (Jack Black), who empties the families' over-the-counter analgesic bottles and refills them with super-duper painkillers and the like.

Needless to say, his application is rejected, and the rest of "Orange County" recounts his odyssey as he tries to break out of his bland-but-moneyed suburban existence and enter the glittering (as he sees it) world of academia. There's a gentle, sweet spirit at the heart of "Orange County" -- it's so sweet that you get the sense that the director, Jake Kasdan ("Zero Effect"), knew he had to rough it up, and he does so in the most obvious ways.

That's how we get Dana Ivey, as the dowager wife of a rich guy who just might be able to get poor Hanks into Stanford, accidentally raising a urine sample to her lips, thinking it's white wine. It's also how we get a shot of Black vomiting enthusiastically (he's perpetually recovering from his various recreational activities) onto the pages of a short story that Hanks has proudly shown him.

"Orange County" was written by Mike White (who also wrote and starred in last year's "Chuck & Buck"), and its tone is sometimes pleasingly off-center. When Hanks reveals to his rich, distracted dad (John Lithgow), who has long been divorced from Hanks' mom, that he wants to become a writer, his father snorts incredulously and says, "What do you want to become a writer for? You're not oppressed! You're not gay!"

The picture is set up so that Hanks is its most likable and most responsible character: You can't help rooting for things to go right for him, especially since those around him are doing their darnedest, inadvertently or otherwise, to muck up his plans.

Next Page: Too many cracks and flaws -- and puke jokes

• View blog reactions