CAN’T HARDLY WAIT
US, 1998, 100 minutes, Colour.
Jennifer Love Hewitt, Ethan Embry, Charlie Korsmo, Lauren Ambrose, Peter Facinelli, Seth Green, Jerry O' Connell, Breckin Meyer, Selma Blair, Jason Segal, Sean Patrick Thomas, Donald Faison.
Directed by Harry Elfont, Deborah Kaplan.
Maybe the bad grammar of the title is a bit offputting – but it may be the kind of grammar used by quite a number of the characters in this high school comedy romance.
This film comes at the end of the 1990s when this kind of comedy was beginning to become more prevalent – 1998 was the year of American Pie. This film is quite restrained in comparison with American Pie. but, many adults may find it very difficult to identify with the characters – except, as people grow older, they might have memories of this time in their life.
It is also interesting to see so many of the performers who developed as actors in a variety of films, here appearing either in guest roles or in supporting student roles, Jerry O’ Connell, Selma Blair, Jason Segal. By this time, Jennifer Love Hewitt was a more prominent name as was Seth Green (especially with his role in the Austin Powers films) and Ethan Embry had been a child actor.
The film takes place over one evening, at an end of year party where everybody turns up. The sympathetic central character is Preston, played by a wide-eyed Ethan Embry, about to go away to college, infatuated with Amanda, Jennifer Love Hewitt, for the previous four years while she has been the date for the local jock, Mike, Peter Facinelli. Mike has broken up with Amanda and she is coming to her senses realising that the only meaning in her life was as his girlfriend and now she wants to assert herself but, at the party, finds it very difficult, especially when some of the boys knowing she is available try to impose on her.
Mike is presented as an unsympathetic jock, macho with his entourage, but finally upset in being humiliated by Amanda not wanting him back. He is the intended target of William, a nerd and talk who also has disciples and a plan to humiliate Mike and photograph him in compromising situations. This backfires pretty well as Mike is rather sympathetic to William who had drunk too much and wins over everyone by a live performance at the microphone and his two friends eventually photograph Mike and William with some embarrassment.
The other subplot involves Denise, Lauren Ambrose, Preston’s best friend who does not want to go to the party, encounters Kenny, Seth Green, who is something of an yobbo, again with disciples, he deceives himself about his being attractive finds himself locked in the bathroom with Denise whom he has known for many years – and theirs is the only actual sexual encounter.
Preston has written a letter to Amanda four years earlier but has not delivered it, throws it away but by a series of accidents, somebody rummaging through the rubbish, the letter attached to a shoe, it finally ending up in a crackers bowl with Amanda finding it but not knowing who Preston is attacks him as one of the many others who are accosting her.
Preston goes off to the station, Amanda looks in the yearbook to see who he is, finds him at the railway station – and he delay seven hours before he goes off to college.
Information is given about the future of each of these characters.
Maybe filmgoers of the same age as the characters will enjoy it and see themselves in one of the characters (not in all of them) – though as time goes on, it may seem a little outdated.
