By: debbie lynn elias
I don’t know about you, but when I think back on my high school days, I don’t recall them being anything like the school in John Stalberg’s HIGH SCHOOL, and that’s probably a good thing, as I would have accomplished nothing but for laughing my way through my senior year. While reminding us all of the fun and foibles of our youth (and taking it to the extreme), with HIGH SCHOOL, Stalberg capitalizes on irreverent humor and social incorrectness to bring us the most Mind Numbingly Funny, Hilarious Ridiculum of the year.
Principal Leslie Gordon runs his school with an iron fist – and a stick up his own butt. Filled with pompous arrogance, he will not tolerate nonsense or shenanigans within his school, which causes a bit of an embarrassing situation for him when a spelling bee champion defending her title appears for the competition high as a kite and stoned out of her gourd. Horrors! It seems that drugs have infiltrated Gordon’s domain and they must be stopped.
Henry Burke is the man of the hour. On the verge of being class valedictorian and getting a full scholarship to MIT, he is a good boy. He doesn’t drink or do drugs. He doesn’t socialize or party. He has an above 4.0 GPA and is, to be honest, a nice geeky kid. On the flip side is his childhood best friend, Travis. Once inseparable pals, as they progressed through the educational system, they went their separate ways with Travis heading over to “the dark side.” Now, as high school winds down, the two reconnect and reminisce about the fun they had as kids, starting with a trip to their old tree house where Travis has stashed a joint. Wanting one moment of “coolness”, Henry imbibes of the cannabis and gets high for the first time in his life. Problem is while Henry and Travis are getting high, Principal Gordon is laying down the law thanks to his stoned speller – mandatory drug testing for every student in the school…tomorrow. And it gets worse. Anyone with drugs in their system will be immediately expelled.
Panicked and in the mental haze of being high, Henry doesn’t know what to do. Drugs in his system will cost him not only class valedictorian, but his scholarship, something his own geekified arch enemy, Sebastian Salem, will relish. Owning up to his involvement in Henry’s predicament, Travis has the solution – get the whole school high – because if everyone is high, Gordon won’t be able to distinguish one student from the other.
Hearing through the grapevine about Psycho Ed, the best and baddest drug dealer in town, Henry and Travis embark on mission impossible – get to Psycho Ed, steal his top notch, purified, A-grade contraband and do whatever good high schooler does, bake it into brownies for the school fundraiser to be sold in the morning before the drug testing.
The result? Madcap mayhem and hilarious hijinks that will have you laughing in the aisles.
Forgetting my instant bond with Cherry Hill, NJ native Matt Bush as we talked summer vacay down the Jersey Shore, he is ideal as Henry Burke. Likeable beyond likeable, Bush is the embodiment of Henry bringing a trusting naivete to Henry that just sells. You know this kid. You might have been this kid. Bush is perfection. “In high school, I certainly wasn’t the valedictorian. I worked hard but wasn’t that smart.” Although age 21 when Bush shot the film, HIGH SCHOOL, regressing into a 17 or 18 year old Henry wasn’t too difficult. “I skew younger. I look younger. It wasn’t necessarily me having to switch too many gears to get myself in that mindset.”
On the flip side is Sean Marquette’s Travis Breaux. Reminescent of Kirk Cameron’s Mike Seaver character from “Growing Pains”, Marquette is a great compliment to Bush. Also likeable, Marquette’s Travis is trying to be a bad ass bad boy but Marquette brings as grounding sensibility to the character that bodes well for creating a sense of loyalty and goodness deep down. Nicely played.
Michael Chiklis is beyond recognizable as he tackles the stick-up-his-butt pomposity of Principal Gordon. Accepting and embracing the script with Gordon being the butt of the jokes as the world goes on around him and he’s so full of himself that he doesn’t see what’s happening, the veteran Chiklis found the creation of Gordon to be a new experience for him. “Often you work on a character from the inside out, wh the person is, what drives them. But this was one of the rare cases where I worked from the outside in and created the outer guise of this character. It was so much fun for me. Once I put the wig on; and the glasses were big; and the posture…it created this person. Allowing the physicality of the character to speak to who he is, Chiklis’ Gordon appears an amalgamation of “Ferris Bueller’s” Jeffrey Jones’ Principal Rooney and “Van Wilder’s” Paul Gleason’s Professor McDoogle. Having said that, as good as the persona and storyline of Gordon is, there are times it goes too far into being almost an offensive caricature.
On the other hand, Colin Hanks and Yeardley Smith are pure comic delights! As Assistant Dean Ellis and Mrs. Unger, respectively, each morphs from buttoned up propriety into a “high as a kite” adult reliving their own youthful “memories” or wannabe memories of their own teenaged years, with the funniest being Hanks as Mr. Ellis. Simply priceless. Important touchstones for the audience, everyone, everywhere, has had teachers and admins like Mr. Ellis and Mrs. Unger, making them very relatable and embraceable. And be on the lookout for some unexpected cameos from Curtis Armstrong (Booger, the world’s greatest stoner in “Revenge of the Nerds”), Michael Vartan and Mykelti Williamson.
The real gem is Adrien Brody. I have no words for him as Psycho Ed but for these: Mindblowingly Awesome!! Describing Brody as “scary”, Bush elaborates. “He’s scary. His presence as Adrien Brody, Oscar winner, it’s intimidating. Amazing presence. But as Psycho Ed, now we’re dealing with a whole other entity. That’s scary.” A character and performance that we would never expect from Brody, according to Stalberg, after sending Brody the script to read, “we got a call the next day from his manager saying that [Brody] hurt his neck laughing from reading the script and that he wanted to get on the phone with me after a chiropractic session where they were putting his neck back.” Integral in the look and development of Psycho Ed with everything from hairstyles to full body tattoos to a pet frog whom Ed believes is his dead grandfather, Brody and Stalberg even incorporated jokes within each and every tattoo on Brody’s body.
With HIGH SCHOOL, John Stalberg, making his feature directorial debut, takes the elements of the well worn and beloved toker movie, “Dazed and Confused” to a new level and on a grander scale. Witten by Salberg and Erik Linthorst (with the latter flushing out the first draft over a pitcher of margaritas), the first word that comes to mind on not only seeing the film, but for the actors reading the script is “funny.” The characters are funny. It’s a funny premise. And the script takes many unexpected surprising turns that keep the film and audience on its toes. Written and played straight, but with some action elements and even suspenseful moments put into play, the film is cinematically colorful and layered. Keeping the pace fast and crisp thanks in large part to Gabriel Wrye’s lively editing, Stalberg has a visual flair that is incorporated into each character and the storyline. No stranger himself to filmmaking, Colin Hanks found Stalberg to know what he wanted, “was open to ideas; more important that anything had this knowledge of the camera and film…working with the DP…knowing how movies are properly made.” Most amazing to Hanks is that not only did Stalberg deliver this film, but he came in under budget.
Set during the last weeks of school in June, challenging for Stalberg was achieving that look given the film was shot in the fall in Michigan. “If you take off the anamorphic map on the film, there’s icicles and huge piles of snow. We had guys with WWII flame throwers melting snow, shoveling it. We had the fire department with hoses blasting snow off the roofs. I had to use visual effects and build the characters’ bodies in 3D to get rid some of the [cold air] vapor they were exhaling.” “I work really fast. I come from a visual background. I had all my stuff planned. When we get there, we try just to have fun and work really fast and keep everyone on their toes.”
According to Matt Bush, Stalberg was adamant that “[I] want to make a great stoner movie but I want to make a fantastic film. I want this to be cinematic.” Stalberg uses familiar protagonist-antagonist scenarios that we’ve seen time and again – (1) childhood friends, one is the best and brightest while the other is badly behaved and not the brightest, each goes their separate ways over the school years only to rediscover each other, and (2) student-teacher dynamic. And of course, the bulk of the hilarity of the film doesn’t come from the students getting high, it comes from the teachers.
Key to the success of these well-written characters is that “we had fun.” As opined by Bush, “I think that’s important because it translates. [Stalberg] was open and let us play around but at the same time, because he had such a unique vision, he knew when to reel us in and give us notes which is constructive. Constructively, it’s the best thing you can ask for.”
Shot at a high school that was built for $77 million, used for one year and closed due to the economy, for Bush, “It seemed fun to be able to shoot a high school movie and actually be in a real high school. We took over a teacher’s lounge, put tvs in there, a couch, ping pong tables. To be able to hang out in a teacher’s lounge – now that’s a high school fantasy.’
It’s “high time” for HIGH SCHOOL! Don’t graduate past the weekend without seeing the most hilarious high school hijinks ever!
Henry Burke – Matt Bush
Travis Breaux – Sean Marquette
Psycho Ed – Adrian Brody
Principal Leslie Gordon – Michael Chiklis
Assistant Dean Brandon Ellis – Colin Hanks
Directed by John Stalberg, Jr. Written by Stalberg and Erik Linthorst.
