Admission Reviews

The idea of a Fey/Rudd romcom plays better in your head than this film actually does, which is the real surprise here. Somehow they disregarded the magic the film should've revolved around - and so what's left are threads, decent threads, that don't connect. Unsatisfying. Liked seeing Tomlin again.

Even though Tina Fey has a few witty lines, there is simply nothing here.

Entertaining. It was a rather complicated plot but they pulled it off without being contrived. Tina Fey is pretty good as a regular actress--just enough funny to be appealing, just enough regular to make the character believable. Paul Rudd is the perfect date movie, well, date. The movie itself is, I'm assuming, a rather realistic look at how admission to an Ivy League school works in 2013, which is frightening. That kids arrive for opening day of college in anything other than complete mental collapse is a miracle. The movie was also an interesting look at motherhood/fatherhood and people leaving their DNA strewn around without thought of the consequence. Only nit-pick--and isn't there always one?--is the mother (Lily Tomlin) who was GREAT, but her role as a self-absorbed a*h* of an ex-hippie mother is a disturbing trend in movies. They aren't ALL like that, although they might be the most interesting.

An Admission of guilty pleasure at times, Tina Fey's latest cinematic venture doesn't make the honor role but a solid 'C' gains it a letter of acceptance. When H'Wood usually focuses on higher education, it takes dead aim at the Valhallan extracurricular activity known as partying. Here, however, the material proves more Paper Chase than Animal House...and not in a stuffy manner either. Rather, Admission is more higher minded about higher education, even if it still checks off some formulaic boxes before commencement. The flick doesn't always juggle romantic comedy, workplace comedy, and family comedy with great ease either, but the leads' awesome chemistry deserves high honors.

In this PG-13-rated romantic comedy from director Paul Weitz (In Good Company), a straight-laced Princeton University admissions officer (Fey) makes a recruiting visit to an alternative high school overseen by her former college classmate (Rudd), who has surmised that a gifted yet very unconventional student might well be the son that she secretly gave up for adoption.

Truly, Tina Fey tends to get a pass from this reviewer. But boy, has she earned it. Even when her comedies don't generate a ludicrous amount of belly laughs (Baby Mama) or pride themselves on being a disposable but fun piece of popcorn (Date Night), her natural beauty, always spot-on performance and - in some cases - gift of prose betray a wit and wisdom for the H'Wood ages. Together with Paul Rudd, a long-underrated comic actor who's finally getting his due, it's the perfect setup for an often well-played - but not exactly uproarious - comedy.

Bottom line: Flirty Rock.

This film took me by surprise. I thought I wasn't gonna like it, especially hearing how critics didn't like the film. However, after watching the film, I was pleasantly surprised. The film is very entertaining. The film reminded me of movies like Smart People, Wonder Boys, and One True Thing.

Tina Fey shines in this film. I would love to see her do a straight out drama. She has a great on screen chemistry with Paul Rudd. Lily Tomlin steals the film as Fey's mother. Gloria Reuben and Wallace Shawn are great in their supporting roles.

I definitely recommend this film.

Denied due to too many wandering plot points and an uninspired script. Paul Rudd rose above this movies' mediocrity but I get the impression he's not acting but just being Rudd in real life. Don't understand the love for Tina Fey - she is a better writer than actor. Lily Tomlin and Wallace Shawn were entertaining. Only LOL moment was the Bella Abzug tattoo on Tomlin's bicep.! (3-23-13)

Admission (2013) -- [4.5] -- Despite the intrinsic charm of both Tina Fey and Paul Rudd, this movie is neither funny nor romantic, and the stakes are never high enough to keep you from dozing off. The third act, in particular, forces you through maudlin, cloying maneuvers that are way beneath the talent involved. Lily Tomlin, as Fey's reclusive, anti-establishment mother, gives the movie all its best moments.

The film wasn't bad, but it wasn't good either. From the trailer, I thought it was gonna be a romantic comedy. However, it wasn't. It was more drama than comedy.

First, let me just say that Paul Rudd is lookin' real good in this movie. That said...the first half of this movie is awesome, the last half has almost no laughs or insight and is super slow and boring. Whomp whomp.

You wanna love a movie that stars Paul Rudd and Tina Fey, but Admission is not that movie. It's so light it practically evaporates. It has no kick to it and, unfortunately, director Paul Weitz (About a Boy) assembles a way pverqualified cast to bring this bore of a script to life. Fey is Portia Nathan, a Princeton admissions officer whose job is to choose only the best. Nothing gets past her, even though she's oblivious to the fact that Mark (Michael Sheen) the professor she's shacking up with, is cheating on her.

While on a tour of schools in New England Portia runs into John Pressman (Rudd), a teacher and former college classmate. He tells her his student Jeremiah Balakian (Nat Wolff), an autodidact with terrible grades, may be connected to her past. I'll reveal nothing but it's not hard to guess.

The rest of the movie comes down to whether Portia may bend the rules for this gifted kid, and will she get it on with John and reconcile with her estranged mother Susannah (Lilly Tomlin), and will she be able to replace retiring dean of admissions Clarence (Wallace Shawn)?

I never mustered up the strength to care. Admission is a waste of good talent, and a tepid adaptation of Jean Hanff Korelitz's novel, adapted with no sense of bit by Karen Croner. It's so rom-com-y it'd make you want to puke.

Wish this had been better - it has the stuff to be really challenging and edgy as a dramedy, but Weitz, when he goes for the comedic, just lets everyone down (and Michael Sheen, how do you fuck up that casting? Or just the writing). But I liked the meat of the dramatic bones, and Fey actually shows she could be great in a more dramatic role... except in here she still gets saddled with the same Liz Lemon bits as we've seen her do. And I love Liz Lemon, but any of her quirky/neurotic bits here are just too much after a while (sand for Lily Tomlin, who goes too quickly from being an over-the-top caricature of feminist aggression to a, uh, normal person I guess, which is fine cause she's good at it). So, in short, really good acting, some fantastic scenes set among the college admissions game of hard-knocks, but it's also uneven. Alexander Payne kept coming to mind as a director who could have turned this into something truly wonderful; in this case it's more like Election-lite.

It was okay. Thought the previews made it look great, when in actuality, it was just okay. Not terrible but not amazing either.

It's funny when it's funny (that's just how Tina Fey rolls) yet it's a slow paced movie that keeps you wondering when the next joke will happen because comedy is what you expect from Tina & Paul. I'd say, wait for the dvd. In theatres today.

It goes without saying that Tina Fey is a national treasure. Her stunningly sharp wit has been a mainstay of American pop culture for more than ten years now thanks to her show-salvaging work on Saturday Night Live and the quirky bliss of 30 Rock. We've all laughed at her work at some point or another, whether its from her spot-on turn as Sarah Palin or from the pages of her bestselling book Bossypants, but the key factor to probably 98% of her success though is that she herself wrote whatever it was that made us laugh.

Tina Fey is a superb writer. And because she is a superb writer she doesn't necessarily have to be a great actress to deliver that writing. I won't argue that comedic timing isn't crucial to deliver even the most sharply written piece of comedy - because it is! In addition to being a great writer Fey has some of the most impressive timing skills in the business and when she's playing a version of herself or Liz Lemon they never let her down. But a rarity in her career thus far has been Fey playing a character from another writer. Even more rare is Fey playing a character from another writer who is...dull.

Enter: Admission written by Karen Croner.

Who is Karen Croner, you might ask? Good question. Karen Croner's last credited screenplay was 1998's One True Thing, which garnered Meryl Streep one of her many Oscar nominations but failed to make much of an impression on anyone beyond that. Before that, Kroner cranked out a few TV movie scripts and that's about it.

I'm sure Ms. Kroner is a charming person and it is not my intent to demean her career thus far, but I mention all of this to kind of set the stage for what to expect with Admission. When we see Tina Fey we tend to expect brutally smart writing to come pouring out of her and now that I know what it's like when that doesn't happen, I really don't want to see it again.

In Admission, Fey plays Portia Nathan, a dedicated admissions officer for Princeton University. She has been on the job for 16 years, is a prime candidate to replace her boss (Wallace Shawn), and lives happily unmarried with her English professor lover, Mark (Michael Sheen). Portia is a very content character. She isn't particularly anal retentive, neurotic, or passionate. She just kind of gets along with seemingly little worry. Naturally though, (for the sake of drama) this doesn't last long.

Portia soon finds herself dumped by Mark in favor of a pregnant Virginia Woolf scholar and learns that a high school student who she meets on a scouting trip might be her son. The script goes to extreme lengths in the beginning to show that she really doesn't care for children only to reveal that she once gave birth to one and gave it up for adoption! How rich.

The connection between Portia and her alleged son, Jeremiah (Nat Wolff), is made by John (Paul Rudd), a teacher at a progressive country school who dated Portia's roommate in college and remembers said girlfriend lending her car to Portia at a specific time on Valentine's Day to drive to the hospital to give birth. After seeing the time and date of Jeremiah's birth on his birth certificate he assumes it must be Portia who works at Princeton where Jeremiah would just happen to like to go to school.

Sound pretty thin? It is. I won't wade into spoiler territory here to discuss the extreme implausibilities of this connection and the glaringly stupid ways some of them are explained away, but the whole film is built on this extremely shaky premise and that should probably tell you enough whether to see it or not.

From that revelation the film becomes a quest for Portia to help the incredibly smart Jeremiah get into Princeton without compromising her morals and then deciding if she should reveal to him that she is his mother. In a nutshell: lives are changed, lessons are learned, and almost everyone walks away smiling. But you already knew that though, didn't you?

You may have also surmised by this point that the whole premise here doesn't sound all that comical. Again, you would be correct. I went into this after only seeing a single trailer for it a couple months ago and while I could really only remember that it was about college admissions and that I laughed a couple of times, I had just assumed that a movie starring Fey, Rudd, and Lily Tomlin (more on her in a minute) was going to be laugh out loud funny or at least trying to be. Boy, was I wrong. In fact, I would struggle to even classify this as a comedy. At best it is a dramedy, but even for that, the laughs are few and far between.

Admission seems to be a movie that was written and directed to be a light, family drama, but cast and promoted to be a romantic comedy, which it really isn't. At all. You better believe that Portia hooks up with Rudd's character and that they end up together, but this relationship is truly a subplot that seems to happen just because they're two attractive single people who happen to be in the same movie. Their courtship isn't particularly funny or even interesting beyond the fact that they're both reasonably pleasant people who you'd like to see happy.

What makes this all really disappointing though is the fact that I think you could make a movie about a straight-laced woman charged with admitting students to one of America's most prestigious universities and make it hilarious. One could easily satirize the bizarre lengths that high school students and their parents go to in order to look good on a transcript. Hell, they could have also just made Portia not so straight-laced. Truly great comedies include a character or two that clash with the so-called normal world around them for comedic effect, but Admission is almost completely devoid of that. It's like everyone is playing "the straight man" without a "funny man" to react to.

The closest thing the film gets to a "funny man" is Lily Tomlin as Portia's mother who lives out in the woods, is a radical feminist, and isn't shy about her sex life in front of her daughter. She is the typical "zany mom" that you've seen in countless other films before and almost nothing about her is funny despite the immense talents of Tomlin at the filmmakers' disposal.

Is Admission a painful film to watch? No. It's just painfully mediocre. It's one of those films built by Hollywood to offend no one. They likely succeeded on that front but I'd be very shocked to see anyone walk away truly loving this film. It has its chuckles, some feel-good moments, and Paul Rudd continues to look better and better with age but it is all so pedestrian and lackluster that you wonder if anyone was awake while they were filming it. I, for one, struggled to stay awake while I was watching it so their desire to nap is completely understandable.

So Tina, if you're reading this: please, please, PLEASE write your own script next time. We'll all be better off for it.

Grade: C-

I really love Tina Fey and Paul Rudd, really. But I have serious issues with the morality of this movie (I know, ridiculous, coming from me), where Fey's character performs a whole ton of unethical acts in the name of love/motherhood, and we're supposed to support her decisions. It just doesn't work for me.

Meh. If a good rom-com is a cold Dr. Pepper in the can, this is one that is warm and has been left out for a few hours. That's seriously how I felt about it. I didn't like it, but I didn't really hate it either. It just wasn't very funny.

Good chemistry makes for a good way to spend the afternoon at the movies.