'Fired Up'
(Nicholas D'Agosto, Eric Christian Olsen, Sarah Roemer, et al / PG-13 / Comedy)
Overview: Shawn (Nicholas D'Agosto) and Nick (Eric Christian Olsen) are top scorers on the Ford High School football team…both on and off the field. When they hatch a scheme to trade their footballs for pom poms and join the school's most beautiful girls at cheer camp, the new team members actually give the girls' historically awful cheer squad a chance at success.
Review: Seriously, an R-rating and this would have been a totally different, way better movie. In the '70s, and even more so in the '80s - the golden age of teen sex comedies, when you had movies like H.O.T.S. and Zapped! and all sorts of really excellent exploitation going on - the teens were actually allowed to have sex!
They didn't just tease you with euphemisms and wacky body-part-hiding slapstick. They "did it." They were 27-year-olds acting like high-school seniors but they used all the good R-rated words and they played Strip Monopoly and we liked it that way. They were funny because they were raunchy and dirty and sometimes disgusting.
But now everything has to be responsible and safe enough for my 12-year-old niece to watch and rely on actual witty dialogue for the laughs. And that doesn't happen nearly enough. It's not a great leap forward in human behavior; it's the de-evolution of comedy!