I Love You, Beth Cooper

Rehashing teen films is risky business

July 10, 2009|Ty Burr, Globe Staff

“I Love You, Beth Cooper’’ is unusual in that it’s the rare teen stu-com - shorthand for “stupid comedy,’’ a proud lineage that goes back to “Porky’s’’ and beyond - that’s based on a novel. On the other hand, maybe not so unusual, since author Larry Doyle has written for “The Simpsons’’ and “Beavis and Butt-Head’’ (and The New Yorker, OK?), and he comes clean about his love for all things John Hughes in the quotes that open each chapter. So what we have here is a cross-media repurposing of teen movies mulched through Doyle’s head onto the page, then remulched by him and director Chris Columbus back onto film.

The results, not surprisingly, taste like mulch. “I Love You, Beth Cooper’’ is one of those long-graduation-night-of-the-teenage-soul comedy dramas (“American Graffiti’’ and “Dazed and Confused’’ remain the platinum standard) in which geek woos golden girl and everything goes fantastically wrong before it goes outrageously right. There’s no denying the movie starts out, as in the book, with a bang: High school senior Denis Cooverman (played by 28-year-old Paul Rust) decides to use his valedictorian speech to go out in a blaze of glory, proclaiming his undying love for head cheerleader Beth Cooper (Hayden Panettiere).

In the same speech, he namechecks and pop-analyzes the school’s bully (Josh Emerson), psycho military freak (Shawn Roberts), and bitchy queen bee (Marie Avgeropoulos) before outing his own best friend Rich (Jack T. Carpenter). Rust, who’s quite good behind his enormous beak of a nose, expertly conveys the sweat-flop thrill of burning all your bridges in public - the scene’s propulsively funny because you have no idea where it’s going to end.

It does end, though, and takes the rest of the movie with it. Beth, contemptuously amused, turns up at Denis’s house with her two BFF minions, ditzy Treece (Lauren Storm) and dead-eyed Cammie(Lauren London). Shortly following is her boyfriend Kevin, the aforementioned psycho G.I. Joe, who with his own steroid toadies chases Denis, Rich, and the girls throughout the suburban evening. There are stops at the liquor store, the girls’ locker room, the queen bee’s party, various unlit back roads. A Hummer gets driven through a picture window. A raccoon is made to look like a feral killer through the use of computer-generated fangs. Yes, again.