geekent’s stuff’n things

I was a latecomer to Strangers With Candy, despite my interest I never got around to watching (via renting or acquiring the dvds of) the show. I have read Wigfield, however, the book, based on the stage show performed by Stephen Colbert, Paul Dinello and Amy Sedaris, and I was entertained, so I knew I’d like it. In the past year or so, the Comedy Network was airing SWC on Sunday nights and I really liked it’s slow-burn, sardonic, character-centric sense of humour wherein Geri (Sedaris), a 40-something, recovering drug addict, bisexual, ex-con, has returned home to live with her comatose father and her new step-mom, as well as her half-brother, and is going back to finish high school, where the faculty, from the art teacher straight up to the principal are quite blindingly inept. Each episode would find Geri in some “After-School Special” style storyline, although heavily skewed by her age, her tendencies and experience, not to mention the teachers.

The film is a “reboot” of the TV series, the setup being exactly the same only the scale is .. well, not so much larger as it is shot in a film-aspect ratio and runs three times the length of a usual episode. We meet Geri just as she’s released from prison, returning home to find daddy in a coma and a new family in her house. The doctor tells Geri that if she straightens out her life by returning to school and making her father proud, he’ll come out of his coma. With thoughts of over-achievement dancing in her mind, Geri’s back in high-school, thrusting herself right back into the cultural mix which likely drove her to drugs and prison in the first place. Meanwhile the school board has threatened Principal Blackman with shutting down the school unless he can prove that there is some form of redeeming value to the school, that there’s any sign of a capacity to learn.

The core story focuses on a make-or-break Science Fair, which will achieve both Geri’s dreams of glory to snap her father out of his coma, and save Principal Blackman’s career. Science Teacher Mr. Noblet (Colbert) refuses to takes up the challenge, but when his lover, art teacher Mr. Jellineck (Dinello), sides with the science fair maven (Matthew Broderick) that Blackman hired as a ringer, Noblet takes charge, sort of.

It’s a standard teen comedy, only reconfigured to be a parody of a teen comedy by playing it’s absurd scenario as straight faced and dire as possible. Though some celebrity cameos (Broderick, Sarah Jessica Parker, Philip Seymore Hoffman and Allison Janney) add a hint of a bigger budget, in reality it feels almost exactly like the show, with the bulk of the same cast (Geri’s dad played by Dan Hedaya is the only role switch for the film) and Dinello’s serviceable, but unambitious directorial style.

While it’s by and large an amusing picture, with some inspired comedic moments, it’s not going to be everyone’s cup of tea, and I found it to be less entertaining, minute for minute than the tv show.