ANGUS
A film review by Andrew Hicks
Copyright 1996 Andrew Hicks / Fatboy Productions
**1/2 (out of four)
This seemed like the movie for me. Socially-awkward fat kid goes through high school rejected by his peers and harboring crushes for beautiful girls who won't talk to him. Unfortunately, even though the theme was right out of my darkest high school memories, the movie itself wasn't quite executed properly. If ANGUS had been presented as a one-hour after school special, it would have worked, but as a feature-length film there's not enough substance. You have to get by the unsightly padding to find any value, which is actually a metaphor for what the movie's about.
Angus (Charlie Talbert), doomed with the self-fulfilling prophecy of being named after a cow, is going through his freshman year as a tormented outsider, "a fat kid who's good at science and football." That's where the Angus character and I fundamentally differ. The movie could have been called ANDREW except that I hate sports and science, although I could identify with the scene in the beginning of the movie where Angus is responsible for the jock quarterback's winning touchdown but his contribution is ignored as the jock is surrounded by screaming fans. It reminded me of the days I would write plays for the popular kids to act out, after which they would conveniently forget to acknowledge my participation.
The movie could have also been called ANGST, because it once again delves into the popular topic of people being ostracized for proudly being different. In Angus' case, a group of brainless jocks who are threatened by his nonconformity (and don't we all know the type?) arrange to have him elected Homecoming King so they can humiliate him at the dance. Angus, meanwhile, has to handle the decision of whether to skip the dance or take the opportunity of dancing with Melissa, the Homecoming Queen, on whom he's had a lifelong crush. The part of Melissa is played by Ariana Richards, the girl who had to escape dinosaurs in JURASSIC PARK. Here, she's chased after by someone slightly larger... Hey, I'm _allowed_ to make fat jokes. I'm in the club.
There are several key people in Angus' life rooting him on -- his truck-driving mother (Kathy Bates), grandfather (George C. Scott) and best friend. They offer means of support in their own weird ways, including a mother-son Hagen Daaz binge (permanently answering the question of who taught the kid to pig out) and a videotaped dance with a blow-up doll... I identified with a lot of things in this movie, but just so you know, the blow-up doll thing held no personal meaning for me.
Ultimately, the film is predictable and offers only a few laughs, some of which come at the expense of scenes which were supposed to be taken seriously, like the climactic scene at the dance, where Angus delivers an impromptu speech to the student body about how it's okay to be different and the oppressive jocks are actually afraid of us for not playing life by their rules or giving a damn about what they think of us. All this is true, of course, but it sounds unnecessarily absurd coming in the middle of a school dance. At least in REVENGE OF THE NERDS, they played this kind of thing for laughs, but in ANGUS we're supposed to seriously think a teenage crowd would applaud such a speech. Uh-uh. Take it from me, an asskicking would occur after a speech like that.
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