Old School

Old School (2003) is about three men in their thirties who rent a house at the edge of a college campus and start a fraternity. The premise is simple: adult life has broken each of them in a different way and they are trying to go back. Todd Phillips came to it from documentary. His 1998 film Frat House, about real fraternities, won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance. That is what brought him to Ivan Reitman's attention. After Road Trip succeeded, Phillips and screenwriter Scot Armstrong pitched Reitman this idea. Armstrong put it this way: a strange brotherhood forms while you are finding yourself at college, and it was funny to imagine old people doing it. The film is treated as the forerunner of the group later called the Frat Pack, with Will Ferrell, Vince Vaughn and Luke Wilson together here. It cost 24 million dollars and made 87.1 million worldwide. Critics split; Roger Ebert gave it one star while singling out Ferrell. It runs 92 minutes. Good for: American comedy of the 2000s, Will Ferrell, and campus humour. Less good for: the comedy runs mostly on drink, nudity and humiliation. The women are set dressing. The scenes are loosely joined, and between the set pieces the film drops badly.