What Went Wrong With American Pie

American Pie is a movie that released in 1999 about four friends, and Stiffler, that are in their senior year of high school. As is normal with these types of teenage movies they are all virgins and they set up a goal to have sex with someone by the end of their senior year.

 

Several different hijinks occur throughout the movie. Our titular character, Jim Levenstein, for example violates a poor apple pie, has a model girl from Europe somewhere force him to striptease, and then ultimately, he ejaculates much too early. All of these are rather hilarious and rather awkward moments between him, his friends, and family.

He has three other close friends, Kevin Myers, Chris Ostreicher, and of course Paul Finch. Each of these have their own challenges throughout the movie, from having to deal with being unable to use the school bathroom, having their entire playbook out of an actual Shakespeare written by Americans book, and of course having an unwilling girlfriend.

 

Those were not in order of the problems and people, but what should be noted, and why I am writing this, is that all of them, even Jim learns that there is more to life than sex. Kevin, who has had a girlfriend for a while and has not yet had sex, learns that there is more than just one goal at the end of the relationship.

 

Ostreicher, or Nova because of his Casanova stylings, does fall in love with the girl he is courting. Learning what to prioritise in his life and you basically get all the rest. Paul Finch on the other hand learns to overcome some of his anxiety, and where Stiffler’s mom hides away during parties.

 

The point of it all is that throughout the movie you are led to believe these three will only want sex and nothing else. But we learn that they are more than that, they do come to care for the girls they like, except Jim who ends up with Michelle, and ultimately when they no longer have just sex as a goal, they get their reward.

 

What should be noted is that from the outset of the movie all three are awkward around girls not because they are specifically rude, but because they have respect-ish. Yes, they want nothing but sex from them, but at no point do they actually use foul language to objectify the girls in their lives.

 

This is where we talk about the fifth person in their group, Steve Stiffler. He does do that; he does objectify every single girl he knows down to his own base urges. And throughout the movie it is made clear that our main four are annoyed and kind of disgusted by his behaviour.

 

Which is fair, since even in the three movies that follow, American Pie 2, American Pie The Wedding, and American Pie The Reunion, they make it clear they try to distance themselves from him. But in the last movie he does also ultimately seem to have realized his own behaviour and finally grow into more than just the, well, asshole that he usually is.

 

These four movies, despite now being well over a decade or two decades old, have held up. As I have grown older I understand some of the characters more and I can also see how childish some of them are. Never while watching them though, did I think they were being crude, disrespectful, or just overall unpleasant.

 

Even Stiffler, who around any woman is thoroughly an unpleasant being, has his moments where he is genuinely hilarious. Him realizing in AP: Reunion that most of the lacrosse team was gay and him being so homophobic at the realization was genuinely something that made it funny. But, again, by the end of the movie he accepts his friends for what they are and even agrees to become a party planner for them.

 

The other four main characters grow and are affected by their lives, from Jim realising that as hot as Nadia (Shannon FREAKEN Elizabeth) is, he is not in love with her. As we know, he marries Michelle, the band geek so to say, and in Reunion we learn of their children as well. Finch, initially jumps from major to major in college, overcome his haughtiness by the end of Reunion too.

 

Because no matter what, he was uppity for no reason whatsoever, and by the end of the last movie he accepts that what he is and what he pretends to be are not the same. And together with his lady-love they start working on realizing their dreams. Something that I do appreciate since they are in their 30s by this point and are restarting their lives to achieve what they want.

 

Kevin has the weirdest journey, from being in love with his high school sweetheart, to apparently not having any romantic options in The Wedding, and then being married in Reunion. Ultimately, his journey is one of growing to learn how to love and then accepting how once you love someone you may never really stop loving them. Assuming of course the breakup wasn’t a disaster or for other more terrifying reasons.

 

The last person we look at is Nova. He goes from being almost like Stiffler, to loving his girlfriend despite other temptations, to being missing, and then randomly being a celebrity in Reunion. He changes the most in the last movie, learning what he was missing in life and all that.

 

But again, throughout these journeys we understand the characters, and even to some extent the ways they get themselves into seemingly impossible situations. At no point do we feel they are truly assholes or that they mock each other for their feelings. In fact, if you watch these four American Pie movies, you may very well learn how to accept your friends feelings and how to be supportive of them.

 

These four movies are good teen movies, even though after the first one, they are more about young adult relationships.

 

Not really teen movies.

 

The Movies That Have No Idea What They Are

 

Movies under the name American Pie Presents: Naked Mile, Band Camp, Beta House, The Books Of Love, and whatever the newest one is are simply awful.

 

The best way I can describe these movies is if Steve Stiffler was asked to make a movie. That is it, that is how these movies are made and they are simply awful presentations of any type of teen life.

 

None of them have actual stories beyond main character is virgin and needs to have sex. What’s worse, every single male character in these movies have the vocabulary of a sailor that has been marooned at sea for years. I recently tried rewatching these and I swear every single sentence from every single character, even the women, had at least one swear word in it.

 

Like the writers couldn’t think of something smart to actually say so they just sublimated jokes for swear words. It is honestly sad and a lot of confusing. Because these movies share the same universe as the original movies, which means that they should theoretically have some better similarities.

 

Instead, we are stuck with one dimensional characters that are either completely flat throughout the movie, or a main character that does a full character change in the last minutes of the movie. In The Naked Mile, the main character is a Stiffler, Erik. And on paper he seems to have a good character development through the story.

 

But I would argue that he makes a change in his entire behaviour at the last minute for seemingly no reason other than he wants to have sex with his girlfriend. Further, his girlfriend, who according to everything we know loves him, doesn’t share any sexual anything.

 

Her entire character is written like I imagine a men in the US think all girls are before they have sex, with her two friends being what I really hope no one thinks girls are that are sexually active. Further, they keep swearing, what is with all the swearing?

 

But all of this could have made for a good movie, if the two supporting characters, Erik’s best friends, were good. But they aren’t, they are as follows. Jock who is popular with girls and sleeps with everything that he can, and not jock who thinks he is popular with girls and uses one liners.

 

That is it. The movie starts and ends with them there, except that according to the writers of this movie, college girls find one liners cute, funny, and attractive. Which, what? Anyway, they never change or learn anything and pretty much just has a good time. Which, sure, all the power to them, but along the way they also torture their friend for being a virgin.

 

Like, from what I could tell in this movie alone Erik isn’t as much bothered by his virginity as he is being bullied by his friends for being a virgin. The opening of the movie not-withstanding. But this is also where the treatment of woman gets so bad that it is genuinely astonishing these movies were ever made.

 

Short of Revenge of the Nerds’ one very problematic scene, the American Pie Presents movies have the worst treatment of women imaginable. Yes, that does include the newest movie where the entire main cast is a bunch of high school aged girls. With one that works in a sex shop, which is illegal for under 18s as far as I am aware, thought she may be older, I am not watching this to figure it out.

 

Anyway, in ever American Pie Presents movie most woman either flirt with the main characters, or straight up punch, slap, or hit them for flirting with them. The women in these movies are nothing but trophies that are to be used, not won, just used.

 

Yes, this does include American Pie Presents Beta House and Erik and his new girlfriend. Somehow, they don’t make a good connection or aren’t having a really good time until the end of the movie, where they have sex. Same with Kuz, the only best friend remaining for Erik, this man literally has nightmares of his girlfriend being a guy because she doesn’t yet want to have sex with him.

 

It astonishes me that in no making of these movies did none of the actors, actresses, producers, directors, or writers pick up on the amount of things that these movies lack. The characters have very little interaction beyond just a quick joke, with very few of them focusing on any plot that drives them or what their friends need.

 

The Big Picture

Overall, the movies are shallow and the more they have made the worse it has gotten. Like the creators of these movies somehow lost the ability to understand what made the actual American Pie movies so good. Which is that the characters aren’t just crude, loud, and overall unpleasant people that are trying get into bed with the next person.

 

No, the movies are about learning that there is more than sex with the opposite sex. Which is what makes American Pie the Book of Love such a travesty too. In the first movie we learn that you only earn the right to get to book of love when you specifically are in love with your girlfriend.

 

It is also not a book about where to get cheap sex or how to get your girlfriend to “give in”, instead it is a book to help guys learn how to have good sex. How to pleasure their girl properly using all the ways that are talked about in the book.

 

This just shows how much the writers desecrate the original movies too, as the movie about the book seem to have no other purpose than to imitate while destroying. The characters in this movie have no other purpose than to not learn anything while randomly falling into bed with the girls around them.

 

Not only that, but they are also each presented as social outcasts pining after the most popular girls, only to get with these girls at the end of the movie. Which, again, is not at all the point of the original movies, which had our group of friends being a strong close-knit group but were in no way socially ostracised.

 

What happens in the movies after this one I have very little to no actual idea, as I had outgrown my want to watch a movie with crude language and naked woman, with nothing else in them. Because that is also something that seems to increase dramatically in these movies, to the point of being more like a soft-core porn movie than anything else.

 

American Pie movies always have some nudity in them, but these are usually played specifically for laughs, instead of just for the sake of showing a naked woman. Which is to say, that the men in the movie are just as naked in them as the woman, with poor Jim having a few scenes that I wish to have scrubbed from my memory for eternity.

 

However, in American Pie Presents movies it seems like the opposite, with naked woman being thrown around for no other reason than they are naked. Which circles back to how these movies feel like the character Steve Stiffler wrote them, I must believe this in some way, for there is no other reason that scenes take place in showers with naked girls all around.

 

Or how in Beta House one entire competition consists of just having a row of woman being un-brad. No idea if that is a word by the way, just going to assume it is. In later instalments we get scenes of girls being naked for no reason too, and yes, we have to call them girls now.

 

Why? Because it switches from these being girls in college or grown woman in a house, to high school teen movies. What this means is that the actress on screen might be in her twenties, but the girl in the movie is portrayed as being 16, 17, or just having turned 18.

 

Which in practice makes anyone that thinks for more than a few seconds of what is happening, feel disgusted. In American Pie The Naked Mile we are taken to a high school girls locker room. And the scene opens with a girl walking out of the shower fully nude, throwing a towel around her.

 

Yes, the actress is above age, but in the world of the movie this becomes increasingly disturbing. And not something that you would expect from a movie made in freaken 2006. You would have hoped that by then these kinds of issues would have been addressed.

 

Then again, knowing the crowd that probably made this movie, they saw these issues as challenges to overcome instead of the issue that it is. As seen by Steve Stiffler in American Pie Reunion, as a man above 30, pining after literal high school girls that have just turned 18.

 

Now, I am no idiot, these girls are hot, after all, that’s why the actresses are chosen. But it does make the movie feel much more insidious when you consider the overall message that is being sent, or the lack of one being sent.

 

Probably the overall reason why these movies are seemingly so bad for me is because I am far and away no longer a teenager. Instead, I am a full-grown man, and seeing these kinds of behaviour seems like a tedious annoyance. With characters on screen being much more idiotic than I originally thought.

 

But this brings the question, why can I still enjoy the original four American Pie movies, which I only watched when I turned 22. But the American Pie Presents movies are movies that I always felt were stupid, boring, and just crude. Despite watching those when I was 18?