The Good

A fun movie that doesn't take up too much of your time.

The Bad

One pretty much knows everything that is going to happen in this one.Denis Cloverman (Paul Rust) has been in love with Beth Cooper (Hayden Panettiere) forever. He picks his high school graduation, when he is giving his valedictorian speech, to proclaim his love. Nobody really knows how to take this but Denis sees his life upended when Beth and her gal pals show up at his house to take him out for a night on the town. What ensues is a cross between Mean Girls, Midnight Madness and all of those other movies in which characters from opposite ends of the spectrum somehow find one another.

It isn't that I Love You, Beth Cooper movie. It tries and ultimately seems to have its heart in the right place. The problem is that it isn't anything that users haven't already seen. We know that Beth and Denis are going to find some form of common ground. We know that they are going to have some zany experiences. We also know that this film is going to try really hard to be relevant to today's youth.

In the end I Love You, Beth Cooper is just an average love story, which makes for an average Blue Laser Beam experience. Sorry, Fox.

Features

Deleted Scenes

If you really liked this movie a lot then I would suggest screening these. One can see moments that aren't in the film which, I guess, are supposed to be funny. The ultimate problem with I Love You, Beth Cooper is that it wants to have a noble premise but at the end of the day it doesn't know what sort of movie it wants to be. Is it an ode to teen love or a raunchy comedy with a heart? These deleted scenes suggest a desire to be in Apatow-Land but it doesn't look like this film is able to pull that off no matter how much trimming was done.

Alternate Ending

The Mush is reticent to really talk about this alternate ending because he knows that this movie does have fans and they haven't seen it. That said, he does recommend people who saw and liked this movie to check this out. While I don't know if this little supplemental feature is a game changer, it is worth watching if you have labored through seeing this movie.

Video

Widescreen - 1.85:1. AVC @ 33 MBPS. 50GB Layer. This movie looked decent on DVD. How in the world did Chris Columbus go from directing the Harry Potter movies to this? He and Director of Photography Phil Abraham seem to have done their level best to create a movie that is in no way different looking than any other teen comedy. In fact, there are aspects of this movie that seem like it might have been made with a grant from the studio. The DVD transfer is sharp and the images are always crisp but everything about how this movie is presented has a seen it before feel. While I never felt like this Blu-ray experience really pulled me into this movie, I think it could be worthwhile to own for a Blu-ray users with teenagers.

Audio

Dolby Digital. English 5.1 DTS HD Master Audio. Spanish, Portuguese and French 5.1 Dolby Digital. English SDH. Subtitled in Spanish, Portuguese and Cantonese. The audio on this movie is there. Simply, that is the best way that I can put it. It doesn't get in the way of the action or comic moments on screen, and for the most part it mainly seems to underscore what we are seeing on the screen. The audio has a big hand in driving home a lot of the action and because of that this movie cooks along at 102 minutes.

Package

Hayden Panettiere and Paul Rust are featured on this front cover which looks like something out of a looseleaf notebook. The back cover gives us four images from this film, a description, Special Features listing, technical specs and a cast list. Nothing too amazing about that!

Final Word

Why do I get the feeling that Hayden Panettiere has lost some luster?

Could it have something to do with making movies that do no box office business? This wouldn't be a problem if she was at least doing interesting movies, but when you do movies like I Love You, Beth Cooper it's hard for it to be looked at as a respectable failure.

Could it be that her TV show Heroes had one great opening season, it couldn't answer any questions in any of the others, and ultimately will relegate the show to forgettablesville?

Yes (In this humble reviewer's opinion).

Lastly, could it have something to do with getting a tattoo committed to her carcass forever and having it spelled wrong? I think when agents, managers and other executives are trying to position their client as being not just another pretty face, events like this are not doing much to bolster that claim.

What does this have to do with my review of I Love You, Beth Cooper? I think that this movie had a solid premise. The acting isn't bad and the director's execution is there. There just isn't anything else about this movie that helps it rise above the teen movie genre.