Post Grad

Post Grad is a disposable, mostly harmless film that is much more suited to the small screen that the big one, and I wonder how it ever got released as such. It tells the story of Ryden Malby (Alexis Bledel), who has just graduated from college and has a specific plan to get a job with a particular publishing company. She's so sure of herself that she writes a bad check for a deposit on a great apartment just a few blocks away from her supposed office. Of course, she doesn't get it, and much of the rest of the movie details her attempts to get a job and deal with her eccentric family.

We know her family is eccentric because they have garden gnomes in the yard. The grandma (Carol Burnett) buys herself a fuchsia coffin, her younger brother likes to lick his classmate's heads, and her dad (Michael Keaton) has lots of get-rich-quick schemes, like selling belt buckles on the Internet. All of this is obvious and has no particular rooting in real life--it's simply goofiness as defined by a not-great script by Kelly Fremon.

The director is Vicky Jenson, who specializes in animation (she co-directed the first Shrek), and she shows no special flair for live-action as shown here. The most interesting things about Post Grad are what it says about certain aspects of modern life. For one thing, it is set specifically in 2009 (a large banner at Bledel's graduation tells us that), but there is no mention of the economic crisis of that year (which is still going on). Bledel's struggle to find a job is viewed as a character flaw rather than a condition of the economy, and it's especially cruel given that she wants to work in publishing, an especially hard-hit industry. She also spends a lot of time looking at classified ads in newspapers for a job, an activity that is largely obsolete. Since the film opens with the character making a video for a social-networking site, I would hope she's heard of Monster and CareerBuilder.

Secondly (and I'm giving away the ending here) I was surprised after all this that the character, after getting her dream job and excelling at it, gives it up to follow a boy across the country. She is then congratulated for this by her father. This film is not exactly a feminist manifesto. I assume that the character is still pounding the pavement looking for a publishing job in New York, because believe me, there aren't any. I've looked.