"Oh no... there are ADULTS up there!"<\/p><\/div>\n

When you look at the cast of an ensemble teen movie, it\u2019s rare that everybody has what would be called a really successful career. We\u2019ve all seen Jason Biggs fuck a pie, which is a tough thing to forget when you\u2019re throwing out casting ideas. Ethan Embry\u2019s career of playing a likeable young man disappeared with his hair. But (good, or at least watchable) ensemble teen movies tend to have a pretty high success rate for their supporting actors. 10 Things I Hate About You featured Heath Ledger, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, and David Krumholtz. Like I said before, half of the cast of Six Feet Under (and Seth Green!) are in Can\u2019t Hardly Wait. Even Not Another Teen Movie features Chris Evans and the perpetually underappreciated Eric Christian Olsen. What\u2019s Your Number? just sort of combines all of the people we should have seen in these successful 90s teen movies into one movie, one that is unfortunately not actually a teen movie.<\/p>\n

What\u2019s Your Number? has a ridiculous premise: Anna Faris decides that twenty is too high of a number of sexual partners to have, so she decides to stop having sex with people (her number is nineteen) until she finds the love of her life. The reason the movie doesn\u2019t work is because Faris is in her thirties, and I don\u2019t care about anybody who is over nineteen and actually thinks like that. The reason the movie almost works though is because the ensemble cast is pretty amazing: Chris Evans, Chris Pratt, Martin Freeman, Andy Samberg, Joel McHale, Aziz Ansari, Anthony Mackie, and Ed Begley Jr. all play roles in this movie. Had it been made 10 years earlier though, they would have all been playing far better roles.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Few of these actors have ever really played a legitimate teen movie role; Evans was in The Perfect Score, but nobody really remembers that one (because it\u2019s awful). Most of the actors simply didn\u2019t have careers in Hollywood when they were still young enough to play teenagers. But let\u2019s pretend they were. Let\u2019s pretend that the cast of What\u2019s Your Number? can be taken back to 2001 when they were all between the ages of 20-25 (with some exceptions) and therefore the appropriate ages for these teen movie roles:<\/p>\n

Anna Faris<\/strong> \u2013 This woman\u2019s comic timing, physical comedy skills and bug-eyed look of adorable astonishment were made to play the lead in a teen movie.<\/p>\n

Chris Evans<\/strong> \u2013 The best friend. This is the weakest of the assignments here, but for a guy like Evans, who is mostly known for being super mega ultra sexy, he\u2019s a pretty good actor. I trust he could do this. Plus, he\u2019s always been really funny.<\/p>\n

Joel McHale<\/strong> \u2013 The douchebag star quarterback of the football team. Basically, Trip McNeely before Trip McNeely went to college.<\/p>\n

Chris Pratt<\/strong> \u2013 The quarterback\u2019s fatish, fratish friend who probably starts on the offensive line. Pratt plays the idiot well, and would be a good companion with McHale\u2019s dry sarcasm (not unlike Parks & Recreation works well following Community on Thursdays).<\/p>\n

Andy Samberg<\/strong> \u2013 The token, uncomfortably awkward super nerd… which also happens to be the exact same role he plays in What\u2019s Your Number?<\/p>\n

Aziz Ansari<\/strong> \u2013 Samberg\u2019s overly confident, but still nerdy, friend. And when you think about it, Ansari is just a version of Anthony Michael Hall who owns a lot of hip-hop records anyway.<\/p>\n

Anthony Mackie<\/strong> \u2013 Token black guy! Mackie is talented (see: Half Nelson\/everything else he\u2019s in), and underused (see: The Hurt Locker), and his talents would definitely be underused in a teen movie, just like most other actors who play the \u2018token black guy.\u2019<\/p>\n

Martin Freeman<\/strong> \u2013 The foreign exchange student. Freeman may not be as Eastern European as the typical person cast for this role, but he makes up for it with ample doses of Britishness. Shitty crumpet jokes will abound!<\/p>\n

Ed Begley Jr.<\/strong> \u2013 Faris\u2019 dad. Begley Jr. is both hilarious and generally a good actor when he has to be a bit more serious, so I trust him to give us all some not so thinly veiled life lessons.<\/p>\n

Anna Faris is amazing. I love her, and I want the best for her. Maybe starring in a teen movie wouldn\u2019t have done that for her (although her role as Cindy Campbell in Scary Movie might almost count), but it\u2019s not like her career is in the greatest place anyway. Everybody likes her, but all of the movies she stars in are awful. And it\u2019s possible this teen movie would have been awful as well, but it would have at least had a pretty stellar cast… kind of like most good 90s and onward ensemble teen movies. Those movies aren\u2019t particularly good per se, they\u2019re just funny, and they\u2019re typically performance driven. Which is also how I would describe What\u2019s Your Number\u2019s funny moments; that they come in a movie about people in their thirties makes the movie too ridiculous to even kind of care about. Even the actual story could have been transplanted to a teen movie about a slutty teenager, allowing the general absurdities of its characters to make it more enjoyable, if not necessarily more serious. Thinking about this as the second half of What\u2019s Your Number? played out in front of me, I got kind of depressed that I couldn\u2019t go back in time and make this happen*, but it also made me recognize something.<\/p>\n

*Screw Terra Nova, this is the type of thing we should be using time machines for.<\/em><\/p>\n

When I find myself watching a comedy I don\u2019t particularly care for, I always end up wishing it was a teen movie. They\u2019re insanely rewatchable films, and while I don\u2019t tend to watch them all that often, I always kind of want to. If you asked me to watch Mean Girls with you right now, I would say yes. You want to eat Pop Tarts and watch Can\u2019t Hardly Wait? I\u2019m in. And if you ever want to analyze the use of social media in John Tucker Must Die, I\u2019m ready to co-write that post-graduate essay. This week at the MacGuffin Men, everything will be dedicated to the type of movie we just can\u2019t seem to outgrow; not the teen movie we wish existed, but the actual teen movies that do exist. We know that rarely do they accurately reflect the teenage experience, but most movies don\u2019t accurately reflect any sort of human experience anyway; we just like to laugh at the absurdities of the fake teenage experience the most.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It’s teen movie week at TMM! Today, Alex breaks down the greatest teen movie cast that never was.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2405,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[184],"tags":[439,284,440,441],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/themacguffinmen.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2393"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/themacguffinmen.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/themacguffinmen.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/themacguffinmen.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/themacguffinmen.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2393"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/themacguffinmen.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2393\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2400,"href":"https:\/\/themacguffinmen.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2393\/revisions\/2400"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/themacguffinmen.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2405"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/themacguffinmen.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2393"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/themacguffinmen.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2393"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/themacguffinmen.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2393"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}