Foreign Exchange
Foreign Exchange
R | 09 September 2008 (USA)
Foreign Exchange Trailers

Four high school friends plan to ride out their senior year taking easy classes, including a program for housing foreign exchange students and eventually all attending Ohio State. Hurdles befall each of the four: grades, higher aspirations, love. Is it the Foreign Exchange students that learn from their host or the hosts that do more of the learning?

Reviews
areatw

There's no shortage of teen comedies out there to choose from, too many in fact. Despite the occasional gem, this genre is renowned for mass producing crap. Movies like 'Foreign Exchange' are exactly why teen movies in general have such a bad reputation. It plays up to each and every negative stereotype of the genre.This is basically just a bad rip-off of 2007's 'Superbad'. Its attempts at humour are much the same, only 'Foreign Exchange' lacks the characters and wit to pull most of the jokes off. The failed humour combined with the predictably crap and wafer thin plot make 'Foreign Exchange' another cheap teen comedy to avoid.

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Wuchak

"Foreign Exchange" (2008) is a high school comedy in the manner of 1999's "American Pie," but with a lower budget. I'm not a fan of "American Pie" or 2001's "Not Another Teen Movie" simply because they're too raunchy for my tastes; but that's just me. "Foreign Exchange" has quite a bit of raunch too and, in fact, begins with a scene of a teen masturbating in bed, but it's arguably not as bad as those other movies on this front.While all these films exaggerate the teen years for comedic purposes, do they - generally speaking - reflect real life? The answer is yes, which is WHY they're funny. For instance, do many teen dudes masturbate in bed to a photo of a babe? Of course. Now, this isn't likely something you want to SEE, but the film's making light of those fun-but-awkward teen years. Furthermore, despite a brief scene of three girls flashing their breasts, the sleaze is all talk or, at best, implied. And isn't that also the way it is in high school, except for the neighborhood Fonz (i.e ultra-cool guy who gets all the babes)? Jay (Randy Wayne) fits this description in the film and, less so, Shantz (Daniel Booko). And then there's the hardaxx principal of the school. I had one of those - a former Marine who always rolled his short sleeves up to show off his muscles & Marine Corps Emblem tattoo - albeit in the movie it's a woman, Jennifer Coolidge, and she's genuinely funny. And then there's the stoner smart kid, Hashbrown (Miles Thompson) and quite a few pot-smoking scenes. Again, these things reflect the real-life high school years.While "Foreign Exchange" is clearly low-budget it's also obvious that the filmmakers took care to create memorable characters with excellent casting. The film also does well on the female front with precious Vanessa Lengies as Robyn leading the way. I say "precious" because she's a hugely likable character that you care about, like Dave does (Ryan Pinkston), particularly as the story develops. Ashley Edner is also on hand as the beautiful Jez. Tania Raymonde as Anita, the Brazilian exchange student, is the main female protagonist, along with Robyn, but she's too thin to trip my trigger. I also like the way the shining Asian girl, Mia Ho (Jessika Van), ultimately finds companionship despite being made out to be discard-able. It's elements like this that reveal the movie's warmth below the raunchy garnish. The second half starts to mark time, however, so I can't give it a higher rating.The film runs 85 minutes and was shot in Los Angeles.GRADE: B-

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arfdawg-1

Four high school friends plan to ride out their senior year taking easy classes, including a program for housing foreign exchange students and eventually all attending Ohio State. Hurdles befall each of the four: grades, higher aspirations, love. Is it the Foreign Exchange students that learn from their host or the hosts that do more of the learning?Will you care after the titles?I didn't. It's sort of an American Pie ripoff without the heart.The only positive thing I can say is that the ids are actually marginally passable as HS seniors. They don't look 30 like other movies

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whammy666

I like sex-comedies. I do. If right, they can be really funny. American Pie is the example most people will give, and it is one of the best of it's kind. Even early sex comedies from Lloyd Kaufman, like the First Turn On! or Waitress. But this time, it's just getting annoying. Annoying characters, unoriginal storyline, unfunny jokes (although one your mom joke was hilarious), and so many more flaws. The story follows a geek who isn't getting any, and he is in love with a more popular girl, who he is friends with. Sound familiar? So, the geek's friends tell him he needs to have sex and blah blah...what do good friends do? They pressure their friend into having sex, and movies like this is probably why teens feel they need to have sex. Movies like this portray that this kid is a geek, until he has sex. And you may say, hey, in American Pie, they pressure the geek to have sex too! But that had a much better story, and actual funny jokes, and we can get on that subject another time. So in this movie, everyone gets foreign exchange students. The geek's student tries to screw up his life. In the end, you don't even like ANY of the characters, they are all really, just annoying. Just, I recommend avoiding this film. It is another teen sex comedy wanna be that steals it's ideas from every comedy ever.

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