Trailer Park: Can't Hardly Wait
Movie
Can’t Hardly Wait, released June 12 1998
Trailer Synopsis
On the final day of high school, several stories conflate at a single graduation party: Ethan Embry pines after newly-single Jennifer Love Hewitt, Seth Green wants to get laid, Peter Facinelli feels equal parts festive and sad, and Charlie Korsmo can’t feel his legs. Also Jason Segel has a watermelon full of vodka.
Does It Honestly Represent the Movie?
Yes. Can’t Hardly Wait was part of the big teen movie boom of the late ‘90s, a boom that also featured a bunch of Shakespeare riffs and American Pie. The party mentioned in the trailer takes up the bulk of the action, and that’s where we meet our friends: Preston (Embry) wants to make a move on Amanda (Hewitt), who just broke up with longtime boyfriend MIke (Facinelli) For a movie as episodic and dependent on its vast ensemble of high-profile teen players, the Preston narrative holds focus even while his platonic best friend Denise (Lauren Ambrose) wanders into a sitcom plot and gets stuck in a bathroom with horndog Kenny (Green) and a bunch of drama unfolds among the members of Love Burger (including Breckin Meyer and Donald Faison). Embry does a fine job as Preston (even though his infatuation reads a little creepy today) and the rest of the cast are all game.
Does It Make You Want to See the Movie?
I think so? (I realize that’s an impossible question to ask considering I’ve seen all these movies, but it’s relevant nonetheless.) The Can’t Hardly Wait trailer has a bunch of things going for it: an all-star cast, a straightforward premise, and a killer soundtrack (more on that shortly). I have a theory: When I saw this movie back in ‘98, I was still in high school myself, though I was not what you would consider a social animal. I knew parties like the one depicted in Can’t Hardly Wait were actively happening in my corner of suburban Connecticut, but I did not have access to them the way all the cool kids seemed to. Plus I was a scared kid who was terrified of drinking until I actually started drinking in college. So part of the thrill for me (and I would wager the thrill for a lot of movie-obsessed teens of the era) was being able to attend one of those bashes without any kind of social pressures or stigmas attached. I related to Preston because I too dressed like a doofus and thought myself a romantic poet and pined after girls who barely knew I existed. People seem mildly surprised that Preston is at the party, much in the same way people would have been had they spotted me in the same era. Can’t Hardly Wait was a convincing simulacra for geeks like me.
What’s Weird About It?
It’s not necessarily a source of weirdness, but now is the time to talk about the soundtrack. While it may be primarily remembered as the launching point for Smash Mouth’s version of “Can’t Get Enough of You Baby,” the accompanying soundtrack to Can’t Hardly Wait is an appealing mish-mash of then-contemporary modern rock (Blink-182, Third Eye Blind), party-ready hip-hop (Busta Rhymes, Missy Elliott) and a couple of old chestnuts (Parliament’s “Flash Light,” Guns N’ Roses’ “Paradise City”) as well as the Replacements song that gives the movie its title. It’s the sort of mixtape I used to actually make using my stereo, with a hefty dose of recognizable names plus a bunch of older tunes I had just discovered. The trailer’s music is not nearly as eclectic: After opening with the jittery bassline from Chemical Brothers’ “Block Rockin’ Beats,” it runs back not one but two Third Eye Blind songs in “Graduate” (duh) and “How’s It Going to Be.”
It’s that second TEB tune that underscores the strangest section of the Can’t Hardly Wait trailer, which suggests that the movie has a much more melancholy heart than it actually has. Some of the characters have breakthroughs (particularly Green’s cultural appropriation avatar Kenny), but Can’t Hardly Wait is, if anything, pretty glib about its protagonists (save for Preston and Amanda). In fact, the movie ends with an Animal House-style series of text blocks that explain what happens in the future to all of our heroes, and it’s mildly cynical in its projections. I’m not saying Can’t Hardly Wait has no heart, but 23 years later the only scenes that still stand out are the party sequences themselves (and maybe Preston talking to a stripper played by Jenna Elfman).
Also, this is yet another teen movie that gives absolutely no lip service to its stars, even though Hewitt was a proper cultural phenomenon at that point. Though that does bring up one more weird thing: For all the focus the trailer puts on her, Hewitt is barely in this thing. The whole idea is to keep she and Preston away from each other for most of the run time, so she disappears for huge stretches.
Does It Spoil the Movie?
No, and in fact it does a pretty good job of taking you right up to the moment that Preston goes to talk to Amanda before leaving you with that cliff hanger. If the trailer somehow got you hooked on Preston’s quest to ask Amanda out, then that’s a masterful cut.
Final Analysis
I always consider the ‘90s to be the decade when trailers become much more refined and concentrated in their content delivery systems (go watch the trailer for any movie from the ‘70s—they just sort of wander around for a while before ending), but Can’t Hardly Wait isn’t a particularly punchy two-and-a-half-minutes, even despite the presence of “Graduate.” The movie itself feels pretty dated now, though it would probably feel strange if it somehow still made sense in 2021. Still, it’s charming to the people who were there then, and it still traffics in a particular end-of-the-school-year energy that not a whole lot of cultural artifacts can accurate depict. 6/10