I Used to Go Here (2020)

I Used to Go Here is an alleged comedy about a hack who admits that “I'm not good enough to write a good book so I wrote a sh*tty book.” Not only has this premise been lifted from a Family Guy episode, but the movie's sense of humor is half-assed at best (but what can you expect from producers Andy Samberg, Jorma Tacone, and Akiva Schaffer?). For example, there is a character named Bradley Cooper. That's it. That's the joke. What scriptwriter/director Kris Rey fails to see is that it's not enough to name a character after celebrity; you have to actually do something, go somewhere with it (I'm reminded of the 'Michael Bolton' character in Office Space). What's the point of naming the character Bradley Cooper if no one is ever even going to acknowledge it? You keep waiting for the other shoe to drop, and when it never does, it becomes nothing more than an annoying distraction. Following the release of her new book, novelist Kate Conklin (Gillian Jacobs) receives an invitation from her former college professor, David Kirkpatrick (Jemaine Clement), to speak at her alma mater, the fictional Illinois University. Her novel is called Seasons Passed, and from its cover and what little we hear of it, it wouldn't be out of place in the Nicholas Sparks canon; that is to say, it's the kind of book that gets its author invited to Oprah, not to a higher learning institution. Kate accepts the invitation, and “rediscovers her college, but now through the eyes of the students living there” (All Movie), in whose lives she “finds herself deeply enmeshed” (IMDb). Actually, what Kate "rediscovers" doesn't go much farther than the house where she herself lived as a student, and where she spends most of her stay; meanwhile, the current tenants drop everything (even intercourse, because what kind of college students would have sex when they could get involved in the depressing problems of a 35-year-old instead? The same kind of college students who are never seen attending any classes) to be at her beck and call. In a nutshell, Kate hijacks this group of supposed college students, spends a night with one of them, and then leaves without learning from or teaching them anything; she even turns down a teaching position at the university, though it's not clear what exactly would qualify her for that position in the first place.