This has the potential to be a clever, fun movie. There're are a lot of things going on that point out the absurdity of modern teenage life, and the pressures we put kids under so that they achieve our goals.<br /><br />However, the adults are morons. Rich, successful people are complete fools. Somehow in America you stay poor if you are ugly, but if you are an imbecile with a size 2 dress, you live in a 5,000 sq ft house with a staff of 15 (never seen) who do all the chores. You don't actually learn anything, so you can't pick up on normal social clues that everyone else does - Charlie, for example, gets beaten up in school because he doesn't pick up that a tough guy and his sycophant in the high school bathroom are people to avoid. Instead, he gets beaten up all day long.<br /><br />And - ha ha, this is so funny - the school principal (Robert Downey) is disconnected to the kids in the school, so they completely disrespect him *and* he doesn't know how badly he is functioning. But he's rich, too, and lives in a 4,000 sq foot house with a staff of 10 (never seen) who do all the chores.<br /><br />The high school is composed of students who are just about on the lowest margin of functionality and awareness. Not a single one of them is destined to be successful serving fries at a McDonalds, let alone doing anything positive. But they are all on drugs - ha ha! - and they barely can keep themselves from disrobing and "making out" (euphemism for what all high school kids do all the time in Hollywood high schools). They openly smoke cigarettes and dope in school, and Charlie distributes high powered drugs (Ritalin & others) in school. All high schools are like this, of course. Not a single kid has a healthy relationship with any adult, and not any adult has a rational frame of mind.<br /><br />Ha ha. You just can't get enough of this.<br /><br />And - ha ha - Charlie can just read up medical books and - poof! - he is smart enough to prescribe drugs *just like a real doctor!* And he does.<br /><br />*** SPOILER*** Charlie's family has a psychiatrist on-call, and he's bamboozled the Dr. (who went to medical school and psychiatry school but somehow was never warned about manipulative kids) who lets Charlie describe fake symptoms and then prescribes drugs for Charlie, who then sells/distributes the drugs in school. Ha ha. This is so funny.<br /><br />I gave it a three because it had some good moments - but the cruft around the good is just so awful.<br /><br />This should have been caught in the editing stage. The editors should have been more on the ball. They could have rescued this film.<br /><br />Instead, the producers must have intervened, saying "We don't care if this is a failure of a movie. We're on a schedule." Lame movie. Lame script. Some good acting. (Charlie actuall does some good stuff.)