I want to begin by saying that I actually feel embarrassed to say that I went to this movie on its opening night in CT, needless to say it did not make a favorable impression on me. I realize that I was asking for it just by watching a movie with a title like "The Rise of Taj" that wasn't the name of a documentary about a palace in India, but now that I'm through the hellish experience I feel obligated to warn as many as possible about the mental anguish you will go through if you see this craptastic movie. Oh, and my condolences if you have already been tricked into seeing it.<br /><br />I checked 'contains spoiler' in this comment but I have faith that I will NOT be spoiling anything for anyone. The plot is about as formulaic as it gets for a movie about young people going to college and the warm feelings you may get from the relative safety of a painfully predictable storyline are about the only comforting thoughts you are going to experience... IF you can sit through it (I dare you). This movie made me cringe from the moment in the opening scene when "Taj" starts waxing philosophical to the dog with scrotal elephantitis, to the obligatory sword-fighting climax, when the hate-me-I'm-a-prick antagonist gets his ancestors' cremains in the face. Now those two sight gags may have been funny at some time on their own, but like a s... sandwich everything in between still reeks. <br /><br />Imagine, for a moment a giant staircase where you must look at travel brochures of London or slides of a dog show for five minutes after which time you are forced to jump onto the next step and land squarely on your head. Repeat this process 19 times and you've got the essence of the movie down; lull, followed by a sharp decline in your personal well-being anytime any colorful characters opens their mouth to recite from the most boring, headache-inducing script ever made. VW2's script has enough clichè and stereotype reinforcing to eclipse an entire season's worth of MTV's reality show 'Next' and the one where Xzibit whores himself out... combined!<br /><br />Flaming aside, the fact that movies like 'The Rise of Taj' are made and seen by idiots (myself included) is very depressing. I encourage everyone to make their own judgments about this and every film, but I feel very strongly that seeing it and actually enjoying it would require you to be either under 18, or someone with the intelligence of perhaps a blade of grass.