YMMV / Can't Hardly Wait

• Awesome Music: With artists like The Replacements, Smash Mouth, Third Eye Blind, Feeder, blink-182 and many many more, this movie has one hell of a soundtrack.
• Catharsis Factor: Amanda publicly telling off Mike after he breaks up with her for selfish reasons and then tries to get back together with her for equally selfish reasons has many positive YouTube comments. This seems especially pronounced among reviewers who mention knowing someone like Mike in high school.
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • The yearbook girl played by Melissa Joan Hart isn't even in the credits, but is a well-remembered supporting character.
  • The Girl Posse trio are better-liked than several of the characters ahead of them in the credits. This is due to a mixture of humorous scenes, Fanservicey moments, and how they side with Amanda over her Big Jerk on Campus ex-boyfriend despite their general shallowness. One of them even smacks her boyfriend for laughing when Mike insults Amanda.
  • The good-natured drummer with the hat who is played by Donald Faison helps make his subplot quite fun.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: Breckin Meyer's character taunts Donald Faison's character about sleeping with his girlfriend with the phrase "Giggity giggity giggity!"
• Moe: The yearbook girl might come across as annoying to her classmates, but her perky attitude and school spirit- and how she wants the yearbook signature of everyone regardless of their social status- makes her rather endearing.
• Moral Event Horizon: It's a small, light-hearted moment, but one of Mike's Jerk Jock friends abandons his sleeping girlfriend when the cops raid the party, seconds after another jock goes out of his way to pick up his passed-out girlfriend and carry her to safety.
• One-Scene Wonder:
  • Jerry O'Connell as Jaded Washout Trip McNeeley.
  • Jenna Elfman as the Angelic Exotic Dancer.
  • The girl who vows to sleep with the first boy to talk to her to get back at her supposedly unfaithful boyfriend. She has second thoughts when that boy turns out to be Casanova Wannabe Kenny and ends up getting back together with her boyfriend.
  • The Granola Girl played by Sara Rue who compares the popular crowd to a flock of sheep.
  • The goofy kid who plays "Paradise City," on a boombox, leading to the Signature Scene karaoke rendition.
• Playing Against Type: Uber-nerd Seth Green is a hip hop obsessed white rapper.
• Retroactive Recognition:
  • Jaime Pressly is one of the jock's girlfriends.
  • Jason Segel as one of the two stoners who are big fans of Velma.
  • Sara Rue as Earth Girl.
• Signature Scene:
  • William's drunken karaoke rendition of "Paradise City" has a special place in a lot of fans' hearts.
  • Amanda telling off Mike during his Entitled to Have You attempts to restart their relationship after callously dumping her.
• Unintentional Period Piece: The X-Files? Brad and Gwyneth? Pay Phones? Yep, it's The '90s. The special edition DVD even has a '90s trivia game to lampshade this fact.
• Values Dissonance: In modern times, Preston's been criticized for basically being no better than Mike was vis-a-vis Amanda, not to mention William's rather homophobic plan for revenge against Mike and Mike losing a job a few years later over it.
• Values Resonance:
  • While there are some homophobic moments in the film, Preston's mellow reaction to being Mistaken for Gay by the stripper has aged decently.
  • In one scene, an Abhorrent Admirer forcefully grabs and kisses Amanda for several seconds without permission as she struggles. When he argues that she was giving him signs that he wanted it, Amanda's reaction makes it clear that what he did was not okay and is deserving of scorn.
  • Kenny's friends get chased out of the house when they try to invoke N-Word Privileges.
• The Woobie:
  • After she gets dumped, Amanda realizes how empty her life is and then inadvertently publicly insults the one person who she wants to connect with.
  • The host of the party, given how trashed the house gets despite her pleas for people to tone the party down.
  • The girl who wants people to sign her yearbook. She might be a bit annoying, but all she wants is a few seconds of people's time to memorialize happy memories, and she's lucky if all she gets is a rude brush off, given how her yearbook eventually gets tossed into the pool.