SUPERBAD neither super nor bad

[mouton]

SUPERBAD
Written by Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg
Directed by Greg Mottola

Evan: I’m just sick of all the amateur stuff. If I’m paying top dollar, I want a little production value. Y’know, some editing, transitions, some music.

Seth: Well, I’m sorry, Evan, that the Coen brothers don’t direct the porn that I watch. They’re hard to get a hold of.

Ah, to be young and free. It was a simpler time when the pursuit of booze and babes was enough to drive a young man right through to adulthood. Alright, so this wasn’t my personal youth experience but it is the premise of director Greg Mottola’s SUPERBAD, a new breed of teenage sex comedy. Here, partying and getting naked with girls are exposed as a thinly veiled act of desperation to prove how grown up one is. The kids are speeding down a hill, screaming their excitement to the sky, but can see that they are also getting closer and closer to everything they’re afraid of, waiting for them at the bottom. Before they know it, high school will be over and Seth and Evan (Jonah Hill and Michael Cera), best friends since they were five, will find themselves going in separate directions to different colleges. While one raucous night finds them trying to score alcohol to impress the girls they each want to get with, it is what they learn about each other, their futures and themselves that will end up defining the night they thought would simply be the night they got some.

Whether Seth and Evan are trying on pants and debating what exactly is “too tight” or discussing the injustices of men having to hide their erections in shame from the rest of the world while buying drinks at the corner store, they are always hilarious. You could put these two in practically any scenario and the laughs would flow. They are drastically different but compliment each perfectly. Seth is loud and foul. Nearly every thought that comes out of his mouth is about sex and he is completely oblivious to the world around him. Meanwhile, Evan is mild mannered and meekly composed. He is constantly muttering sarcastic quips that most don’t hear and is acutely aware of his surroundings. The two are inseparable but one gets the impression their friendship is based more on its history than what they have in common. One thing they do have in common though is awkwardness. While one covers up his insecurity with obnoxious remarks and the other barely hides it at all, they both have each other to be themselves with. The beauty of their performances lies in the conveyance of the recently rising knowledge that the friendship that makes them feel safe is also now the friendship that is stopping them from going any further.

Written by KNOCKED UP star, Seth Rogen and long time friend, Evan Goldberg, SUPERBAD is at times genius in its subtlety. This is no easy feat considering how outrageous it is most of the time. Loosely basing Seth and Evan on themselves (sorry fellas but the names give it away), they manage to pinpoint the moment these boys become aware of their co-dependence. The two characters are so well drawn that you never want them to leave the screen. Only they do to make room for a third friend, Fogell (Christopher Mintz-Plasse). Fogell is somehow even more socially retarded than Seth and Evan and is himself a funny enough secondary character despite his entire existence being based on one-off joke that is given away in the preview (McLovin!). It is the direction his character takes the film in that is an unnecessary distraction. Fogell/McLovin spends his night riding around in the back of a police cruiser with two of the worst police officers ever to walk the beat (played by Rogen and Bill Hader, whom I would sooner never see on film again). The cops are such screw-ups that all they do is make every scenario they’re in worse than it was before they got there. With most of their humour falling flat and not coming close to measuring up to Seth and Evan, they have a similar effect on the film itself. Filler is rarely fun and here it exposes the writers’ insecurity regarding their own abilities.

So this is the story of how Seth Rogen is both his best friend and worst enemy at the same time. Alongside Goldberg, the two have stated publicly how they never want to grow up. While that gives them a particular insight into the pivotal crossroads Seth and Evan, the characters, find themselves at, it also makes SUPERBAD, a movie about maturity which is meant to be immature at times, less mature than it actually should be. For the most part, SUPERBAD is surprisingly mature, while still maintaining its youthful glow. Seems to me that Seth and Evan, the writers, could stand to learn a thing a two about evolution from the characters they created in their own image. Growing up isn’t all that bad and it can still be freackin’ hilarious.

www.blacksheepreviews.blogspot.com

[Chris Knipp]

GREG MOTTOLA: SUPERBAD (2007)

Revenge of the nerds: the next generation

The starting point of this movie is a theme that's come up before--it's basic to Brian Robbins' silly and stupid but entertaining The Perfect Score (http://www.chrisknipp.com/writing/viewtopic.php?t=252) (2004): two best friends in high school are going to be separated because one got into a good college and the other didn't. As summer approaches a couple of the cool "in" girls ask them to supply the liquor for a party and they think they have one last chance to lose their virginity before they go away.

The friends are the bushy-haired and overweight Seth (Jonah Hill) and the taller, lean, silky voiced Evan (Michael Cera) They talk dirty, but they don't know what they're talking about. Mottola's low keyed road comedy Daytrippers appeared nine years ago and he's since been working in TV. He's now joined the team of Judd Apatow, who produced the very popular 40-Year-Old Virgin and the current big summer hit Knocked Up. Superbad partly grows out of the late nineties TV series Apatow produced, "Freaks and Geeks," whose team Seth Rogen, star of Knocked Up and writer and cast member here, was an important part of. Superbad is the brainchild of Rogen and Evan Goldberg, who first conceived it in Vancouver when they were thirteen.

I'm not sure what the difference between freaks and geeks is, or if it matters. The word nerd comes to mind when one watches the amusing antics of Seth and Evan's pal, Fogell (newcomer Christopher Mintz-Plasse) who has spectacles and an idiotic grin.

The point is they're all outcasts, not the campus "winners." "Freaks and Geeks" focused on a high school world where nothing was ever fair, where outcast status linked stoners and bad students and smart kids who weren't social--as symbolized by the almost-romance between dumb dreamboat Daniel (James Franco) and the sensitive outcast and mathlete Lindsey (Linda Cardellini). "Perfect" guys and girls are who we'd like to identify with, and that's why big stars are so often gorgeous. But they aren't who we really are: "perfect" people aren't real. In movies geeks and nerds usually aren't real either; they're stereotypes. But Superbad gets away from that. Seth and Evan are a source of comedy, but they aren't unreal. They're just not aggressive like the campus macho men--the types who're always beating up on undersized Sam (John Francis Daly), Lindsey's little brother in "Freaks and Geeks," and who spit on Seth and warn him not to come to the cool girls' party.

Seth and Evan do plan on going to the party anyway, helped by Fogell, who's just acquired a fake ID that says he's a 25-year-old organ donor from Hawaii named simply McLovin (no first name). Fogell's going to buy alcohol. The babes (AKA "ladies," using the Player name) are going to get sloshed and get laid by mistake, and as Seth exclaims, "We could be that mistake!"

Fogell gets clobbered at the liquor store by a holdup man, then taken in tow by two very wayward and unserious cops. Seth and Evan get mixed up with a dodgy guy who takes them to a more dangerous party. The way to the cool girls' party is as convoluted as Harry and Kumar's trip to White Castle.

Superbad isn't necessarily funnier than earlier teen or college comedies, the Harry and Kumars and Dude Where's My Cars, but it has a humanistic arc they lack. Like Knocked Up, it leads off with a stream of foul language and winds up with sweetness and doing the right thing. It's also a celebration of male friendship. It dares to speak of male love and depict it as something abandoned on the way to growing up, like Seth's drawings of penises--which he confesses to Evan to having done obsessively as a little boy and which are shown in a phantasmagoric panorama in the middle and in the closing credits.

The joke of these virgins locked in male-male bonding is that they can't deal with a babe when she throws herself at them. In a world of 40-year-old virgins it's no surprise Michael Cera was recruited from a TV series called "Arrested Development." Apatow says Seth Rogan really lives like the character he plays in Knocked Up.

In its blend of dirty talk and sweetness Apatow's and his posse's comedies are something different for which the current audience is more than ready, and his productions are beginning to multiply like prairie fires. It's great the way Apatow keeps gathering contributors and remaining faithful to them, and lets actors improvise freely. This is likely to wind up being not just a body of work, but a new school of comedy, not unlike earlier productions of the kind but more fertile, almost a rival to the Eighties youth movies.

And this success is deserved. There's a movement and energy in Virgin, Knocked Up, and Superbad that shows the team know what they're doing. It's not all perfection, however. Knocked Up seems like wishful thinking on several levels. Is it fair to the smart young woman to accept a nerdy stoner? Despite reported hilarious improvised riffs on abortion during the shoot, how come that option is given such short shrift in the finished film? The physical business in Superbad is crude, and not really that funny. Seth gets clobbered and hit by a car too often.

The whole episode of the cops in Superbad is not only preposterous but tiresome. It may be "nice" to turn cops into practical jokers, but it's false. They have guns. And they're loaded. They have the power of menace. Fogell's adoption by the cops seems like a suspicious kind of wishful thinking, even though, like everything else, it's well-meaning. Nonetheless Mintz-Plasse is good in these scenes. Though he is the most farcical of the main characters, his nerd morphing into cool dude is one of the best acting turns in the movie, while as the slippery, fluent, but terrified Evan, Cera is the most complex and real. The overtly Jewish Seth may be the spokesperson of the story, but Evan and Fogell are wonderful foils.

There's nothing sinister or revolutionary about the guys' language. It is a great exaggeration to think Seth & co. are so much more sophisticated or deviant in their sexual lore than earlier generations: society has just granted them license to use in public the bluntest language about what they, like their predecessors, still barely understand. But the language, post-Kevin Smith as it is, is a great source of relieved laughter. Something that was always there is now okay to speak about--like two straight guys who love each other.

Superbad has a terrific opening title with silhouettes of Evan and Seth dancing.





I got some of my information about Apatow & Co. from Damon Wise in The Guardian (http://film.guardian.co.uk/features/featurepages/0,,2146375,00.html#article_continue).