Judd Apatow
The American Mainstream is in love with Superbad.. We Feel the Samesy's!
After we saw Superbad together, my girlfriend told me that she has a crush on Michael Cera. And, ya know, that was a frustrating thing to hear. Because I was about five minutes away from announcing the same thing.
Truth be told, though... I’d go steady with the whole cast.
Forgive me if this next comment shows up surrounded by ellipses on the cover of the DVD, but: Superbad is the best straight-up comedy I’ve seen in years.
I say “straight-up” because it’s a pure comedy. Unlike other recent comedies that I’ve liked, it’s a machine designed primarily to elicit laughs. There’s no “think” wrench holding up the hilarity gears.
Sure, it has a plot and a moral. But although the former is typical, it’s not contrived
. And director Greg Mottola delivers the latter without alerting your inner cynic.See, there’s nothing new about the premise or the characters or even the setting in Superbad.
It’s the flawless, un-self-concious execution that sets it apart from the probably dozen or so high-school-buddies-set-out-to-score-booze-and-chicks-before-graduation films that come out each year.
For certain, it has your crude daydream sequences, gratuitously raunchy one-liners and penis jokes, but this time, the use of what raters call “non-stop four-letter profanity” is truly what helps it arrive at a genuinely poignant — and even wholesome — core.
That’s no surprise considering it was produced by Judd Apatow, who we first knew as the creative force behind some of the best episodes of the heartwarming cult hit Freaks and Geeks.
More recently, he has been building a catalogue of hit comedies for which he serves as either writer, director or producer.
Although my preference has been with the movies he has written — The 40-year-old Virgin and Knocked Up — over those he has only produced — Anchorman and Talladega Nights — Superbad changes that trend. To me, it's the antithesis to the rash of recent comedies — including the aforementioned Will Ferrell vehicles — built around a gimmick premise stocked with caricatures, not characters. Films like Dodgeball, Old School and Wedding Crashers are destined to fall apart in the end because they try to become real movies when no one cares about the outcome.
Forgive the comparison, but if the dudes in Animal House came to terms with their immaturity at the end of the parade scene, I doubt anyone would be walking around with “College” shirts 30 years later.
But in Superbad, there’s not even a hint of a seam between the penultimate action, the climax and the aftermath.
The movie doesn’t dwell on the moment that you know is imminent in most comedies — when the characters change. Like the best of Apatow’s catalog, the laughs are in the characters’ flaws — their realistic humanness — not in the antics of a sketch actor riffing in the midst of an overly polished plot whose trajectory is solely engineered for the benefit of the gimmick.Credit Superbad’s actors for making it feel natural.
Take Christopher Mintz-Plasse, who absolutely steals the show in his film debut as Fogell. I mean, you know the kid. He’s the one you might have let sit at your lunch table, but would have disavowed at the very hint of an accusation of acquaintance.
But in the movie, he’s so unbelievably unaware of how uncool he is that, of course, everything comes up aces for him at every turn.
As for Cera’s Evan and his best friend Seth, played by Jonah Hill, the two thrive in discussing both the mundane and absurd. Literally every line they deliver is gold.
Cera’s comic timing, instincts, delivery and inflection rival even Ricky Gervaise.
As for Hill, to paraphrase A Christmas Story: he works in profanity the way some artists work in oils or clay.
Their command of the dialogue makes the mostly predictable story (things go wrong wherever they can) a vehicle for a new standard of per-capita laughs.
As high school seniors looking to hook up summer flings before graduation, the two share names with writers Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg, who started the script when they were in high school.
Save for the intermittent and ridiculous antics of Rogen and SNL’s Bill Hader as over-the-top cops, the story rings true throughout: the high school girls actually look like high school girls, the kids talk the way high school kids actually talk, and Seth and Evan’s experience probably isn’t unlike one you’ve heard about or had.
Fittingly, the characters’ fate is favorable, but not triumphant.
And that’s what makes the best comedy — familiar situations amplified by competent representatives of ourselves.
Michael Cera can play me any time he wants.
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