Superbad (2007)
It would seem now that producer/sometimes director Judd Apatow, over the course of three summers, has told the definitive, epic story of the clueless, sex deprived white man of the 21st century. We’ve covered his forties (The 40 Year Old Virgin), his intiation into sort of adult hood (Knocked Up) and now, with Superbad, we’re backtracking again to his teenage years, and the never ending pursuit of booze, which is actually a pursuit for sex, which is actually a pursuit for some sort of comfort that teens associate with the full arrival of adulthood. The realization of that to be a myth is, of course, the driving thematic point of Superbad.
Superbad will be compared to many movies, John Hughes, Amy Heckerling, other Apatow movies, Dazed and Confused, but its really a pop stoner’s revisit of American Graffiti. Both films have their characters brushing up against a version of the Pharoahs (one of Superbad’s scarier than the genre requires moments), both have a Wolfman Jack (here embodied by Seth Rogen and Bill Hader in some of the film’s most surprising scenes), and both end in a bit of sad, shit we’ve reached the end finality.
Superbad, and this is what distinguishes the film from even some of the better entries of the genre, also has a strong current of goofy, druggy, hipster surreality. About two thirds of the film seems to have taken up permanent residence in its hero’s (Jonah Hill, Michael Cerra) heads, the episodes are charged with the kind of hurlyburly sexual menace that can only come from a frightened, insecure, overly infatuated with porn adolescent.
Superbad is about watching too many movies, and playing too many video games and masturbating too much, and its about the very contemporary new sense of humor of the young white guy. The film acknowledges the dangerous dislocation that all of that saturation can yield, and, as a result, the obligatory third act growing up scenes feel honest and authentically unsettling. This film has some John Hughes and Amy Heckerling and John Landis in it, but there’s some Paul Thomas Anderson and Alfonso Cuaron floating around in its creative mojo too.
I may have forgetten to mention that this thing is often uproarious, and that is, of course, most important in any mainstream comedy. The script (by Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg) is appealingly loosey goosey and free associative. The dialogue starts out self-conscious, and then tops itself with non-sequitur upon non-sequitur, and you find yourself laughing more at the cumulative effect than any one joke.
The direction here, by Greg Mottola, is also the sharpest of any Judd Apatow production. If you want to see the great Freaks and Geeks reborn as an unsettling farce of media obsessed teenage terror, see Superbad, one of the best films of the year.
