Superbad is awesome.
You may think I'm saying that because I just saw it today... but no; I actually have known this since Tuesday night 
and just haven't had time to tell you. :)
As something of a connoisseur of the teen sex comedy (I came of age - teenage - during the initial renaissance of Porky's, Sixteen Candles, Class... ah, youth), I can say without hesitation: Superbad takes it place with the best of the genre, a dirtier, sleazier American Pie with the mind and instincts of a teenage boy. It is also one of the best laugh out loud comedies of the summer, and surely this year's late summer gem.
Written by Knocked Up star Seth Rogen and his friend Evan Goldberg, Superbad is the tale of Seth (Jonah Hill) and Evan (what a coincidence!), who are getting ready to graduate high school, and don't want to leave as virginal geeks. The story concerns the one night, just before graduation, when they make their last stand: using a girl's grad blowout (her parents, conveniently, away) to each make a move on that one girl they've been lusting after. And of course, hilarity ensures.
If this all sounds familiar, it's because it is: this is Fast Times at Ridgemont High meets Risky Business somewhere up the street from Sixteen Candles. But as he did with Knocked Up, Judd Apatow (as producer) encourages a switch from focusing on the girls to focusing on the boys; and as with this summer's other smart comedy, the payoff is a new kind of emotional complexity: the girls are not what you expect, and the boys are surprisingly real: smutty talking, filthy minded sex obsessed kids with no real experience to speak of, which lends much of their dirty talk an unexpected sweetness.
Seth's plan is to get the party's hostess, Jules (a wry and amusing Emma Stone) drunk and convince her
that he's the one, while Evan (Michael Cera) hopes the gift of his girl Becca's favorite vodka, along with a chance to tell her his real feelings, will get her to be his girl. Both go hilariously awry as Jules turns out to be a non-drinker, and Becca turns out to be the secret wild thing who, with a few drinks in her, wants nothing more than for Evan to ravage her.
But the real scene stealer is the third boy of the story, Fogell, played by newcomer Christopher Mintz-Plasse. In the quintessential Anthony Michael Hall/Jon Cryer part of the geeky guy who suddenly turns into the stud, Fogell hijacks the film by serving as the patsy in the purchase of the liquor with his fake ID. Of course, his fake ID has the name "McLovin", comes from Hawaii, and says he's 25. When the police show up (the liquor store is robbed just as Fogell is about to make a clean exit), it looks like curtains, but instead the cops (one played by Rogen, the other by Bill Hader) turn out to be another pair of glorious slackers.
By the end of the evening. McLovin is the boy all the bad girls want, Seth discovers his lovable side, and Evan realizes he needs to take some chances. And we have been taken on a "whole life in one night" tour of those glorious, awkward teen moments yet again.
Director Greg Mottola - who last directed the offbeat film "The Daytrippers" before taking a detour into TV, makes a nice return here. The actors are all pleasant surprises. The film, despite some modern day references, has the feel of a film set in 1983, and its lovingly picked score grooves to a rhythm of late seventies and early eighties funk and soul.
In the end, the film offers the sweet and slightly scary moral that what teen boys think they want - the chance to get it on with a girl - comes with an actual person attached... and he's not like your best guy friend. It's not a long stretch from that to, say, Brokeback Mountain (or maybe I was just reading too much into Seth and Evan's crashing in Evan's basement with his sleeping bags). But that's the charm of Superbad, which knows that for all its foul mouthed swagger, teen beastie boys are easy enough to tame.
I thought this movie was terrible. I also disagree with your interpretation of Becca, who could have as easily been "hooking up" with Evan because that's what you're supposed to do, blah blah blah, versus actually wanting it. The fact that she's so embarrassed the following day and grateful that he didn't "take advantage" of her makes me think she is not secretly a wild thing.
Posted by: Redstar | January 20, 2008 at 05:05 PM