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#592 - Superbad
Greg Mottola, 2007
A trio of high-school seniors get into a series of misadventures after they try to acquire alcohol for a house party.
In theory, I should like Superbad. My last Top 100 featured Clerks and Dazed and Confused; the former's crude, dialogue-heavy buddy comedy and the latter's loosely-structured 24-hour tale of partying high-schoolers seem like obvious influences on this film. It also came out during my final year of high school and the lead characters were supposed to be socially awkward misfits, so that should have resulted in peak relatability. However, as I've noted in other reviews, it was very easy to grow fatigued with anything that had any relation to Judd Apatow and featured any of his regular collaborators; Superbad was a major contributor to said fatigue since Apatow regular Seth Rogen co-wrote and co-starred in the film. That aside, the film is perhaps too immature for its own good, which comes as no surprise considering how Rogen and co-writer Evan Goldberg apparently started writing the screenplay when they were thirteen years old. It's obviously been through some revisions since then, but the core narrative is still pretty simple. Superbad takes place on a Friday a couple of weeks before graduation and centres on two lifelong friends named Seth (Jonah Hill) and Evan (Michael Cera). They are fairly average (if uncool) teenage boys whose original plans for the night involve their usual hanging out with their dweeby friend Fogell (Christopher Mintz-Plasse). These plans are shaken up when the boys get word of a house party being held by popular girl Jules (Emma Stone), who incidentally asks Seth to acquire some alcohol for said party. Seth, being infatuated with Jules, readily agrees to carry this out, while Evan is willing to go along with it because it means he'll get a chance to impress his own crush, Becca (Martha MacIsaac). Of course, this means getting Fogell's help as he's the only one with a fake ID.
This is a solid enough set-up for a movie's worth of shenanigans, especially when an unexpected twist results in the trio being split up, forcing Seth and Evan to improvise a new plan to acquire alcohol while Fogell gets into a series of misadventures with a pair of wacky police officers (Bill Hader and Rogen), thus allowing for a wider range of gags to be deployed. Unfortunately, despite some of the film's more interesting touches (such as a retro vibe enhanced by a soundtrack filled with various classic funk and soul numbers), the humour is extremely patchy. While some of the absurdity is tolerable (the infamous joke involving Fogell's fake ID featuring the ridiculous fake-sounding mononym "McLovin" still holds up despite it being run into the ground on a "Vote For Pedro"-like scale), some of it just lands with a dull thud, such as Seth's revelation that he used to be obsessed with drawing cartoon penises (which the film goes on to show in detail). This does not prompt personal offence so much as a nonplussed "Really?", which is a reaction that I still have even as I re-watch this for what is at least a third full time (no idea about partial viewings). One can also interpret a subtle darkness to this seemingly lightweight plot in that Seth really does seem to think that the way to win over the girl he likes is to get both of them drunk enough for her to "make a mistake", to say nothing of the many irresponsible ways in which Hader and Rogen abuse their authority. Hell, I liked Super Troopers just fine and that managed to wring a whole movie out of irresponsible goofballs working in law enforcement, yet these cops' infrequent appearances feel pretty sub-par for the most part with only the occasional funny line to sustain them. They also feel like a conscious attempt to pad out a film with broadly comical wish fulfilment that is naturally used on the incredibly dorky Fogell. This intention is made even clearer by the fact that sequences involving Seth and Evan by themselves tend to be a bit more grounded in reality, whether it's their attempts to fit in at a party full of dangerous adults or their confrontation over the tension that's been growing between over the fact that they have vastly different post-graduation plans.
As easy as it would be to completely hate Superbad, I think there is just enough of worth here to stop it being a completely reprehensible mess of a film. Despite the aforementioned dark subtext behind these fairly ordinary teenagers' incredibly short-sighted plans to hook up, it helps that there actually is a bit of heart and self-awareness to the plot that saves it as it reaches its inevitably awkward conclusion. This even extends to the wacky sub-plot involving Fogell and the cops, though it's not given nearly enough focus in favour of playing up the anything-goes mischief of those scenes (which can be entertaining but is fundamentally flat and doesn't really hold up). The film does struggle to pepper its considerable running time with amusing jokes, but I guess if I wasn't liable to laugh at them when I was the same age as the main characters then being almost a decade older was not probably not going to make a significant difference. The technical quality of this film is only in service to the comedy and the acting tends to be pretty average as the performers play to their persona's most widely-accepted stereotypes; Hill is an obnoxious smartass, Cera is a neurotic mumbler, Rogen is an easy-going goofball with rapid-fire delivery, etc. The lack of a distinct high concept beyond high-school tomfoolery certainly makes it a surprisingly tolerable film in relation to other Apatow-like films and there's enough quality that tells me this might not be the last time I end up seeing this. Ultimately, however, to me Superbad feels like the cinematic equivalent of spending two hours hanging around a pair of best friends having a conversation consisting entirely of their own personal in-jokes. I might be able to understand the jokes, but that doesn't guarantee that I'll laugh at them myself.
Greg Mottola, 2007
A trio of high-school seniors get into a series of misadventures after they try to acquire alcohol for a house party.
In theory, I should like Superbad. My last Top 100 featured Clerks and Dazed and Confused; the former's crude, dialogue-heavy buddy comedy and the latter's loosely-structured 24-hour tale of partying high-schoolers seem like obvious influences on this film. It also came out during my final year of high school and the lead characters were supposed to be socially awkward misfits, so that should have resulted in peak relatability. However, as I've noted in other reviews, it was very easy to grow fatigued with anything that had any relation to Judd Apatow and featured any of his regular collaborators; Superbad was a major contributor to said fatigue since Apatow regular Seth Rogen co-wrote and co-starred in the film. That aside, the film is perhaps too immature for its own good, which comes as no surprise considering how Rogen and co-writer Evan Goldberg apparently started writing the screenplay when they were thirteen years old. It's obviously been through some revisions since then, but the core narrative is still pretty simple. Superbad takes place on a Friday a couple of weeks before graduation and centres on two lifelong friends named Seth (Jonah Hill) and Evan (Michael Cera). They are fairly average (if uncool) teenage boys whose original plans for the night involve their usual hanging out with their dweeby friend Fogell (Christopher Mintz-Plasse). These plans are shaken up when the boys get word of a house party being held by popular girl Jules (Emma Stone), who incidentally asks Seth to acquire some alcohol for said party. Seth, being infatuated with Jules, readily agrees to carry this out, while Evan is willing to go along with it because it means he'll get a chance to impress his own crush, Becca (Martha MacIsaac). Of course, this means getting Fogell's help as he's the only one with a fake ID.
This is a solid enough set-up for a movie's worth of shenanigans, especially when an unexpected twist results in the trio being split up, forcing Seth and Evan to improvise a new plan to acquire alcohol while Fogell gets into a series of misadventures with a pair of wacky police officers (Bill Hader and Rogen), thus allowing for a wider range of gags to be deployed. Unfortunately, despite some of the film's more interesting touches (such as a retro vibe enhanced by a soundtrack filled with various classic funk and soul numbers), the humour is extremely patchy. While some of the absurdity is tolerable (the infamous joke involving Fogell's fake ID featuring the ridiculous fake-sounding mononym "McLovin" still holds up despite it being run into the ground on a "Vote For Pedro"-like scale), some of it just lands with a dull thud, such as Seth's revelation that he used to be obsessed with drawing cartoon penises (which the film goes on to show in detail). This does not prompt personal offence so much as a nonplussed "Really?", which is a reaction that I still have even as I re-watch this for what is at least a third full time (no idea about partial viewings). One can also interpret a subtle darkness to this seemingly lightweight plot in that Seth really does seem to think that the way to win over the girl he likes is to get both of them drunk enough for her to "make a mistake", to say nothing of the many irresponsible ways in which Hader and Rogen abuse their authority. Hell, I liked Super Troopers just fine and that managed to wring a whole movie out of irresponsible goofballs working in law enforcement, yet these cops' infrequent appearances feel pretty sub-par for the most part with only the occasional funny line to sustain them. They also feel like a conscious attempt to pad out a film with broadly comical wish fulfilment that is naturally used on the incredibly dorky Fogell. This intention is made even clearer by the fact that sequences involving Seth and Evan by themselves tend to be a bit more grounded in reality, whether it's their attempts to fit in at a party full of dangerous adults or their confrontation over the tension that's been growing between over the fact that they have vastly different post-graduation plans.
As easy as it would be to completely hate Superbad, I think there is just enough of worth here to stop it being a completely reprehensible mess of a film. Despite the aforementioned dark subtext behind these fairly ordinary teenagers' incredibly short-sighted plans to hook up, it helps that there actually is a bit of heart and self-awareness to the plot that saves it as it reaches its inevitably awkward conclusion. This even extends to the wacky sub-plot involving Fogell and the cops, though it's not given nearly enough focus in favour of playing up the anything-goes mischief of those scenes (which can be entertaining but is fundamentally flat and doesn't really hold up). The film does struggle to pepper its considerable running time with amusing jokes, but I guess if I wasn't liable to laugh at them when I was the same age as the main characters then being almost a decade older was not probably not going to make a significant difference. The technical quality of this film is only in service to the comedy and the acting tends to be pretty average as the performers play to their persona's most widely-accepted stereotypes; Hill is an obnoxious smartass, Cera is a neurotic mumbler, Rogen is an easy-going goofball with rapid-fire delivery, etc. The lack of a distinct high concept beyond high-school tomfoolery certainly makes it a surprisingly tolerable film in relation to other Apatow-like films and there's enough quality that tells me this might not be the last time I end up seeing this. Ultimately, however, to me Superbad feels like the cinematic equivalent of spending two hours hanging around a pair of best friends having a conversation consisting entirely of their own personal in-jokes. I might be able to understand the jokes, but that doesn't guarantee that I'll laugh at them myself.