Superbad

Superbad is the best comedy I've seen this year, a gleefully profane look at what it's like to be a virginal, perpetually horny teen. Though it is packaged in 1970's blaxploitation veneer (complete with a funk-heavy soundtrack and opening credits that recall Cleopatra Jones and Dolemite), this film is very contemporary, and also smart and even sometimes sweet. It was written by Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg, and is apparently something they've been working on for years, and is about their own high school experiences. It was directed by Greg Mottola and produced by Judd Apatow, who now seems to be king of cinema comedy, after The 40-Year-Old Virgin and Knocked Up.

The story is basically an odyssey, though on a much smaller scale than a man sailing back to Ithaca. Seth and Evan, too high school kids and best friends, are about to graduate. They don't get invited to many parties, but because their friend Fogell is getting a fake ID, they've promised to bring booze to a party thrown by Jules, who is Seth's inamorata. The rest of the film details how they go about getting liquor and transporting it to the party, but along they way their friendship endures stresses and they run across a menagerie of bizarre characters.

The two leads are terrific. Jonah Hill seems to be a cross between Curly Howard and Larry Fine, and is the engine of this piece, sputtering vulgarities at every turn. He thinks only about getting laid, or at least about "pussy," since at the beginning of the picture he has finally decided which Internet porn site to subscribe to. His friend Evan, played by Michael Cera, is more thoughtful and subdued, and seems to live vicariously through the bombast of Seth. Evan has gotten into Dartmouth, but Seth did not, so the boys are starting to undergo separation anxiety, as their friendship will certainly suffer when they attend different schools.

Seth lusts after Jules, played by Emma Stone, and Evan has it bad for Becca, played by Martha McIsaac. The screenplay is smart enough that both of these girls, while very pretty, are not femme fatales, and are basically good eggs. Fogell is memorably played by Christopher Mintz-Plasse, a performance that should be the standard for actors playing nerds in the future. Though he is about 100 pounds and looks like a strong wind could break him in two, he has a defiant swagger that makes him irresistible. Who else would choose the single-moniker "McLovin" as the name on his fake ID?

The only misstep in this film, and it's a significant one in terms of time, are the characters of two cops, played by Rogen and Bill Hader. They befriend "McLovin" when he is assaulted during a liquor store holdup, and he rides along with them as they make a bad name for peace officers everywhere. I'm not naive enough to think that all cops are knights in blue like Malloy and Reed on Adam-12, but I'm doubtful that cops would get drunk, shoot at street signs, and do donuts in a parking lot, especially with a witness tagging along for the ride. It doesn't ring true, and seems more like Police Academy than anything else.

That being said, I laughed a lot at Superbad. There are too many good lines to even begin to catalogue them, but I especially liked a comparison Evan makes to Seth having some limited success with the girls too early. "You were like Orson Welles," he said, referring to another genius of a sort who had early success too soon. Imagining the comparison between Brillo-haired Seth and Orson Welles is going to stick with me for a long time.