Ray Pride

"Superbad" may have more profanity in it than any recent American movie; if you thought "Knocked Up" had its share of tender filth, you ain’t heard nothing yet.

And yet…"Superbad" is a movie I’m still thinking about weeks after I first saw it. Produced by Judd Apatow ("Freaks and Geeks," "40-Year-Old Virgin," "Knocked Up") and directed by Greg Mottola ("Arrested Development," "The Daytrippers"), "Superbad" is a script that writers Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg had been working on since their late teens. Three teenagers have several hours to find a way to get liquor to impress the girls at a party they’ve unexpectedly been invited to. Seth (Jonah Hill, "Knocked Up") is wide-eyed, f-word-spraying and the horniest of the crew; Evan (serene Michael Cera, "Arrested Development") is the quietly deadpan straightman of the bunch and their dorkiest friend is Fogell (Christopher Mintz-Plasse), who, as the story evolves, is revealed as the most obtusely confident character in view. Mintz-Plasse is a newcomer, but he’s also amazing, and not at all condescended to by the movie as a whole.

It’s not "American Pie" or "American Brew," and amid the rampage of verbal gags, there’s characterization and mortification galore, and a portrait of teen friendship that’s remarkably sophisticated. At a chaotic interview a few weeks ago after a Chicago word-of-mouth screening of the reportedly $18-million-budgeted comedy, I attempted to interview the three at a nearby restaurant, but it was tough going: several guys in their thirties who’d been at the screening ambled over to tell them how funny they thought they’d been; Mintz-Plasse, only 18, pale and mild in person, Cera, 19, who’s very funny yet very quiet and Hill, 23, who’s physically and verbally akin to Rogen himself, were wide-eyed but nonplussed as publicists shooed the well-wishers away. When we were done, on the sidewalk outside, a blonde woman in her mid-twenties stood directly in front of Cera. "You’re Michael." "Yes." "Michael." "Yes." "From ‘Arrested Development.’" "Hi, I’m Michael, and you are!" "I just love you! You’re so great." After a hug, Cera says, "That is so strange." (There are multiple reports of women reacting that way to him.) The clearest answer I got about the movie, aside from seeing how the trio interact, was from Hill, who’s passionate about his own work as a screenwriter, and how Apatow, as has been said many times, doesn’t think a joke belongs in a movie, no matter how funny, unless it moves the scene or the character along. The film was shot in a blue-green palette, mostly at night, on high-definition video, which affords comedians, and especially ones who improvise, new latitude. Hill told me that there were some scenes where they tried variations for up to forty minutes without cutting, without having to reset lights or reload cameras. It extends the working method of this new school of comedy, where a funny script is shoehorned with even more funny embarrassments once the actors, who are often actor-writers, get in front of the camera. The result? "Superbad." (The hyperrealism of the guys' desires and self-awareness is leavened by an extended parallel plot involving two utterly irresponsible policemen, played by Rogen and Bill Hader, who get into monstrously absurd trouble.)

But there are quieter things working here: a while after seeing the movie, you realize that the Seth character is explosively profane because of a level of frustration and embarrassment just shy of middle-aged apoplexy, and there’s a girlish jealousy anytime he feels slighted by lifelong friend Evan. And Fogell, tall, thin, pale, a know-it-all who doesn’t even notice when he’s getting knocked around, is a superb conception, and Mintz-Plasse probably now holds the title for most well-rounded nerd-geek-future-mogul character in American teen movies. The girls in the film are also interestingly cast: striking, but attractive in an auditioning-would-be-actress-next-door kind of way. Their characters have their own foibles and follies.

Two notable passages: there’s a liquor-slaked adult party that Evan and Seth find themselves at through a very squeamish series of events, and the casting is sheer genius: each face around the room, whenever the camera pans, brings out another individual, who, you realize, is stylized through Seth’s consciousness: this is a world, a party, a potential prison yard, filled with every kind of fucked-up grown-up who fills him with fear. (Cue the dirty-dancing menstrual blood.) This is the moment "Superbad" becomes an "After Hours," but underage. But the joke that amazes I should skirt around, but I will merely note that it is a single nonsense word that winds up being spoken maybe a hundred times, coming in a close second to all the "fucks" in the film. That word? "Mclovin." And the amazing thing is that against all the familiar "rules" of comedy, it gets funnier and funnier and funnier until it’s a total term of approbation by the end of the movie, an honorifical after a series of potential cataclysmic rites of passage. There’s more to the movie, of course: the barrage of inspired teen verbiage is accompanied by all sorts of subtleties and patterning to which a nod in the direction of Mr. Mottola is well deserved.

"Superbad" opens Friday.

(2007-08-14)

Also by Ray Pride

Engineering This Fiasco
Kinsella's writing-directing debut, "Orchard Vale," an experimental feature about a band of outsiders after an off-screen collapse of civilization, opens the 14th Chicago Underground Film Festival on August 15, just a few weeks after his decision to leave the band Make Believe
(2007-08-10)

Engineering This Fiasco
Ever prolific, Tim Kinsella, who began his public life as a musician at the age of 16 in the band Cap'n Jazz, has recorded dozens of albums since, and with the meltdown of the music industry, has shifted to filmmaking, itself a troubled medium for anyone wanting to make a career today. His writing-directing debut, "Orchard Vale"
(2007-08-07)

Tip of the Week
Russian émigré Julia Loktev’s fiercely controlled, compellingly opaque, gorgeously austere "Day Night Day Night" pares and parses sound and image as she quietly, methodically, observes a polite, tiny young woman of indeterminate ethnicity, speaking with flat, compliant American inflection, in the hours before a suicide mission
(2007-08-07)

Life after Life
Charles Burnett’s great, fluky, lyrical, post-neo-realist, nearly lost, eighty-minute valentine of verisimilitude to 1970s Watts and to the struggles of the American working class is a 16mm student film, black-and-white with offhanded yet lyrical photography (yet always of documentary intensity), shot over a year of weekends for about $10,000, but it is a loving, attentive dream, detailed with the rhythms of a life almost none of us have lived
(2007-07-31)

Tip of the Week
(2007-07-31)

Somewhere Over the Rainbo
(2007-07-24)

The Odyssey
(2007-07-24)

Tip of the Week
(2007-07-24)

Space Odyssey
(2007-07-17)

Tip of the Week
(2007-07-17)

Bombs Away
(2007-07-13)

iPhone Has a Home
(2007-07-10)

about Newcitychicago | about Newcity magazine | advertising | privacy policy | FAQ | employment