Review: Superbad (2007)

Superbad
reviewed by Samuel Osborn

Director: Greg Mottola
Screenplay: Seth Rogen, Evan Goldberg
Cast: Jonah Hill, Michael Cera, Seth Rogen
MPAA Classification: R

Like Knocked Up and The 40 Year Old Virgin, Superbad has the feeling
of being absolutely effortless. It's a Judd Apatow requirement maybe
that no joke should be choked out by its characters. Honesty and
chemistry seem to be the only ingredients to his enormously profitable
formula. He sits in the Producer's chair for Superbad, letting Seth
Rogen and Evan Goldberg use their ten year old script and Greg Mottola
direct it. But Apatow has ushered in his own era of comic productions
in Hollywood. They're low-brow in their premises but entirely human
and wholly sincere in their execution. Superbad is no different,
pulling focus on two outcasts trying to wiggle somehow into the
exclusive social hierarchy of high school before they scoot off into
their separate lives at college. Girls are their only concern and like
the boys of American Pie, Seth and Evan are looking only to get laid.

The simplest way to explain Seth and Evan (Jonah Hill and Michael
Cera) is to say they would have no problem getting along with the
stoner Ben from Knocked Up and the sexless Andy from The 40 Year Old
Virgin. Molded too awkwardly to exist normally in the social world,
these characters are forced into situations far outside their comfort
zone. Here Seth, Evan, and their twice nerdy friend Fogell
(Christopher Mintz-Plasse) are asked to score the alcohol for a party
that evening at Jule's house, Seth's big crush. Depending on the fact
that Fogell somehow has obtained a phony I.D., they boast that they
can buy the girls whatever they want; that they do this thing all the
time when, in fact, they've never set foot in a liquor store. It
doesn't help that Fogell's I.D. claims that he's a 25 year old
Hawaiian named McLovin. And as any teenager knows, finding alcohol is
never a simple task.

The boys' shenanigans drive them deep into the night and late to the
party, but glorious in their possession of alcohol for their underaged
peers. These peers, thankfully, actually look like their peers. By
this I mean that the extras and peripheral characters look believably
under the age of twenty-one. I'm so tired of muscled, bearded thirty-
somethings posing as bodacious high schoolers. The students here are
entirely convincing as real live students.

The funny thing about effortlessness is that rarely is it in fact
effortless. But the effort involved is so well masked that we accept
it as something easy and natural. Like the previous Apatow
concoctions, casting and scripting are the main players; minutely
calibrated to bubble up a critical mass of on-screen chemistry for the
actors to play with. Jonah Hill from previous Apatow films and Michael
Cera of "Arrested Development" fame are superb choices as Seth and
Evan. Director Greg Mottola handles Mr. Rogen and Mr. Golberg's
script adroitly and manages to funkify what could have been a pop-
music mood, bringing in music from the Bar-Kays, Rick James, Curtis
Mayfield and The Roots. The result is a swell continuation of Apatow
and his crew's success.
Samuel Osborn