Superbad

I finally got to see this yesterday with my friend Curtis, on a fun little playdate that involved us getting to the theater tragically early (two hours before the damn movie started) and having to find ways of keeping our interest up before we could actually enter the auditorium. What this eventually entailed, as per my own suggestion, was to explore the woods behind the theater a bit, during which stumbled upon a purse and a hairbrush scattered about on the ground in a most unsavory way.

Once we got into the theater, we got treated to a nice treat, as, while most of the previews were kind of ass (particularly the Walk the Line parody with John C. Reilly, which looked like another entry into the Anchorman/Talladega shitfest), we were surprised by the discovery of a sequel to Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle, which was one of the great comedic surprises of the decade. The only other trailer that really looked any good at all was the one with Will Arnett and his brother trying to get a child to show off to their dad before he dies. Beyond that, all the trailers were ass, and there were quite a lot of them.

Of course, I’m sure you’re reading this to find out what I thought of the movie itself, now that I’ve bored you for two paragraphs describing my entire day. Oh, I forgot to mention that before we went to the theater we had a fairly sub-par meal at P.J. Whelihan’s, in which I ate a burger while fighting off a surprising number of flies. There, my full day for you all.

So anyway, the movie itself was actually really good. Most of the humor involved actually sprung from the characters themselves rather than from stupid plot contrivances like in most present day comedies, and the characters themselves were actually (gasp and horror) fully realized, three dimensional people that you could easily believe existed in the real world. The plot hinges upon the three main characters and their desperate quest to procure booze for a high school graduation party so that girls there will be drunk enough to sleep with social outcasts like themselves. In this way, so reasons Jonah Hill, they’ll be able to have summer girlfriends to practice having sex with so that they won’t embarrass themselves when they get to college. It’s a surprisingly well thought out plan for a high school kid to think of, I have to admit.

Where the movie works is in how it treats its characters as real, and doesn’t try to caricature them in any way. It understands just how obsessive high schoolers are regarding things like sex and alcohol, but also understands just how lousy parties based around alcohol can often be, and doesn’t mind letting its characters learn of this. Even the side plot with Fogell palling around with the cops, which seems at first somewhat out of place given the borderline realism of the main plot, is eventually explained in a surprisingly intelligent and emotional manner.

While I still wouldn’t list it as my favorite comedy of the year (that honor is reserved for Hot Fuzz), it’s still a really great movie, and one that you should all be checking out (of course, by its box-office take, it seems probably that you didn’t really need this advice). Unless you’re someone that really hates the entire concept of the teen sex comedy, and are intent on hating anything in that vein, you should enjoy this quite a bit.