Superbad (2007)

Superbad
Dir. Greg Mottola
Premiered August 17, 2007

The first ads I saw for Superbad were banner ads on MySpace. The film was advertised as “from the creators of Knocked Up,” provoking my immediate dismissal. Clearly this was going to be a cheap cash-in on Knocked Up’s success, starring two unknowns, one of whom I only knew from an obscure TV show nobody else had seen (yet). In reality, Superbad turned out to be the far superior film.

I don’t remember what turned me around on the idea, but certainly the TV ads helped, especially the ones with McLovin. Without giving away the best jokes, the campaign presented us with a teen movie with a very different, very teenage sense of humor. And then the actual movie took it to the next level. For that reason, Superbad is one of my top five favorite films, and probably always will be.

Most movies about teenagers suck because they’re not really about teenagers– they either exploit hoary old tropes to show nudity and wildness, or they simply put adult stories and characters in high school drag (remember that weird trend of teen adaptations of classic literature?). Superbad does neither. It is a raunchy comedy about teenage stupidity that’s also heartfelt, earnest, and empathetic.

Seth (Jonah Hill) and Evan (Michael Cera) are two best friends about to graduate high school and start college. Evan has been accepted to Dartmouth, which Seth couldn’t even dream of, and the fear of losing their friendship has kept them from dealing with the inevitable consequences of their separation. Instead, the two try to win the affections of their mutual crushes (Emma Stone and Martha McIsaac) by acquiring alcohol for their end-of-year party, with the help of dorky hanger-on Fogell (Christopher Mintz-Plasse) who has recently acquired a fake ID that would be convincing except that the name on the card simply reads “McLovin.”

From this starting point, Superbad is tight and controlled; director Greg Mottola blesses the film with a clearly-defined aesthetic that most comedies sorely lack. Over the course of a single day, a random encounter with two grossly irresponsible police officers (Bill Hader and Seth Rogen) sets the guys off on a desperate After Hours-esque adventure, forcing them to reconcile their friendship and their future.

I don’t want to give Superbad credit for what it doesn’t do, but that certainly contributed to its success at the time, and I’ve yet to see a teen movie that has followed in its footsteps in such a way.

First, Superbad is not a romance. Although the film has love interests (and Emma Stone and Jonah Hill really do have chemistry here), the main conflict is over a platonic friendship between two young men. The fact that so many have read gay subtext into this film says as much about the frequent homoeroticism of adolescence (and the movie definitely has fun with that) as it does about the fact that close male friendships don’t get a lot of love in Hollywood. And they should, because it’s a huge, huge part of growing up that never seems to get its due.

Second, the teenagers act like teenagers. They don’t look 25 or have perfect skin or hair, or wear the latest fashions from Paris. They do not exist in the preordained, personality-based Apartheid state that high school is typically depicted as. They talk like teenagers. They swear incessantly like teenagers, but they’re also very clever like teenagers can sometimes be. And the whole film is permeated by a very teenage anxiety: the idea that everybody seems to know what’s going on except you.

And that’s what really makes Superbad hold up. It’s written in good faith, really trying to tell a teenage story. Screenwriters Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg claim to have started the script when they were only 13 years old; obviously it went through many drafts as their perspectives and writing skills improved, but something very important managed to survive that process. They didn’t go into it hoping to imitate or capitalize on anything that came before, but simply make something new: a comedy of youth as youth sees it.

How Did It Do?
Superbad grossed $169.9 million against a $20 million budget– an uncommonly lean budget for an Apatow production, but it’s worth remembering that Apatow neither wrote nor directed. It earned a well-deserved 87% rating on RottenTomatoes, but failed to make any notable year-end lists, in contrast to Knocked Up, which was only slightly better-received at the time. This may be credited to the fact that Superbad ended up relying so heavily on the Apatow name, which had only become famous as a result of Knocked Up a few months before.

At the same time, a small contingent of critics took Superbad much more seriously than Knocked Up. Wesley Morris used the word “sophisticated” –in a negative review, no less. Stephen Farber compared it to American Graffiti and Y Tú Mamá También. The seeds for Superbad’s legacy were already sown.

Perhaps most astonishingly, Superbad, a raunchy teen sex comedy that broke the record for most utterances of the word “fuck” per minute, re-defined Seth Rogen as a cinematic renaissance man. Having co-written Superbad at 13 and having become a staff writer for a network TV series at 18, he went on to become a regular presence on both sides of the camera and on both the big and small screen, finally turning to directing with Evan Goldberg on This is the End and The Interview. So too have co-stars Jonah Hill and Emma Stone, who both broke out in the wake of Superbad’s success and have each received multiple Academy Award nominations.

This is what great comedy can do.

Next Time: 3:10 to Yuma

Knocked Up (2007)

Knocked Up
Dir. Judd Apatow
Premiered at SXSW March 12, 2007

I don’t know what it was like for the rest of you, but for me, Knocked Up came out of nowhere. Despite living in Southern California, where the film industry spends disproportionate sums on local advertising, I never saw a single trailer, TV spot, or poster for the film. I just woke up one day and there on the cover of Time Magazine was screenwriter/star Seth Rogen, America’s unlikely sweetheart.

Now, let me say this: I like Seth Rogen. He has a very warm presence and a gift for comedic timing, and those things both come out in this film. He’s also an incredibly gifted writer, having begun screenwriting at 14 and earning a plum sitcom writing job straight out of high school. So I’m glad he broke out. I’m just a little confused as to how his big break was this movie.

Rogen stars as Ben Stone, a perpetually broke pothead living with his friends as they try to create a website that documents nude scenes in films, not realizing that such services already exist. Ben has an unlikely one-night stand with the rich, successful, aggressively gentile Allison Scott (Katherine Heigl), resulting in an unplanned pregnancy that causes the two to get back in touch and reconcile their very different lives. In the process, Ben befriends Allison’s brother-in-law (Paul Rudd), who begins to question his own relationship with Allison’s sister (Leslie Mann).

Before I say anything else: this film has some very good jokes. But the film succeeds only as a vehicle for those jokes, surprisingly few and far between as they may be; not so much as a movie.

A few critics more inclined toward demagoguery have decried the film’s message as little more than antiquated, borderline fascist propaganda, and while I see where they’re coming from, anyone can see that those problems are merely side-effects of poor execution. First, Allison briefly discusses abortion with her mother, but decides to keep the baby. This I can easily forgive, as without the pregnancy, there’s no movie. Second, the film ends with Ben and Allison staying together, implying that they’ll eventually get married. The idea being that Judd Apatow is telling unhappy couples to “do it for the kids.”

But that’s the problem. The movie wants us to root for them to stay together, but these people should not be together. At her worst, Allison is bitter and contemptuous toward Ben and ultimately just learns to tolerate him for the sake of their child. Ben eventually grows up and gets a job (which I imagine is really easy fresh out of college with zero experience), but that doesn’t make him any more of a match for her. To her credit, Heigl actually complained about her character’s lack of humor when the film came out, but she immediately undercut her complaint by going on to perform near-identical and often more shrewish roles in countless romantic “comedies.”

Speaking of romantic comedies, Knocked Up has no style. Much if not most of the film looks as glossy and anonymous as, say, The Other Woman or Think Like a Man. Director Judd Apatow’s continuing inability to portray people who aren’t wealthy or don’t work in the entertainment industry only seems to be getting worse with time, and it started here. And in a long tradition of learning all the wrong lessons, the film’s unusual running time somehow convinced Hollywood that movies are funnier when they’re an hour too long. While Knocked Up still has some very funny jokes and brought more good into the world than bad ultimately, it is most certainly less than the sum of its parts, and speaking as an adult, quite depressing.

Signs This Was Made in 2007
Ryan Seacrest dreams of an exit strategy from Iraq. Pete wants to watch Taxicab Confessions and got Hideki Matsui on his fantasy baseball roster. Lily Allen’s “Smile” makes its obligatory appearance. There’s a product placement for a Moto Razr. Allison’s first on-air interview is with Matthew Fox from Lost. Three separate references to the then-in-theaters Spider-Man 3. Jonah and Martin re-enact Murderball with hospital wheelchairs. Ben despises Steely Dan.

Additional Notes

• The economics of Knocked Up are a common complaint for Apatow films and rom-coms generally, but it’s even weirder here: Pete (Paul Rudd) can singlehandedly support a family of four in a giant house in Brentwood while working in the moribund music industry, yet Allison has a stable full-time job and still lives in his guesthouse.

• Since we’re on the subject of Mr. Apatow, I want to clarify that I don’t dislike him. I’ve worked on one of his shows, and I think he’s a great businessman with a real eye for great ideas and talented people, but since this film, whenever he’s in the director’s chair, it seems like he can’t get outside his own head.

• Debbie (Leslie Mann) is an anti-vaxxer, and the film treats it as just another example of her being an overprotective busybody, instead of, you know, fucking dangerous. It’s a minor line, but it completely undercuts the character’s credibility. Less than a year after this film came out, there was a huge mumps outbreak in a wealthy suburb of San Diego, and everyone was shocked that rich kids would get sick, and that’s when the whole anti-vaccine movement was essentially outed in America. Since then, the vaccination rate in Los Angeles’ affluent western suburbs, where this film takes place, have a lower child vaccination rate than South Sudan, where access to medical care is limited by a civil war. I don’t think Apatow would’ve taken the same approach if the character was, say, a creationist.

• At one point, there’s an earthquake, and Ben’s housemates and neighbors line up on the street afterward while police drive by for inspection. Having lived my entire life in California, I’m befuddled. The point of going outside during an earthquake is to get away from things falling on you. There’s no post-mortem muster involved.

• Another fucking contrived epidural irony. That was played out when they did it on Mad About You.

• Something I never noticed before: multiple visual references to Neil Young’s Landing on Water. If you can figure out why, be my guest.

• Ben gets an apartment in East LA and they get there by driving west from Santa Monica because sunsets are pretty.

• Easily, easily the only part of this film that truly holds up is the “chair scene” from Ben and Pete’s Vegas digression:

How Did It Do?
Comedy can’t really be engineered; things just kinda have to go right. But the desire to find a formula that will “make something funny” will never go away, and the…let’s call them systemic novelties…in Knocked Up gave Hollywood– or infected it with– the idea that the key to a successful comedy is to have a much longer running time and way more improvisation. This is how we got, among many, many other things, the Ghostbusters remake.

Sure, Knocked Up was a smash hit, grossing $219.1 million against a $30 million budget, it earned an 89% fresh rating on RottenTomatoes and a spot in way too many Top Ten lists, legitimized Seth Rogen as a screenwriter and comedic star outside the normal “funny fat guy” mold, and allowed Director Judd Apatow to become a true impresario of comedy, shaping tastes and making stars up to the very present– but as the hype has worn off, its ultimate legacy will be teaching filmmakers the wrong lessons, encouraging screenwriters and directors to treat all comedy like the very particular voices of a talented few.

But Knocked Up is still only one movie. Don’t count Apatow– or especially Rogen– out for 2007.

Next Time: Talk to Me