Superbad

Superbad is neither super, nor completely bad. Bill (Jonah Hill) and Ben (Michael Cera) are nice guys. So much so that you end up willing them to get laid at last. But what good is that when the duo at the typewriter gives them such paper-rustling dialogs. They try so hard to be “obscene and natural about something important" like when Kevin Smith writes them, but they end up being obscene and about nothing. Just a little spiced up with a pop culture reference in every other sentence. But just for the sake of it, not because it fits. Another down point is the length. Not even the ending of The Return of the King drags on this long. This way a few really good scenes and ideas are drowned under a ton of filler. And not the flavored filler like you get at McDonald’s, but ordinary, flavorless filler from McLovin. P.S.: Any similarity with my review for Knocked Up is fully intentional. (14/06/2008)

Superbad is probably the best movie produced by Judd Apatow. It’s so earnest and depicts the problems of teenagers so aptly that it might move you to tears. It is a crazy comedy about the shenanigans of a couple of young guys, in which the innovative screenwriting ideas and dialogue might give you more “film pleasure” than the Coen brothers’ sophisticated humor. And not many teen comedies are able to do that. I want a sequel! I want more of Seth, Evan and Fogell! (17/03/2008)

More than a decade on, Superbad has managed to become an important turning point in the moribund genre of teen comedies, whose target audience then started getting targeted by the grandiose Young Adult productions which more and more revised the dialogue (i.e. the cornerstone of teen comedies) into theses that could better reach teenagers confused about their role in the vast and ambivalent world opened up to them by the internet and, eventually, social networks in particular. Teen comedies continue to be made, but not for teenagers, only for those who grew up on them in the first decade of the new millennium and continue refusing to grow up, see Ted, Observe and Report, 22 Jump Street, Pineapple Express, etc. The last scene of Superbad, therefore, is essentially a symbolic farewell to a decade of comedies about the eternal sunshine of the spotless mind and the power of high school friendship. Along with the first installment of American Pie, it forms the zeitgeist of the world of American teenagers at that time: while in Pie we see a post-MTV society just getting used to the existence of the internet, but still resorting to the improvised physical stimuli of porno magazines or warm apple pie, Superbad chronicles adolescence just before the advent of social networking. Here, the actors are on the phone all the time, there are several jokes built around it (have you tried calling anyone under the age of 25 on the phone these days?), and in the end they have no way of resolving the situation except in person. And so simulating the ideal conditions for this will require a lot of dissembling and alcohol, ergo lots of fun when there’s a decent screenwriter on board, and Goldberg and Rogen were very much in form at the time. ___ Otherwise, personally, those of us who grew up around 2005, sharing cigarettes on park benches after school, figuring out whose parents were going away for the weekend and who had the money for booze, only to have no girls show up anyway so we'd end up just playing Dragon’s Den or Quake III all weekend, we generally tend to find the movie more credible. ___ Yeah, and those kind of objective pros: Jonah Hill is unreal, some of the piggish dialogue should be framed ("You know when you hear girls say ‘Ah man, I was so shit-faced last night, I shouldn't have fucked that guy?’ We could be that mistake!", "You don't want girls thinking you suck dick at fucking pussy.") and I'd go a long way for Emma Stone. (06/01/2019)

This is such a crazy, stupid, filthy and incredibly funny comedy with great actors, I don't understand how I didn't know it until now. It's nothing intelligent, but I laughed so hard. There's not much more I can write about it, everyone needs to see this. It's similar to Project X, so fans should like it. (28/02/2020)

It is not gratuitously vulgar, it is funny as hell and affably sensitive at the end. An excellent script that isn't afraid to go for the absurd at times, but mostly keeps it pretty real and believable. The film has well written and acted characters and it’s generally a terrible pleasure to watch. I'm looking forward to giving this one a second go. Much more entertaining than Knocked Up for me personally. (15/10/2007)