Superbad – Not really a review.

Every now and then you discover a restaurant that you just have to take your friend’s to eat.  Same thing can apply to a new web service or a new band.  For me, those happen more frequently than it does for a movie, but it does sometimes happen.  Some of my friends can remember being dragged out to see Powder when it opened in 1995.  Now it has happened again with Superbad.

I first saw Superbad the Monday after it opened while away at a conference.  I was hilarious.  There are a lot of great lines that you walk out quoting to your companions.  However, its hard to really pin down what it is that made the movie so funny.  When Brian and I first saw it we both laughed our asses of but in discussing it we decided that it was probably a guy thing and that our female friends would probably not enjoy it quite as much.   We were wrong.  By the following Saturday we had seen the movie three times, each time with different people.

In talking to some of the ladies I know who have seen it, I discovered they found it every bit as enjoyable.  as anyone who has read a review probably knows, the acting by the the three younger male leads was superb.  They captured that perfect level of feigned coolness laid over an intense, visceral feeling of awkwardness.  The jokes, while coarse and often mysogenistic do not come across as rooted ina  truly misogynistic world view.  They are more like the fag and nigger jokes me and my friends repeated to each other when we were kids because that is what we heard at home and our unique personalities had not yet gelled into a state where we felt strong enough to buck the system.

Th extremely candid feel of many of the exchanges between Evan and Seth reminded me of the kinds of ridiculous in retrospect but critcally important at the time conversations I had with friends when I was a teenager.  That connection to my younger self allowed the jokes and gags to reacher deeper into my mind and made them that much funnier.

As Heinlien pointed out so well in Stranger in a Land, what is funny to humans is frequently the misfortune of others.  Much of the laughter you will experience watching Superbad comes from an deep feeling of "Thank God that’s not me!".

I’m clearly not alone on my love of this movie.  After over 30,000 votes on IMDB, Superbad has a average rating of 8.4 out of 10.   That puts it at #128 of the IMDB’s top 250 movies of all time (based on User voting).

One of the first exchanges in the film is quoted below.  It is dialogue like that which sets the stage for everything that follows.

Evan: You could always subscribe to a site like Perfect Ten. I mean that could be anything, it could be a bowling site.
Seth: Yeah, but it doesn’t actually show dick going in which is a huge concern.
Evan: Right, I didn’t realize that.
Seth: Besides, have you ever seen a vagina by itself?
Evan: No.
Seth: (shakes his head) Not for me.