Superbad **** (2007, Jonah Hill, Michael Cera, Christopher Mintz-Plasse, Emma Stone, Bill Hader, Seth Rogen) – Classic Movie Review 3663

Director Greg Mottola’s hilarious 2007 American teen bromance comedy stars Jonah Hill and Michael Cera as high school senior losers Seth and Evan, inseparable best friends who lament their pathetic sad virginity and terrible social standing during their last weeks of high school. This all seems to change when they luck into an invitation to a party, and they spend a long day trying to score enough alcohol, with the help of their even nerdier buddy Fogell.

Fogell buys the alcohol with his fake ID in the name of ‘McLovin’, but a robber enters the store, punches him in the face, and steal cash from the register.

Loaded with raunchy controversial jokes, Superbad was a sensation in the US as the highest American grossing high school comedy at the time. It is one of the best of the many hit films produced by Judd Apatow.

It is written con gusto by Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg, who began working on the script when they were 13 and completed it when they were 15. It is loosely based on their own experience as seniors in Vancouver in the late Nineties. As you see, the film’s main characters even have their names. Fogell was also a real friend of the duo. Rogen was to play Seth, but as the film took over seven years to complete from scripting in 2000, he had to swap to Officer Michaels.

If Hill and Cera are hilarious, and they are, Christopher Mintz-Plasse is hysterical as Fogell/’McLovin’, while Bill Hader and Seth Rogen play police officers Slater and Michaels, who arrive to investigate the store robbery. If the script has gusto, the performances have even more of it.

On a $20 million budget, it earned $170 million ($121.5 million of that in the US and Canada).

Superbad was released on DVD and Blu-ray on 4 December 2007 in two versions: theatrical (113 minutes) and unrated (118 minutes).

Promoting Bad Neighbours 2 in 2016, Rogen looks back and comments on the homo-eroticism played for laughs in Superbad: ‘There are probably some jokes in Superbad that are bordering on blatantly homophobic at times. They’re all in the voice of high school kids, who do speak like that. But I think we’d also be silly not to acknowledge that we also were, to some degree, glamorising that type of language in a lot of ways.’

Of course he does this all over all again in Bad Neighbours (2104) and Bad Neighbours 2.

And, talking about playing things for laughs, it is the plan of Seth and Evan to get Emma Stone’s character Jules and Martha MacIsaac’s character Becca drunk so they can have sex with them.

As Mintz-Plasse was only 17 at the time of filming, his mother was required to be present on set during his sex scene. Awkward or what?

Ten years on, in 2017, Emma Stone is an Oscar winner and the year’s highest-paid actress, banking $26 million pre-tax. Who’d have thought it?

© Derek Winnert 2016 Classic Movie Review 3663

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