Yummy or Crummy?

OK I saw Superbad last Thursday thanks to SIFF’s free member preview, but I couldn’t post about it until today because of my web host moving fiasco. Anyway, I’m now happily hosted with Dreamhost, and moving the WordPress database over was surprisingly easy. Anyway, that’s for another day…

I was pretty excited when I got the email from SIFF telling me about the preview — I was sad when its screenings got cancelled during the festival this year. Well — it didn’t disappoint! It was really funny. The plot was not nonexistent, but it wasn’t important. It was just a way to get the characters from A to B — what made this movie fun to watch was all the things in between. It was like watching several episodes of a funny TV show strung together to make up a movie. Oh yeah, with swearing. The characters are familiar — geeks who dream of not graduating high school as virgins. The driver of the plot is almost too cleché, too — it’s to get to a party with booze so they can, you know, not graduate as virgins. But somehow the dialogue and all the subplots make this movie seem more fresh. The movie also doesn’t disappoint in the area of gross humor — these “lowbrow” comedies all seem to include one or two really filthy jokes just to try to top (bottom?) each other. It’s mild compared to other R rated movies, but it still gets laughs.

The incompetent/juvenile cop jokes last a bit too long, and that’s my only complaint. I’m definitely showing my age with these comparisons… But the writing is smarter than, say, Van Wilder, and it’s not as slap-sticky as Scary Movie (or the derivatives) or Dude, Where’s My Car? — the only thing I can think of that’s close is American Pie, but the characters are definitely more likable in Superbad!