Boys Behaving Badly
PODHORETZ, JOHN
Boys Behaving Badly An 'extremely right-wing movie with extremely filthy dialogue.' by John Podhoretz Superbad—a horrifyingly foul-mouthed, shockingly hilarious, and surprisingly moving new teen...
...But they're certainly second-tier material...
...They are, rather, consumed with conversational one-upsmanship in the tradition of Prince Hal and Falstaff— a lifelong two-man race to see who can say the most raw, most shocking, most appalling things possible...
...The chief problem with Superbad is the spate of repellent copycat pictures it will surely spawn—movies devoid of its rueful honesty but full of nauseating filth-speak...
...Evan is an achiever heading off to Dartmouth...
...Seth barrels his way ineffectually through life while Evan sidles about like a hermit crab...
...But what makes Superbad a clas-sic—and it is a classic, the best such movie since Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982)—isn't its social commentary but its superbly detailed and immensely touching depiction of a desperately close friendship between two boys that is fast coming to an end...
...Sweet and nervous, the undeniably intelligent Evan is so inhibited around women that he is unable to read the favorable signals a pretty classmate keeps sending his way (by the end of their conversation, she is practically using semaphore...
...Will the boys ever get to the party...
...But the cop subplot does benefit from the presence in the police cruiser of the memorable third wheel in the Seth-Evan friendship—the uber-nerd Fogell, who decided to dub himself "McLovin" on his fake ID...
...The portly Jonah Hill is Seth Rogen as a teenager, and just like Rogen, he's funny and aggressive and annoying and motor-mouthed...
...Each of them eventually has an embarrassing and literally sobering experience with the girl of his dreams...
...You really shouldn't see Superbad if the sound of that line disgusts you— because it's one of the milder sides in the film...
...Earlier in the summer, Seth Rogen starred in Knocked Up, the hit comedy written and directed by Judd Apatow about a slacker and an accomplished woman who try to establish a relationship when she becomes pregnant with his child after a one-night stand...
...Doubtless some parents will blame Superbad when they catch their sons spouting off like Seth and Evan, but trust me on this one: Boys have always been boys...
...That seems an easy task, because they have a car and their friend Fogell, an unquestioned loser, has gotten himself a fake ID...
...Its remarkably talented authors, Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg, began crafting their screenplay as 13-year-olds in Vancouver, and Superbad is the apotheosis of profane teen talk...
...More important: Will they fulfill their cheap, low, and adolescent goal for the evening, which is to get the hostess and another cute classmate drunk so that they can have sex...
...Superbad has its weak spots—in particular, a subplot involving two lunatic cops (one played by Rogen) that is so wild and silly it seems to have come out of one of those bad teen comedies from which Seth and Evan received their bad education about girls...
...But it's male waif Michael Cera, stumbling, blushing, stammering, and pausing his way through the movie as Evan, who is the revelation here...
...We make extremely right-wing movies with extremely filthy dialogue," Rogen told Time...
...You've held me back for years," a drunken Evan finally tells Seth in a rage, and we can see that what he is saying is true...
...Seth and Evan have learned their wisdom about women and what they want from teen comedies, and over the course of the movie they learn that these adolescent male fantasies have nothing to do with what females are really like...
...You know how girls are always saying, 'I was so wasted last night, I shouldn't have slept with that guy?'" declares Seth...
...Considering that Superbad is going to be nothing less than Harry Potter for teen boys, Mottola won't be going back to purgatory anytime soon...
...They are also firmly in the Laurel and Hardy tradition—Seth an abrasive porker, Evan a gangly wraith...
...Suddenly the simple task of getting some bottles and cans to a high-school party becomes a tortuous odyssey...
...But then the car is towed and Fogell gets punched in the face during a liquor-store robbery, which leads Seth and Evan to think he's been busted for his phony ID...
...We could be that mistake...
...The 19-year-old Cera seems to be channeling Jack Lemmon, only Lemmon didn't have a scintilla of Cera's disarming sweetness while Cera doesn't have a scintilla of Lemmon's on-the-verge-of-a-nervous-breakdown aggressiveness...
...Seth and Evan, friends since infancy, are graduating...
...Seth is a layabout going to a state school...
...In terms of dialogue, Superbad is without question the crudest mainstream movie ever made...
...Despite the plotline Rogen and Goldberg have cooked up, which includes a flashback to a nine-year-old Evan obsessively drawing phallic images during his third-grade classes, the characters they've named after themselves aren't really sex-crazed...
...Apatow is the producer of Superbad, a movie whose painful sex scenes might be frightening enough to convince impressionable teens of both sexes to take vows of lifelong celibacy...
...delighted to find themselves invited to a cool party in part because they promise to supply the alcohol...
...Boys Behaving Badly An 'extremely right-wing movie with extremely filthy dialogue.' by John Podhoretz Superbad—a horrifyingly foul-mouthed, shockingly hilarious, and surprisingly moving new teen comedy that will probably be the best-known and most fondly remembered Hollywood picture of 2007 a quarter-century from now—is set on a Friday two weeks before the end of the school year...
...Christopher Mintz-Plasse, who plays McLovin, is beyond delightful in the part...
...They are, therefore, shocked and John Podhoretz, a columnist for the New York Post, is The Weekly Standard's movie critic...
...I can't remember a fresher comic performance...
...They are classic high-school oddballs—not losers, exactly, because they're funny and because most other kids seem to like them fine...
...Their friendship is full of jagged edges: Evan can't bear to tell Seth that he and Fogell are going to room together at Dartmouth because he rightly fears Seth's jealous wrath...
...This is one of the moments that demonstrates the deft and delicate touch of the movie's director, Greg Mottola, who came out of nowhere to make one of the most auspicious debuts in decades with his superb The Daytrippers (1996) and then oddly descended into cinematic purgatory until the release of this picture...
Vol. 12 • August 2007 • No. 46
