Word: superbad
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...Today we have the summer's last major comedy: Superbad, produced by Apatow and co-written by Rogen. It's about a pudgy, mouthy slob named Seth (Jonah Hill) and his quieter, slightly more kempt buddy Evan (Michael Cera) who want, with variously intense degrees of desperation, to get laid before they graduate from high school. At the end of a night of wacky hijinks, the lads do wind up in a sleeping bag, exchanging intimacies with...each other...
...allows him several opportunities to stick his face in Jon Heder's crotch. Sandler's summer hit, I Now Pronounce You Chuck & Larry, took guy-guy friendship to its logical conclusion: two firefighters get married. At least that seemed as far as boy-meets-boy comedies could go, until Superbad's cuddle-up scene...
...Colbert Report, and was asked what was possibly left to show in male comedies, he instantly answered, "A penis." I don't doubt that Apatow was speaking ironically, yet there was self-revelation there to, since that's exactly the sexual organ that the fellows in Knocked Up and Superbad (and his earlier The 40-Year-Old Virgin) are most obsessed...
...pretty small minority of critics who aren't enchanted by the Apatow movies. The first four reviews I read online this morning of Superbad, all by women, in the New York and L.A. Timeses and the Washington and New York Posts, ranged from favorable to ecstatic. Manohla Dargis' notice in the New York Times described the film's phallo-neurosis with a gusto that soared into poetry: "If the penis is puzzled in Portnoy's Complaint, as Alexander Portnoy's shrink believes, in Superbad it is thoroughly, stunningly clueless and as violently tremulous as a divining rod at Hoover...
...caveats, then, before I go ranting on like the crank at the christening. I'm not a prude. I enjoy a good dirty joke, including more than a few in Knocked Up and Superbad. In my time I've praised ribald comedies (Clerks comes immediately to mind) and male-bonding frolics (Sideways). I don't mind the Apatow movies; I'm not trying to make anyone feel guilty for liking them more than I do. I just wonder why they've become the template for popular and critically acclaimed comedy, and why guy-guy is just about the only kind...