Superbad (2007) -vs- American Pie (1999)
The Smackdown. Can you believe that it's been ten years since the release of "American Pie"? July 9 marks a full decade since Eugene Levy caught his son Jim doing, well, unspeakable things to innocent baked fruit. I remember thinking that it was a great comedy if only I could keep my teenage boys from ever seeing the film. At the time, back in '99 when Clinton was riding out a rocky ending based on having oral sex in the Oval Office, it seemed kind of quaint to see the President of the United States getting impeached for doing something the kids in "American Pie" thought wasn't even real sex. Their theme was "All the Way by Graduation Day." Ah, nostalgia...
"American Pie" re-defined a genre and paved the way for "Superbad" to do it again eight years later in 2007. Both "American Pie" and "Superbad" remind us that you're never too old to relive the total humiliation of your teenage years, nor to remember (if you're a guy) just how much you wanted to get in the Club and to realize it might just be out of reach.
Both of these raunchy films (with the now obligatory "heart") give us groups of horny high school guys who would really like to have shed their virginity so they can truly relax and enjoy graduation, knowing that they will not have to spend the rest of their lives lying about what they did and did not do by the end of that fateful senior year. They know, apparently, that a diploma for merely passing classes is so not what it's about. Both of these films -- released eight years apart -- hit the gold with audiences of all ages and theaters during both releases were filled with actual screams of laughter. This ain't gonna be easy...but let's get started with the challenger...
The Challenger. By the time "Superbad" came out, the option of somehow keeping my kids from seeing it had pretty much expired so I threw in the towel and went with my teenager. We'd just returned from a family vacation, jet-lagged as all hell but, as it turns out, this film was so entertaining and outrageous that the last thing you will ever do while watching it is go to sleep. As written by Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg (who named the two leads after themselves), the film starts with dick-jokes and similar raunch and never stops but, the thing is, the dialogue all feels very fluid and confident, even if underneath it all, it's also just a little sad. The point is, most reviews will now tell you, it's really not about the sex-jokes, it's about the friendship between Seth (Jonah Hill) and Evan (Michael Cera). Well, yeah, and the sex-jokes. A third-wheel friend, Fogell, played by new kid Christopher Mintz-Plasse pretty much steals the show and the moniker "McLovin" has probably forever entered the nation's vocabulary. These Three Musketeers have two goals for the evening of the last night of high school: first, supply booze to a party being thrown by a popular girl so they can achieve, second, some kind of sexual experience, no matter how messy and potentially humiliating.
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