by Matt Morgan-Rawes

Created on: August 04, 2008

Superbad is a comedy aimed at the teenage demographic, focusing on sex, smut, bumping uglies, doing the dirty, making that special love cuddle etc.

It sounds crude and, trust me, in places the language is delightfully coarse and the observations made about sex, masturbation and the courting of lovely young women by hapless, clueless gentlemen come thick and fast, mostly prematurely because by the time the film reaches an hour in length, directer Judd Apatow realises that he has to advance his plot. The film works more for me when it's just plain crude but the overtly sexual parts needed a sensetive counterpart to make the film work, much like Seth and Evan are dependent on each other despite being really quite different.

Superbad will inevitbaly be compared with the modern forefather of all teen comedies, the incomparable American Pie (strictly the first one only) and while the films can be seen as very similar (replace a pie with drawings of dicks, for example, for the crudest, cringe-worthy moment of both films respectively), I think that Superbad is a film that a lot of teenagers will be able to identify with.

American Pie was merely a voyeur, albeit a hilarious one. Although group leader Kevin made his speech about "the next step" and Oz - the insensitive, "dumb jock" stereotype - discovers the pleasure of actually getting to know and connact with a woman, American Pie is mostly hysterical car-crash comedy, each gross-out or embarrassing scene follows another and doubles your previous laughs. I found myself not really caring about the characters and their well-being because we had been positioned in such a detached way to the characters of American Pie and, in all honesty, I think we knew that everybody in American Pie would get laid. After all, the characters are good-looking enough for the big-screen.

Superbad, however, puts two very awkward characters under its spotlight. Evan is a very sensitive, thoughtful guy and quite often will get bumped into in the corridor as if he barely exists. You get the impression that Michael Cera doesn't just play the role of Evan - he IS Evan. In recent teen-flick Juno, Cera repeats his shy, awkward teen routine and almost perfects it. His partner-in-crimne, Seth, however, is a loud, obnoxious, overtly sexual boy with a couple of pretty large, obvious chips on his shoulder; he didn't get into the same, prestigious college as his best friend and he is also quite large; his white t-shirt strains over his swelling body, with

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