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It is rare that a film grips me by the funny bone from the opening credits, but Greg Mottola's "Superbad" does just that - a snazzy, retro-style credits sequence garnered a smile from me, and was just the first of many highly enjoyable moments in this film. The title of this film was undoubtedly a huge gamble, and if this film proved to be horrendously bad, the jibes from critics would start pouring in, but alas, I would deem Superbad to be one of the greatest comedies of the last decade, and perhaps further still.

As evidenced by the smash hit Knocked Up earlier this year, Judd Apatow, Seth Rogen, Evan Goldberg, and anyone else in their clique that I've neglected to mention, all seem to have a superb knack for dialogue that is not only insanely quotable, but also immensely authentic-sounding. Naturally these written lines would be nothing without the superb actors spouting them, but it's rare to see such a verisimilitude in films of the this ilk. Much of the dialogue is crude, but the writers get away with it because it has an intellectual undertone, a noted example of which is two characters discussing the cinematic merits of pornography

The two protagonists of Superbad are Seth (Jonah Hill) and Evan (Arrested Development's excellent Michael Cera), two socially inept teenagers who, just as we all have at some stage, are attempting to appear far cooler than they actually are, and perhaps "score some chicks" along the way. Seth and Evan's diatribes are essentially honest discussions of things we'd all like to say, but are too socially-informed to do so. Their rapport is thrilling to watch, and the chemistry between these two youngsters is both refreshing and smart, even throwing in obscure references, from Orson Welles to Saved By The Bell's Zack Morris.

Hill and Cera's characters are also wonderfully complimentary - Hill's Seth is the crude, considerably more pronounced character, whose primary objective in Superbad is to get drunk, get the girl he pines for drunk, and proceed to have sex with her. Cera, conversely, is the somewhat repressed, sweet, Bambi-like teenager, although we're never dragged too far away from the fact that he's a red-blooded teenager like anyone else, as he's caught staring at a girl's chest in class. They both attempt to appear cool and confident, particularly around the opposite sex, fabricating stories to that effect, with predictably amusing results. That said, they do manage to forge something resembling a connection with some

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