Rollin' the Dice

Did you see Knocked Up? With Ben Stone? It was a silly little movie about a not so socially adept, 20-something year old guy that lucks up on a one-night stand with somebody way out of his league and the life changing consequences that ensue as a result. Seth, Stone’s character, was a guy that apparently couldn’t let go of the college style frat house living arrangement that provided so much comfort and security, even at the expense of his progressing to an adult style social existence. I’m not going to lie, I laughed a bit during this movie. This group of misfits exhibited traits that I observed from many of my acquaintances when I was in college or just out of college, so it was amusing to see them captured on screen.

This collection of characters had all sorts of misguided notions about the opposite sex, subscribed to urban legend more often than empirical fact, and just overall lived a club house sort of lifestyle chock full of intense video game battles, gratuitous drug abuse, and a healthy consumption of porn. In fact, they took their porn fondness to another level in their attempts to launch a website that chronicled all possible nude scenes from Hollywood movies, keeping a database of who was nude, which body part they showed, and at what point in the movie that it occurred. They deemed this incessant ingestion of R-rated DVD’s “research” and rarely left the house to undertake any real world activities. Again, it was a mildly entertaining movie, but it, like many others these days, was about 30-40 minutes too long. I don’t know about you, but I like my comedies to be about 90-100 minutes of side-splitting laughter and then I can get on to other things. I get mentally prepared to be engaged for 2 hours or more when watching a good drama like The Departed, The Good Shepherd, or a classic like the Godfather.

Furthermore, this brand of comedy is not exactly going to have mass appeal and I don’t think that it will reach “time-honored classic” status like National Lampoon’s Vacation, Caddyshack, or any number of Richard Pryor films. It seems to be made for a very specific group (deranged, Gen-X’ers and Gen Y'ers who try to navigate their way through life’s challenges, more often virtual than real life) by a very specific group (these same slightly off center social mis-fits with their clever idiosyncrasies ). So don’t look for any of these to, say, “go platinum” down the line like a Bob Marley record might as new generations of youth get exposed to his music.

I saw another such movie, SuperBad, over the weekend. The guy that directed Knocked Up (Judd Apatow) also had a hand in this one as a producer. The one thing I’ll give these movies is that they keep the same likeable mis-fits employed. The protagonist is always a peculiar looking underdog that probably isn’t at the top of any “senior mosts” lists in the yearbook, and for some reason his name is often Seth. In both these movies, Seth was a curly-haired chubby kid (Stone in Knocked up, Jonah Hill in SuperBad) that despite his realization that he was not exactly the captain of the football team was charming, if not vulgar and obnoxious, in his own way. These Seth’s do usually have the trait of having the cojones to think they have a shot at the head cheerleader, or homecoming queen, or whomever else the captain of the football team is supposed to date, despite their obviously relative invisibility on the social scene. This is surely do in no small part to Apatow’s (and other director/producers of this genre) personal experiences as an adolescent. “I think that everything I do tends to root for the underdog. I always felt as a kid that I was under appreciated, invisible or weird,” Apatow says, continuing “but I've always secretly thought people would one day appreciate what is different about me. I'm always putting that message out there.Eventually, the nerds and the geeks will have their day.” This is oh so apparent in his projects, and a lot of times it plays well.

Unfortunately, the title, SuperBad was oddly indicative of the quality of the film. It did have a couple of funny scenes, but they were few and far between. Ben Stone is a talented guy, and even in the marginal role that he had, was fairly entertaining. You can always count on their being some really stupid exchange between characters about something which they are deadly serious and not meaning to be funny. It’s just way too vulgar. Putting myself back in the 16-year old’s mindset, I could see this being somewhat entertaining, but the thin-line between sexual humor and deviant sexual humor is too often blurred a little too much for my tastes. At least Richard Pryor and Eddie Murphy could pull this off in a light hearted manner that even my mother could almost laugh at..well..almost…um..well, ok…maybe not, but more likely than this stuff. Apatow’s retort:
“When R-rated comedies don't work, the studios are really embarrassed by them. But a PG-13 comedy is actually less offensive than an episode of "Friends" (1994). I think people want something a little more adult.”

Something more adult? sure. Funny? Definitely. But this wasn’t it. The guys that I knew that acted like this in high school are often the ones that seem to have their names in the “From:” line on mass emails that I get that say “Don’t open this at work” and casually talk about trips to the Asian Massage joints and make strange comments about little girls around the water cooler at work. No thanks. I’ll take Pryor any day of the week. I will agree with Apatow on the following though:
“My way of dealing with the world has always been to make fun of it and observe it but not take part in it. That's how I became a writer.” Me too, Judd, even if I’m not a real writer yet, not one collecting a check anyway. It’s definitely a lot more fun to step outside of something and derive some personal amusement that way. “ But when you have kids, suddenly you have to be part of things. It leads almost to a breakdown because your whole defense mechanism is now really destructive,” he says. Okay, I’ll agree partly on that point. I know what I was like as a teen-aged boy and as a result, as a general rule try to be mean and unfriendly to any of the little guys that my daughter knows at school (even if she’s only 10). Destructive? You don’t have to be. I think it’s possible to slip into an attitude of denouncing everything, and not trying to relate on the level of a youngster, but you can be positive and supportive. Adolescence is indeed awkward. Some people never recover. But it’s possible. There’s lots more information in my head than when I was 16, so I don’t feel like I’m totally stranded out on an island when confronted with coming of age issues like I might’ve back then.