I picked this film up earlier this month after having watched Knocked Up late last month to see what I thought about other Jud Apatow movies.
This film stars Jonah Hill, Michael Cera, and Christopher Mintz-Plasse as high school friends (well, mostly Cera and Hill’s characters are–they keep the geeky other guy around because he has a fake ID and can score alcohol). They’re coming to the end of their senior year in high school and will have to go to different colleges–the first time they’ll have been separated since they were really young. They get invited to a party thrown by their attractive classmate (Emma Stone), so they plot to get alcohol, lower their inhibitions, and have sex with their crushes. Their plan goes awry when Fogell, the one with the fake ID, witnesses a liquor store robbery and is befriended by two fun-loving cops played by Bill Hader and Seth Rogen. Meanwhile, the other pair infiltrates a biker party to make off with some booze. Hijinks ensue, they make it to the party….
And although they could, they do not have drunken sex with their crushes.
So the film does have a bit of a mature, maybe even conservative cast as the kids learn that alcohol and sex are not really the ultimate ends of life. Which is nice.
However, the film is a little more crass and overt with a lot of the swearing and drinking that differentiate it from the youth party-centric movies of my youth (such as Weird Science which I saw over and over back in the day as it was on Showtime). And I got to thinking about how much of the youth party culture is fictional. I mean, I did not go to a lot of parties in high school (and only a handful in college). My boys haven’t seen it so far. I don’t think my wife was into it. But I do recollect that my West County girlfriend of the middle 1990s talked about her experience in high school, how on a Saturday night they would pile into cars and start following cars they recognized, eventually having a long train of cars because someone was going to a party, and all the rest would follow. Perhaps, then, the party-culture depicted in the films are more of an upper class thing, or perhaps I and my progeny are just oddballs who have been left out of it, probably to the better.
Oh, and shortly after watching this, I saw a headline in a British tab “‘I drew todgers as young Jonah Hill on Superbad – it earned me a fortune’. An interesting story about how small roles can lead to income years down the line. But hardly a fortune.
