In both films, high school is idealized as the apex of acceptable irresponsibility and social freedom.
What I find interesting is that neither of these movies about the high school experience is really targeted toward high school kids (although I imagine high school boys will probably flock to see Superbad, they aren't technically supposed to be allowed in without an adult...but tell that to the group of unchaperoned 8th graders that were in the same showing of 300 that I attended). "Tweens" (a ridiculous designation if ever there were one) watch HSM 2 and are excited over the prospects of their coming high school year being filled with dancing, singing, and everyone gets along in the end tales. The out of high-school viewer of Superbad remembers the good ol days of high school and reminisces about the crazy adventures they had or wild schemes they concocted back in their own adolescene.
Now to the films themselves:
High School Musical 2
High School Musical 2 suffers from the worst fate that can befall a musical: the story doesn't 'sing'. Musical writers the years over stress the importance of telling a story that creates situations wherein the characters can't help but break out into song and HSM2 only has 1 such moment and its the first scene of the film. It is the last 2-3 minutes of the school year and when the bell finally rings and summer is here the characters break into song and dance in a number that compares favorably with a similar scene from Disney's mostly overlooked mid-90's stroke of genius that is A Goofy Movie.
Beyond that scene, which borrows heavily from the original High School Musical, right down to the dancing with basketballs, it descends into an extended episode of Saved by the Bell from the summer they spent at the Malibu Sands Beach Club, which isn't altogether bad, but there are several songs that are added in for the sake of having songs that aren't any good, feel needlessly tacked on, or go on too long, especially at the end of the movie. The only other song in the film that comes close to justifying its existence is I Don't Dance, a humorous number during a baseball game (once again, drawing heavily from the first movie).
The first film was carried by great musical numbers which made the meager acting/dialogue between tolerable and the sometimes surrealistic visuals of East High more acceptable, but this time around the bad songs only underscore the bad acting and lazy directing (other than in the scene with Sharpay's big number which is, at least visually, a great homage to the classic, lavish musical choreography of Busby Berkley).
I suppose this one is worth seeing if you loved the first one, but it really is forgettable by comparison. Probably better to just watch the first one yet again. Or better yet, introduce the youngsters (and face it, most likely yourself as well) to the dance-floor wizardry of Fred Astaire & Ginger Rogers in Swing Time or Shall We Dance.
Superbad
Superbad has that same winning formula of the other two comedies Judd Apatow has a hand in since switching over to movies (40-Year-Old Virgin and Knocked Up after failing to find an audience with critically acclaimed television shows Freaks & Geeks and Undeclared) in that the characters spout off pop-culture rich, profanity-laden dialogue for 2 hours, but while the dialogue is full of raunch the movie is really fairly staid in terms of what actually takes place on screen. The characters tend to make the "right" choices when faced with moral dilemmas and there is a strong theme across all three films of male camaraderie and how the "loser" (the titular 40-year-old virgin, the unemployed illegal immigrant in Knocked Up, and the chunky kid and awkward kids in this movie) can ultimately be "the man" in the end, continuing the cultural oscillations on the definition of masculinity.
Though set in the present day, the movie features a great soundtrack of 70s music and new 70s-sounding music recorded for the movie which serves to underscore the sort of goofy tone the same way it did in Undercover Brother.
The thing that sets it apart from most high-school movies is the rejection of traditional high school archetypes/stereotypes in the characters. For the most part, there are no clearly defined "cool kids" or "nerds", although the Fresno Bee's high school movie reviewer perfectly describes the one truly nerdy character in the film as a cross between Urkel and Harry Potter.
Seth, Evan and the rest of the high school seems to be one big group of kids who've more or less known each other since forever, but have separated themselves out over the years for the sake of appearances, conveniences, whatever. There is no impenetrable social hierarchy that the characters feel they are fighting against. Jules says she is having a party and invites Seth to come. No strings attached, no qualifications, she just invites him. Perhaps as a joke, perhaps because she doesn't expect him to come anyway, but there's no evidence of that. She seems to genuinely think he's an okay guy. This sort of subversion of genre makes the film worth the ticket price. That and the first 10-20 minutes of this are as good as anything that's been out this year in terms of comedy. The jokes are vulgar, but come on, that's how it is with 17/18 year old boys and what else would you expect from a film called Superbad.
Recommended Reading: If you enjoy Superbad, you'll probably also enjoy I Love You, Beth Cooper, a highly amusing novel about, you guessed it, that one infamous night at the end of high school in the life of unpopular class president Dennis Cooverman (picture a male version of Diane Court in the high school classic Say Anything) and his buddy as he tries to hook up with the head cheerleader while being chased by her just-back-from-Iraq, slightly psycho boyfriend and his army buddies.
1 comment:
I've been a 17 year old boy who's scored on back to back weekends.
Oh, wait, that's not what you said
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