Word: superbad
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...There was the fruitful encounter in the chair in Juno, and the time we almost went all the way with him on a couch in Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist. We would have done it in Superbad if vomit hadn't been an issue. And now, in Miguel Arteta's uneven but occasionally quite funny Youth in Revolt (an adaptation of C.D. Payne's successful mid-'90s book Youth in Revolt: The Journals of Nick Twisp), we watch as Cera, by way of a devilish alter ego he calls François Dillinger, engages in criminal acts in hopes that...
...François, also played by Cera, smokes, has a pencil-thin mustache and wears a costume of pristine white trousers, blue shirt and white loafers without socks. Superbad, he wantonly destroys property and several cars and plays Cyrano for Nick. François and Nick appear in the frame together, which sounds like great fun but mostly feels like a Saturday Night Live skit in which the writers spoof Cera's reputation for being one-note...
Wichita (Emma Stone, she of the sultry voice and fetching overbite who was Jonah Hill's love object in Superbad) and Little Rock (Little Miss Sunshine's Abigail Breslin) are also serial grifters. They relieve a gas-station attendant (Chuck & Buck's Mike White) of his money, and Columbus and Tallahassee of their car and weapons. Little Rock is mature and calculating beyond her years, or, as she explains while frisking Tallahassee, "Twelve is the new 20 - gun, please." Wichita, who's about Columbus' age, has had all the world experience he's missed. For Columbus, whose idea of emotional...
...roughhouse comedy, the films he's produced have opened well and, more important, had staying power - what the industry calls "long legs." The final theatrical earnings for Virgin and Knocked Up (which he wrote and directed as well as produced) were about five times their opening-weekend gross; Superbad, Forgetting Sarah Marshall and Pineapple Express made about four times their openers. People saw these movies, told their friends they were funny and made them hits. The new movie will be hard pressed to duplicate that word-of-mouth salesmanship. For most audiences, Apatow's 2-hr. 24-min. attempt...
...first movie he directed, 2005's The 40 Year-Old Virgin, earned more than four times its cost at the U.S. box office. This enabled Apatow to produce all the scripts he'd been studiously stockpiling, making seven movies in 2007 and '08 - Knocked Up (which he also directed), Superbad, Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story, Forgetting Sarah Marshall, Drillbit Taylor, Step Brothers and Pineapple Express - and inspiring a slew of imitators. He was the first to show that our porn- and profanity-saturated culture is actually underpinned by churchgoing morals. Crudeness became a cover for sensitivity; he created...