Superbad
A last-week-of-high-school panic attack disguised as a party movie. Two best friends on a doomed one-night quest to buy alcohol, and a fake ID bearing a single name — McLovin — that instantly became the decade's most famous prop. This was the R-rated teen comedy that felt like watching your own friends instead of a movie.
Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg started writing this script as teenagers at Point Grey Secondary in Vancouver, drawing directly on their own high-school years. Greg Mottola directed, with Judd Apatow and Shauna Robertson producing. Jonah Hill and Michael Cera signed on as the leads — Hill as the loud, panicking Seth, Cera as the nervous Evan — and Christopher Mintz-Plasse made his film debut as Fogell, the kid with the most gloriously terrible fake ID in cinema history: a Hawaii license with the single name "McLovin." Rogen himself, who had aged out of the role written for him, appears instead as one of the two cops who adopt McLovin for the night.
Superbad hit theaters August 17, 2007, in the wake of Apatow's Knocked Up that June, and the two films together crowned a new era of R-rated comedy. The dialogue became hallway slang immediately — vulgar, affectionate, exactly how teenage friends actually talk to each other. On a budget of roughly $20 million it grossed $170.8 million worldwide, and critics singled out the chemistry between Hill and Cera. "I am McLovin" went straight into the yearbook-quote canon.
Superbad solidified the late-2000s comedy moment, in which vulgarity and heart went hand in hand, and the Apatow production line became the house style for mainstream comedy. But the film's emotional core — two friends quietly terrified of being separated after graduation — outlasted its jokes, which is why it aged into being genuinely rewatchable instead of dated.
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