Somehow the cinetrix managed to miss seeing either Knocked Up or Superbad during the Summer of Apatow. At the time, it was not intentional, but you gotta admit, in hindsight it looks like quite a feat.
And so it was that the cinetrix, the 'Fesser, and a few pals headed to the two-buck theater Friday to catch up with Superbad. It was nice to see high school-age actors cast as high school students, and the dick-drawing montage was pretty hilarious, but I found it hard to engage with the characters or their story. This put me in the minority that night--the audience was as responsive as any the cinetrix can remember. She shares the love for Michael Cera, but the movie itself wouldn't crack her top 10 of teen Aristotelian comedies.
Way back when, Umberto Eco
wrote an amusing essay that described how porn movies work to break up
the constant coupling by including all the tedious getting from point A
to point B that other movies elide through editing. "Last night of school" teen flicks are just as formulaic as porn, which got the cinetrix to thinking, would the audience think everything was so goddamned funny if they had to experience Seth--or even loveable McLovin--in anything resembling real time? What if Apatow et al. took a page from Akerman and went all Jeanne Dielman on the plot? Or better still, let Douglas Gordon loose on the film in its current form--hilarity ensues!
