Superbad

Boys will be boys, and — if we recall the life lessons that gross-out comedies have taught us over the years — young males will be horn dogs who’ll stop at nothing to get laid. Superbad doesn’t try to reinvent the guys-behaving-badly movie; if you want mucho dick jokes, this is the film for you. But this ode to testosterone run amok goes down so easy that you’d feel like a cantankerous a-hole for complaining that it’s superslight. In a summer crammed with toxic examples of dudes being dudes (we’re talking to you, Dane Cook!), this eloquently foul-mouthed frolic manages to be sweet-natured and still bring the funny.

Seth (Jonah Hill) and Evan (Arrested Development’s Michael Cera) are high school losers who make Anthony Michael Hall’s old gallery of dweebs look suave. But then the two hottest girls on campus invite them to a graduation party, their buddy scores a fake ID — his new name: “McLovin” — and the young men have a rare shot at knocking boots. Enter the obstacles: belligerent stoners, incompetent cops and your typical bad luck involving inconvenient drunken vomiting.

What differentiates Superbad from every American Pie clone you’ve seen is who’s pulling the strings. Though Greg Mottola (The Daytrippers) is in the director’s chair, the film’s sensibility bears the signature of producer Judd Apatow and writer-actor Seth Rogen. The brain behind The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Apatow is peerless in mining Y-chromosome angst for painful laughs; his protégé Rogen, who plays one of the dimwitted cops and who cowrote the script, has a gift for coming up with conversational nuggets like “No one has gotten a hand job in cargo shorts since ’Nam.” Both Apatow and Rogen know how to seemlessly blend sensitivity and outrageousness, which ends up as the film’s saving grace when things get sentimental toward the end. This one’s not as satisfying as the duo’s recent Knocked Up, but it’s still funnier than your average frat-pack goof.

Like Superbad, Rocket Science takes place on the lower rungs of high school’s social hierarchy. But Jeffrey Blitz’s comedy about the cutthroat world of debate teams embodies a more contemporary version of geek chic. In fact, this tale of a hopeless teen (Reece Daniel Thompson) recruited to competitive public speaking by an honor-roll Machiavelli (Anna Kendrick) apes its influences to the point of serious déjà vu. Ironic cello covers of Violent Femmes tunes, a narrator who sounds like Alec Baldwin, an overkill of prep-student quirk — did we just stumble into a mediocre Wes Anderson film? Blitz’s previous work, the spelling-bee doc Spellbound, was compelling and funny. This fictional follow-up just feels like indie-film karaoke.

Both The Ten and The Signal are movies that cater to the short attention span of the YouTube generation. The first is a collection of comic vignettes based loosely on the Ten Commandments, featuring Paul Rudd, Winona Ryder and every alumnus of MTV’s The State. The second is a lo-fi apocalyptic horror flick about infected citizens turning into enraged sociopaths, which is divided into three chapters, each with a different director (newcomers David Bruckner, Dan Bush and Jacob Gentry). Both films have their share of bright spots, yet neither is worth more than the sum of its parts. Consistency always becomes collateral damage in these sorts of movies, though when The Ten’s director David Wain (Wet Hot American Summer) hits on a winner — like Justin Theroux’s Jesus having a fling with a mortal played by Gretchen Mol — you can almost forgive all the DOA anal-rape jokes. As for the exquisite corpse experiment that is The Signal, go for the first part’s white-knuckle ride and split before the wink-wink attitude of the last two-thirds becomes overbearing.

Advice for actors who aspire to be serious novelists: For God’s sake, don’t try to direct the screen adaptation, too. That’s the main lesson to be learned from The Hottest State, in which slacker poster boy Ethan Hawke turns his own literary effort into an equally noxious date movie. Following the relationship between a self-involved actor (Mark Webber, blatantly imitating the real Hawke) and the woman (Catalina Sandino Moreno) who eventually breaks his heart, this semiautobiographical drama about romantic ups and downs turns into an exercise in whiny narcissism. When Hawke shows up, playing the protagonist’s deadbeat dad, it’s hard to watch the awful meta-Oedipal drama play out. A more objective director might have brought something to the table other than the repetitive picking of old emotional scabs.