Sunday

Today was supposed to be a repeat of yesterday: I'd sleep late while Sunshine and family would go out shopping. I was planning to meet them in the District. Only, the plans all changed: for no reason especially concerning, my in-laws decided to cut their trip short, heading home early this afternoon. If I'd known, I would have gotten up before noon. For the rest of the day Sunshine and I relaxed into our unexpectedly free Sunday. We watched the Sopranos* on DVD, ate a nice Italian dinner up the street, and we headed to the Ballston Commons Mall for Greg Mottola's simply senioritis Superbad,* a big-screen first for many of its cast and crew (including director Mottola, veteran Judd Apatow conspirator on episodes of TV's Undeclared* and even better work helming the late lamented Arrested Development*). I'm generally loath to do much talking about current-run movies because of spoilage, but Superbad really interested me. While it shares all the predictable facets of every other coming-of-age end-of-high-school movie out there (like Can't Hardly Wait*), it feels like is has more in common with recent auteur reconsiderations (like Garden State* or Napoleon Dynamite*) in that the movie uses its comfortable predictability to avoid any lingering concern about contextual framework at all, narrowing its scope instead to concentrate on the rhythms of character interaction and environmental development. In this important way the movie can also probably be called Tarantino-esque, though lacking the pitched crisis this description usually entails. The auteur here is certainly writer Seth Rogen (constant Apatow collaborator, recently seen in the similar Knocked Up*), who manages to ink a typical mid-teenage sex thing where realistic kids inhabit a realistic high school; though there remains the usual disparity between the respective physical awkwardness of the boys and the girls. [Cavin]