(Long Island, NY) Hollywood blockbusters usually don’t see the light of day in this column. I save that stuff for the other LI Exchange writers. Or maybe it’s just plain laziness? I don’t have time to rush out and see every bald action hero with a gun shooting up major cities and destroying high-priced machinery.
With that in mind, it’s not really a miracle that one of the hottest movies of the summer has no giant robots knife-wielding psychos, or World War II themes. SuperBad is aimed squarely at nerds with nerd problems. Wanting to get kissed, wanting some kind of reason to exist, the teen urge to achieve advanced states of mental incapacitation through the inducement of minor alcohol poisoning.
Ahhh, high school.
It’s interesting to see clips of the movie SuperBad turning up on websites such as GearCrave.com, which usually hawks high-tech gadgets and fashion eye-candy. GearCrave.com’s latest updates feature a SuperBad t-shrt tied directly to one of the movie’s top “geek moments” concerning a fake ID with the ridiculous last name “McLovin”. Now, that goofy name is practically a cultural meme, overnight. Geek chic is exploding, and all you have to do is look at the websites. Nerdyshirts.com, Geeksquad.com, there’s even a Superdork.net. You name it. They are out there.
What is it about geeks, anyway? From Richard Linklater’s excellent Dazed And Confused to SuperBad, geek chic keeps rearing it’s bespectacled head in the culture. Hell, Revenge Of The Nerds probably started the whole thing. But that movie had a nasty frat-boy edge to it, even though the nerds won. SuperBad is far nicer to the nerds, showing them as basically the nice guys who are going to be running the world tomorrow from the safety of computer-filled basements. You know, the ones who would rather just take your cell phone away from you and program it to receive your Instant Messaging from Yahoo! rather than take the time to explain it to you. “Cuz dude, that would take longer than fixing it.”
SuperBad is such a big hit – 31 million this weekend in the debut – because people seem to be sick and tired of multimillion dollar budgeted NRA wet dreams; thinly veiled “manifest destiny” apologetic with the good guys with the best firepower getting the blessing. We’ve got a nasty conflict going on in two different countries, and Iran only too happy to keep throwing in idiotic messages about destroying Israel (as if) to stir up the cauldron.
Yes, people are sick and tired of war. It doesn’t matter if it’s giant robots, alien parasites, or Ninja Turtles. Gun play, swordplay, it doesn’t much matter. SuperBad is a massive success not just because it’s a comedy that every nerd or embarrassed friend-of-nerd can relate to. It’s a very telling indicator that we’re collectively fed up.
Maybe that is a stretch, considering that it’s just pop culture, it’s only a movie, and no matter how sick and tired we are, the gun battles just keep happening. Hell, that new Jet Li movie’s TITLE is “War”. Who came up with that priceless gem of original thinking? What’s the next one called, “Millions Of Dead Bodies”?
Come to think of it, maybe I am just projecting my OWN sick-n-tired views on the rest of the movie-going public. It’s true, at least where I am concerned – the gun battles should take a rest. Bring the geeks, I am ready to see it all over again. In fact, I think maybe an all-night marathon of Hackers, Dazed And Confused, Weird Science, Real Genius, and a Korean bootleg DVD of SuperBad would be a fine way to kill a Saturday night. I’m not alone, 33 million dollars worth of American movie-going public seems to be right there with me.
But I don’t have room on the couch for them all.
