Clueless (Amy Heckerling, 1995)
What could be further removed from comedy’s 1930s drawing-room heyday than high school? Sex-starved adolescents and their romantic angst hardly provide the raw material for a Cary Grant-Katharine Hepburn film. And yet, director Amy Heckerling puts her idiosyncratic stamp on the ’90s comedy by retaining a certain ideal of suave, acerbic wisecracking lifted directly from the likes of Bringing Up Baby. Stars Alicia Silverstone and Paul Rudd dazzle each other with their wit as they trade carefully crafted insults. Heckerling is updating Austen’s Emma, but the results are closer to a mid-90’s Beverly Hills version of Howard Hawks’ His Girl Friday, where men and women express their secret love by slinging mud.
Can’t Hardly Wait (Harry Elfont & Deborah Kaplan, 1998)
For Can’t Hardly Wait, whose characters are plucked out of the Complete Idiot’s Guide to Teen Comedies, the point is in the profusion of perspectives: the garage band composed of mismatched parts; the party host who runs around in a state of ever-mounting hysteria over the state of her parents’ home; the science geeks who spend the night of the party on an adjacent rooftop, speculating about “UFO superhighways”; the villain’s sidekicks, who pay obeisance to his command to ditch their girlfriends, but find it difficult to resist their nubile bodies and all-too-attractive blandishments. Like the work of Preston Sturges, Can’t Hardly Wait lets its leading men and women function as straight men to a raucous supporting crew of walk-on performers.
American Pie (Chris & Paul Weitz, 1999)
What do guys do when no one is watching? Based on American Pie, they seem to mostly be interested in getting freaky with Mom’s freshly baked pies. And what do they talk about when there are no girls around? Sex again. Like infants who have discovered a new toy, or cats with their ball of yarn, these teenage boys are interested in little else. The combination of large quantities of bravado and meager amounts of experience is ideal for American Pie, which thrives on humiliating its characters. And humiliation is the one item on the menu that never runs out. Sexuality is a minefield — a booby-trapped no man’s land with unimaginable pleasures at the other end. These soldiers never seem to make it all the way to the other side; instead, they spend the bulk of the movie exploding in shame.
Mean Girls (Mark Waters, 2004)
Lindsay Lohan is a walking punchline now, to such an extent that it’s become easy to forget she starred in this wonderfully mouthy comedy, written by 30 Rock‘s Tina Fey. The Heathers have become Mean Girls‘ Plastics, defined by the rules they explicitly set for themselves (“On Wednesdays we wear pink”), and by their unquestioned rule over the slobbering masses of their high school. Mean Girls has a superb array of supporting players, including Lizzy Caplan’s sour teenage rebel and Tim Meadows’ harried principal, but it is Lohan — sunny and inviting here, if nowhere else — that gives this surprising movie its heart.
Superbad (Greg Mottola, 2007)
At its best, Superbad is a reminder of why the rewind button was invented. Taking a page out of the screwball comedy, Superbad is a dazzling display of virtuosic talk, piled up in such profusion that one gem is no sooner unfurled than the next is exposed. Superbad lavishes the bulk of its affection on the tender bromance between stars Michael Cera and Jonah Hill. The pair lovingly bicker, break up, get back together, and have a fond night of amour before heading their separate ways. The film’s last scene is played like the final scene of Brief Encounter, with Seth and Evan renouncing each other eternally. The rest of producer Judd Apatow’s work, with its endless guy love, was a rejoinder to that very possibility, but the surprising bittersweetness of its conclusion gave Superbad a heft that it might otherwise have lacked.
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