Superbad is super fun. :) The first 10-15 minutes or so were a bit slow because the two guys aren't the best actors when it comes to normal dialogue but once the movie got going, it got much better. And, of course, the "boop" on the nose part, the silhouette dancing at the beginning, and the running makes the whole movie for me. Give me a movie with funny dancing and awkward running and I'm happy. Makes me want to watch Little Miss Sunshine now.
The Drowning Pool is another one from the Paul Newman boxed set and another point in the "Paul Newman appears shirtless in all of his movies" poll (this time he was even pants-less a couple of times)--and he turned 50 the year this movie was released. Anyway, this one is the follow-up to Harper. Newman is the private eye Lew Harper and he's been called to Louisiana by a former fling (real-life wife Joanne Woodward) who is being blackmailed for her marital indiscretions. Her conniving and this-close-to-a-prostitute daughter is Melanie Griffith in her second role ever (surprise, surprise, she was just as bad an actress then as she is now and it really showed against Oscar winners Newman and Woodward). Of course, it all turns out to be more than just a simple blackmailing case and turns into quite the Southern scandal. It's a just fine movie (no need to watch Harper first although I think the earlier one is probably the better movie) and Newman is fun as the always getting beat up detective but the plot is just a tad dull.
On another, completely unrelated note: I caught ten minutes or so of The King and I (1956) on TV. I haven't seen it in years and never processed that it contains a Siamese theater re-telling of Uncle Tom's Cabin: "The Small House of Uncle Thomas" (it's actually even on the soundtrack). It's just racist on so many levels--not only the white 1950s American version of a 1860s Siamese version of a white abolitionist American woman's version of 1850s slaves in the US but the casting of Rita Moreno (who is Puerto Rican) as the Siamese narrator of the re-telling (not to mention the fact that Yul Brynner was Russian although supposedly he had a Mongolian grandfather). Yeah. I missed all of that when I watched it as a child . . .
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Re: Superbad. Though I really liked this movie, I was about to make a snarky comment about the Apatow-fueled trend of making movies about how much boys love each other way more than they'll ever love the girls they end up with, but now that I think about it, there have been waaay too many movies about how girls love each other, and they aren't nearly as funny or sweet half the time. So: snarky comment preemptively provoked.
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