Michael Cera
I love a good teen gross-out comedy as much as the next 15-year-old boy. I thought Superbad, in which the loser duo struggled to hook up with the cool girls, was funny and endearing. But unlike Superbad, the Jonah Hill/Michael Cera characters in The Virginity Hit – and it’s such a blatant rip-off it’s literally not even funny – are the centre of a circle of friends who party at frat houses and enlist a seemingly endless army of hot girls to help rid protagonist Matt of his pesky virginity. The problem is, you just don’t feel like rooting for...
Graphic novels make the best source material. They’re popular, they’re fun, they’re filled with complex characters and fantastical plot points, and they’re already story-boarded. They also come with a built-in fan base just chomping at the bit to see their favorite book come to life. So why, then, do so many of them turn out so badly and end up alienating the fan base that made them such attractive properties in the first place? To be honest, I have no idea. But thankfully, in Scott Pilgrim vs. The World we now have a shining example of how a movie made...
While a notch or two above the conventional teen sex comedy, or the average Michael Cera movie, Youth In Revolt nevertheless fails to bring up anything completely fresh. The film – an adaptation of C.D. Payne’s novel, directed by Miguel Arteta – centers on our culture’s obsession with virginity as a significant contributor to a person’s worth and sense of fulfillment – or lack thereof. The presentation of this overdone theme is a little smarter and more imaginative than many of the recent efforts in the genre; it tries to outweigh the presence of often unsympathetic characters and dubious morality....
