Ty's movie picks for Friday, August 17

This is how the Hollywood Overhype Machine works.

The drumbeats for "Superbad" have been pounding louder and louder all summer. Sony has been holding so many word-of-mouth screenings over the past two months that you'd think they'd already churned through the movie's initial paying audience.

And word has grown: "Superbad" is the big one, the be-all and end-all of teen gross-out comedies. "American Pie" with heart and a brain instead of a pie. An "Animal House" for our generation -- if you're 15 years old.

It's not, of course. But it is pretty damned funny, and it cracks the smug spine of most youth comedies to get at some sweet and smart observations about the mating habits of Americanus Suburbus Teenus. I had a ball with the film and so did my wife, who's generally not swayed by the young and the crass; she noted that it was one of the few teen comedies she'd seen that got the girls right, more or less.

My wife was less enthralled with "Knocked Up," though, from much the same crew of filmmakers and actors. And that's partially my point: She saw it on the other side of the overhype bell-curve (and to be fair, there was a huge guy with really bad B.O. sitting next to her in the packed theater -- no, on the other side from me).

Similarly, "Superbad" has been on the wind for so long that if you're under 30 it must feel like you've already seen the movie and are congratulating yourself on your farseeing hipness. How can the actual experience live up to the "Redline" trailers on YouTube? How many people are already wielding the word "McLovin" as a secret handshake, draining the juice from a very funny but one-shot joke? Is it possible to watch this splattery, cheery comedy without self-consciously feeling you're watching a self-anointed classic, and boo to you if you don't play along? Has "Superbad" already lost its virginity?

Probably, which brings me to Wesley's review this morning. He saw the film late in the bell-curve, too, which is unusual for a movie critic and indicates how relentless Sony has been with the promotional screenings. And by the time he got there, he had been assured many times over that this was going to be the best dang thing since Elvis. I'm not saying my colleague let the Hollywood promo boom/bust mentality affect his critical thinking; on the contrary, it's our job to describe the emperor's clothes as they are, not as the PR flacks say they are. But Wes had a problem with Jonah Hill's character -- some find Seth grating but comical, others just find him grating. Really grating. And if you don't sign up for Seth, you're not going to sign up for "Superbad," McLovin or no.

Me, I say see it for Michael Cera and the painfully comic/comically painful party scene between his character, Evan, and the drunken good-girl of his dreams. See it for Christopher Mintz-Plasse's roistering nerd-god, Fogell. Skip the dumdum comedy with the cops played by SNL's Bill Hader and writer Seth Rogen; those scenes are just too close to "Porky's 3" outtakes for comfort. See it for yourself, in other words, but forget everything you've heard. Including what I just wrote.

In other movie openings this weekend, "Rocket Science" is all that "Superbad" is not: a teen movie that's dry, careful, watchful, heartbreaking, and pretty much emotionally dead-on. Occasionally very funny, too, especially when Anna Kendrick is onscreen. This is the superego to the other, bigger movie's id. Which I guess makes "High School Musical 2" the Ego. Makes sense. See them all and compare notes.

For those of us living in the real world as opposed to Hollywood suburbia, the Darfur documentary "The Devil Came on Horseback," at the Coolidge, is rough stuff but thought-provoking in all the good ways. It's not only about the genocide in Sudan but about one American's coming of age as he documents it -- and by extension the moral responsibility of the West itself. Yeah, I know, you don't want to know. But, really, you do.

Cute little British comedy of embarrassment at local arthouses, "Death at a Funeral," worth seeing for Alan Tudyk as a stoned naked guy on the roof and Peter Dinklage as a mystery guest. Wesley likes "Blame it on Fidel," about a young girl growing up with socialist parents in 1970s France.

Ah, and then there's "The Invasion," the latest version of "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" and a studio movie that clearly died in the making. The usual: Too many cooks and a meddlesome producer. You can see what might have been -- a grave, frightening essay on social paranoia, with an eerily zombielike Nicole Kidman -- but what's onscreen is a cynical mess, and the cut-and-run ending feels like a final kick in the shins.

Some interesting things going on over at the Brattle this weekend: Charlton Heston movies and folk legend Peter Yarrow. Somehow they make it work.

Two great lost 80s comedies at the Harvard Film Archive on Saturday: Jonathan Demme's "Something Wild" and Martin Scorsese's "After Hours." Talk about superbad.