In Sweet, Funny Good Boys, Tweens Don`t Lose Their Innocence : They Just Misplace It
Himanshu · 5 years ago
Good Boys is a raunch-filled, F-bomb-laden, almost-coming-of-age comedy directed by Gene Stupnitsky and produced by (shocker) Seth Rogen. Ed Araquel/Universal Since American Pie reconfigured Porky's 20 years ago, the modern sex comedy has abided by a tacit formula. Call it the sweetness-to-raunch ratio. It would be completely unacceptable for comedies about woefully inexperienced dudes to be only about their single-minded pursuit of gratification, so it has to be cut with material about friendship or the tender feelings they can access in vulnerable moments. And age is the key factor: the younger the dudes, the more sweetness required. The 40-Year-Old Virgin can be as raunchy as it likes, but the STR ratio changes with American Pie and Superbad, which have many more scenes of teenage boys bonding over their shared ineptitude or treating girls with kindness when no one is looking. So what to do with sixth-graders? The correct answer would seem to be "nothing, please — try again in a few years at least," but the winning comedy Good Boys gets the STR ratio miraculously right. The thought of preteens swearing, porn-hunting and speculating wildly about what-goes-where, anatomically speaking, sounds more like horror than comedy, but Gene Stupnitsky and Lee Eisenberg, the writing team best known for its episodes of The Office, make it all seem like innocent fun. They place the guardrails early — a game of spin the bottle is as far as this will go, they assure us — and turn the quest for a kiss into a juice box jamboree of silly malapropisms, wild misbehavior and deep sexual confusion, sprinkled with real insight into a painful growing period. A father-son heart-to-heart about masturbation in the opening scene evokes uncomfortable memories of
