I didn’t
see Superbad
until a few weeks after its theatrical bow, and – whether it was the
expectations and hype being too high or the fact that I wasn’t seeing it in a
packed theater with a raucous audience – I sadly left the theater underwhelmed.
To this day, I still can’t put my finger on what didn’t work for me because I
really dig almost all of the talent involved. And regardless of that, I
want to see them all continue doing great work and grabbing opportunities.
That goes
double for Christopher Mintz-Plasse. Unlike the army of comedy and improv pros
who surrounded him in Superbad, he’s a rookie who lucked
up and somehow grabbed a slot in the starting lineup of the 1927 Yankees, which
is to say that as far as showbiz debuts go, McLovin is about as tops as you can
ask for. And he’s following it up with the rather promising Little
Big Men, or as IMDB is frickin’
still calling it, Big Brothers. The project got under
way rather unremarkably in January with The Girl Next Door director Luke
Greenfield at the helm, and eventually derailed completely. That’s where Paul
Rudd, who originally was merely to co-star with Sean William Scott as beer
workers forced into mentoring, came in. He wrote a brand new draft and got
things moving again (featuring the shiny new title) with his director for The Ten, David Wain, running the
show. Now, Mintz-Plasse just jumped onboard, and I assume he’d be one of the
kids on the receiving end of the beer dudes’ atrocious advice. But that has yet
to be specified.
Either
way, I’d hate to see the kid get Jon Heder-ed, so I wish him the best.