For me, no comedy from my teen years and young adulthood has stood the test of time better than Superbad. It is a film that always has jokes I’ve forgotten about, and even the ones I remember still make me laugh. It is filthy, but if you scrape away the caked bodily fluids of the heavy-R screenplay, you find a touching tribute to young friendship, and the importance of letting those bonds weather the storm of humiliating, unpredictable teenage life. The cast is astoundingly great, the pace relentless, the turns of phrase unforgettable, and the characters well-drawn. The dialogue often sounds like witty teenagers might actually say it; and that’s in part because Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg started writing it when they were thirteen.

Superbad revived the teen buddy comedy and locked in a refined template for the format. All of the story structures and character types it deploys had existed before, but it still feels original: They work in a wonderful, synchronous harmony. In fact, “It’s Superbad, but…” has become a reliable story structure to my eyes. That pitch alone will almost always get me in the door. (I just recently used it describing what I hoped Y2K would be, e.g.) The components that make up this “it’s Superbad, but…” paradigm are as follows: 1) A pair or group of teenage doofuses are stuck on the outside of the popular social order; 2) they go on a one-crazy-night odyssey to a party or big event; 3) they have the ostensible goal of getting laid or finding love (but, really, to better understand their own souls and their friends before they depart into adulthood); 4) wherein everything goes wrong in a series of shenanigans, before 5) a reunion between the doofuses at the end of the film in which they are slightly wiser and perhaps romantically fulfilled. But, 6) they ultimately realize that what they really needed was the friendship and lives they had in the first place. The real lost virginity was the friends we made along the way. Superbad perfects every one of these story points.

The doofuses in question are Seth (Jonah Hill) and Evan (Michael Cera). They are third-wheeled by a king doof-among-doofs named Fogell (Christopher Mintz-Plasse), but whom you surely know as McLovin. Mintz-Plasse has had a long and productive career as a comedy character actor, and yet whenever he appears, I point at the screen like Rick Dalton and say “hey, it’s McLovin.” It will always be this way. Some actors so perfectly inhabit their most iconic roles that it’s both a blessing and a curse.

I’ve long been of the opinion that Cera is the funniest actor of his era. The main pillar of this argument is Arrested Development — in which a 15-year-old Cera keeps up with and, many times, surpasses the work of a beloved troupe of grown-up comedians — but Superbad is bullet point 1B in my thesis. Here, he plays Evan as a twist on the stereotypical 1980s film virgin; horny, but not in a depraved way, like you can tell his parents taught him how to have a healthy sexual identity. Evan is the toughest character to nail because he needs to be funny, sympathetic, and pathetic in pretty equal measures, and Cera is great at every angle. There’s a bit here where he gets stuck in a room with some partiers doing cocaine who mistake him for a singer (”you’re Jimmy’s brother!”), and Evan must sing his way out. The moment is charged with danger and one of the funniest scenes of any movie I’ve ever seen because Cera’s nervous energy and his physical comedy while singing The Guess Who’s “These Eyes” is so perfect.

Hill presents a slightly more complicated case. The producers, including Rogen, Goldberg, and Judd Apatow, only reluctantly cast the older Hill, fearing he wouldn’t look like a high schooler. And the difficulty curve for this character is steep, too: Hill’s Seth is an unkind creation, his friendship with Evan spiked with sexual anxiety that comes out as overconfidence and nastiness. Hill treads a perfect line of keeping his edge but leaving Seth just charming enough that you can imagine him having friends. He is not quite as funny as Cera, but Hill hints at the dramatic chops he’d develop over the next decade. He offers in Seth a portrait you might even call nuanced underneath all the dirty punchlines he’s delivering.

The thrust of the story is that Seth and Evan’s crushes have entrusted them to buy alcohol for the big party that night. Seth has his eyes on Jules, played by Emma Stone in her first ever screen appearance. I will never forget the first time I watched Superbad and becoming breathless at the way Stone’s eyes glimmer when Seth confesses to having feelings for her. She also gets the best delivery of the line “what the fuck” in cinema history. I knew I was following this actress wherever she was going for the rest of eternity. Evan, meanwhile is yearning for Becca (Martha MacIsaac). MacIsaac is the closest thing to a weak link in the cast, her forgettability a stark contrast to Stone’s obvious future stardom. But, thematically, Becca’s blandness also works; our high school crushes are not necessarily special, despite our intense feelings at the time. Sometimes they’re just the person who sits next to us in math. (My high school crush was special, though. At least I hope so. I married her.)

Superbad has a structure that you might call a flaw, though I wouldn’t. McLovin splits up with Seth and Evan early in the evening when a robbery interrupts their attempt to buy alcohol with a fake ID. (Whether this is intentionally a reference to American Graffiti or just a happy coincidence, I’m not sure.) McLovin spends the rest of the night stuck with two bumbling cops, Officer Michaels (Seth Rogen) and Officer Slater (Bill Hader). Michaels and Slater offer a grown-up contrast to Evan and Seth, two buds with a homoerotic friendship that have accepted it rather than letting it drive tension and angst between them. Rogen and Hader are so sublimely funny in this, offering dialogue that sometimes borders into the shaggy improv, a harmlessly playful spirit serving as contrast to the terror of their irresponsible police work. But the problem is that we essentially have two movies that have no real reason to interact: McLovin & the Keystone Cops vs. Seth and Evan trying to get laid. You could cut the McLovin-cops thread from the movie and it wouldn’t really harm the arc or comic effectiveness of Seth and Evan’s party quest. This doesn’t really make it expendable, since it’s so funny, but it does mean we’re bouncing between different threads through the runtime. This would probably be a pacing and momentum problem if the movie wasn’t so uniformly hilarious. McLovin’s thread at least deepens some of the film’s narrative ironies: The uber-dweeb McLovin lives out the film’s biggest fantasy; perpetually horny Seth’s object of lust wants to take things slow; and Evan’s long-simmering, heartfelt crush drunkenly throws her body at him like a piece of meat.

Part of what I admire about Superbad is analogous to what I love about Forgetting Sarah Marshall. Although it’s a comedy, it takes the time to explore the characters and the way the plot events change them. You wouldn’t in a million years call the material “dramatic,” but the narrative serves the development of Seth and Evan in a way worse comedies don’t bother with. Specifically, the evening helps the pair realize they haven’t processed the fact that they are sad about saying goodbye to each other when they head to college in a couple months, and both feel slightly betrayed and scared. They’ve had years of easygoing best friendship where they can be the most pathetic but honest versions of themselves around each other. After the party, they drunkenly admit that they love each other, and at the mall the next day when they reunite with their crushes-maybe-soon-to-be-girlfriends — the very goal they stated aloud at the beginning of the film — they’d rather just spend some of their precious little remaining time hanging together.

There’s a particular bit of character development in Seth that is accented by Hill’s performance. We gather without the movie putting a label or too fine a point on the matter that Seth has some unrealized quirks in his sexuality: He is completely obsessed with dicks — like even more than the average 18-year-old horndog. He proffers multiple broad-sided critiques of femininity, and he carries an air of frustration to his lack of sexual fulfillment that reads as if he is missing some actualization in his soul. Is he gay? Queer in some other way? Does he just have weird, unfulfilled kinks? Maybe, or maybe he’s 18 and is drowning in raging hormones. It’s clear even Seth doesn’t quite realize whatever is going on, though Hill really plays up the looks of longing towards Cera in the film’s closing minutes.

As much as Superbad is very much a comedy built to maximize the density and delivery of jokes, it is also remarkably well directed. Between this and Adventureland, Greg Mottola makes a case as one of the shrewdest and most effective comedy directors of his era. His recent Confess, Fletch was smartly made, too. I’ve been saving his cult comedy debut from 1996, The Daytrippers, for a special day, as it has all the makings of a movie I’ll love. In Superbad, I especially love the flowing energy and chaos of the first party that Seth and Evan crash; it’s grungy and not exactly appealing but it has a tense energy. Mottola shoots the entire film as if it could take place anywhere from the ‘70s to the ‘00s (though a couple of references to the Internet clearly date it as contemporary to its release). William Kerr’s zippy editing never lets the momentum flag for even a couple of minutes. (As with most comedies, I recommend the theatrical edit over the unrated DVD release, though the theatrical cut is increasingly hard to find. For some reason the streaming option is the extended cut.)

Yet what the success of Superbad ultimately comes down to is just how funny it is. And, my God, it’s funny. You never go longer than 30 seconds without a big laugh; whether the source is a well-structured punchline, or some great line reading, or an off-handed turn of phrase, or all of the above at the same time, varies from moment to moment, and yet it’s all brilliant. There’s an honesty in the dialogue cadence that you wouldn’t call naturalism, but flows so organically: The script absolutely nails the mean-mostly-as-a-cipher-for-affection texture of teen boy dialogue that rings very true to my adolescent experience. The way characters twist pronunciations into crass jokes and slide pop culture references into their banter is definitely authentic teen boy behavior.

No film is flawless, not even Superbad, and the joke hit rate here is more like 98% than 100%. The film includes an extended gag about elementary school Seth drawing penises that is hysterical as a comic micro-film but doesn’t quite click with the rest of Superbad: it is both the only major flashback and much more heightened and absurdist than any of the other jokes here. And the tone sometimes goes too far in on the nastiness. While the film mostly offers an observational, non-endorsing lens on Seth and Evan’s shortsightedness, it does seem to share its repulsion of periods, which is pretty pathetic. (Gasp, unavoidable natural body processes!) That runner about period blood is one of the few times the movie really feels like it was made by high school senior boys rather than about them.

I also accept that a film that is so crass and occasionally mean-spirited, even if most of that is only on the surface layer, will turn off a significant percentage of its audience members by those very traits. Superbad’s screenplay is a royal tapestry of dick jokes, but mostly dick jokes nonetheless. Not everyone wants to re-experience the undeveloped brains they had at eighteen or thinks that it’s inherently funny when teenage doofuses don’t really understand sex despite their bodies craving it more than any demographic on the planet. Not everyone is me.

As far as I’m concerned, Superbad is one of the greats: a great raunchy comedy, a great encapsulation of puerile teenage boyhood, a great rowdy ensemble cast, a great cinematic execution of a joke-delivery-vehicle. It’s a great movie, period, and one of my favorite comedies of all time.

Alright, I’ve refrained from letting this review turning into a quote-a-thon, but I’ll indulge with this last paragraph: “Prepare to get fucked by the long dick of the law!” — “Okay, so we have an African Jew wearing a hoodie…” — “Hey Greg, why don’t you go piss your pants?” — “He is the sweetest guy. Have you ever looked into his eyes? It was like the first time I heard The Beatles.” — “My brother came all the way from Scottsdale, Arizona to be here tonight and you’re not going to sing for him?” — “Muhammed is the most commonly used name on Earth. Read a fucking book for once.” — “Nobody has gotten a hand job in cargo shorts since ‘Nam!” Long live Superbad.

But no teen movie had ever embraced a lack of plot or character development to the extent that Dazed and Confused does. It’s ideological in its chillin’. This is where the Richard Linklater ethos took full form. I’ve seen this film described as “vibes only,” which is not quite right as a label. There’s too much richness in the cross-section of characters and the forging of their adolescent souls to dismiss it all as “vibes.” But “vibes only” is not quite wrong as a label, either.

Dazed and Confused rejects the idea that teenaged existence can be crammed into easily digested linear narratives. Consider the dynamic between Randall “Pink” Floyd (Jason London), his girlfriend Simone (Joey Lauren Adams), and Jodi (Michelle Burke). Pink has clearly lost interest in Simone and connected with the likable Jodi. Almost any other teen movie would have Pink and Jodi get together by the end of the film — a mini Happily Ever After, maybe giving us some reason to hate Simone in the process. Sure enough, we get one scene of Pink and Jodi making out in the woods. But then Jodi heads home from the party, and Pink bumps back into Simone, and things return to the status quo. Perhaps Jodi and Pink finally get together before they graduate; perhaps they circle each other but never get the timing right, then grow up and move on. We don’t know. In the eyes of Dazed and Confused, it’s just one little thread of a huge, colorful tapestry of humanity that exists even at a small Texas high school.

The film has a complex relationship with nostalgia. On the one hand, it is a deeply nostalgic film on the surface. It recreates the thrill and the sense of possibility of a night out with your friends. Everyone here is living what most viewers would call the good-old-days: A carefree time when nothing mattered but looking forward to an Aerosmith concert and hanging out at the Moon Tower. Inside jokes, rituals, nonstop radio jams. Life is, from the outside, quite good.

But it’s not as simple as that: If the film is texturally pro-nostalgia, it is textually anti-nostalgia. Many of the characters are unhappy or nasty to each other, and this gives the film some much-needed edge to counter the rose-tinted view of the past. None of us were quite so generous and upbeat in high school as we might have wished we were. Many characters openly profess boredom and the gnawing urge for something more meaningful: “All I’m saying is that if I ever start referring to these as the best years of my life — remind me to kill myself,” mopes Pink. Characters engage in gratuitous hazing, not to mention Wooderson’s (Matthew McConaughey) incessant grooming of underage girls. However, Wooderson facilitates the Moon Tower party and is as gentle and non-pressuring as any adult partying with high schoolers could possibly be. He provides a reassuring voice to Pink that it’ll all work out so long as he keeps L-I-V-I-N livin’. Wooderson is complex and multitudinous, you see — just like the movie. No heroes or villains, no simple morals or takeaways.

All that makes the movie sound a bit academic and pretentious, which is exactly what it is not. Dazed and Confused works because it is so damn fun. It’s so unburdened and smoothly flowing that it almost seems too easy. (But if it was easy, there’d be a Dazed and Confused every year, and there hasn’t been one since.) It’s so joyful to watch these kids cruise from school to baseball practice to a party, always searching for the next good time. Linklater has filled the movie with so many energetic and fun moments that the film never loses its sense of delight, no matter how many times you watch.

Linklater spent a lot of time studying Cassavetes and the neo-realism movement. He takes the John Hughes template for high teen melodrama and turns it inside out. The dialogue feels unscripted and natural, as if these are regular kids talking about everyday things; the exact opposite of, e.g., the big Breakfast Club speeches. There aren’t too many jokes per se; they’re more like riffs. There’s no punchline to the Martha Washington “cool, cool lady” monologue by Slater (Rory Cochrane), but that means every contour of it is worth celebrating and memorizing. (Slater, by the way, is one of cinema’s great stoners.)

The script — and the subsequent near-universally terrific performances by the loaded cast — gives inner life and personality to no fewer than two dozen characters, and you could probably go higher than that. That’s one reason the film is so rewatchable — you can pick a new character or two to focus on each time through and try and dissect how they relate to the other characters and to the world around them.

As perfect as the script is, it might be only the third-most important contribution by Linklater to the film. We must consider, first, his production leadership, and, second, his direction. After Everybody Wants Some!! released, I read an interview where one actor cited Linklater’s “Wikipedia” brain — you give him a scenario or topic, and he could tell you, in depth, what it needed to look and feel like, and how it connected to other things. This results in films where every detail feels like an authentic treasure; the fashion, the styles, the gestures, the turns of phrase, all add up to a vivid world. He may not have designed every single facet himself, but his guiding vision holds it together.

And Linklater’s direction, his ability and intuition with a camera, is special, too. He gives every scene a tremendous sense of physical space that you want to hop into and explore. Whether he’s gliding through an arcade or peeking over the shoulders of a wisecracking circle of friends, he always make you feel a specific emotion or sensation with each shot. His blocking inside compressed spaces is incredible: No director I’ve ever encountered has done a better job at shooting people in a car (a sizable portion of the film), making it always feel realistic and spatially elegant.

But of all of the elements that bring life to the film, none is more important than the soundtrack. If there’s a film that uses a rock soundtrack better than Dazed and Confused, then… well, it’s probably American Graffiti. But if this movie isn’t quite so formally inventive with its use of musical diegesis as American Graffiti, it goes even further to construct a distinct texture for each scene with its music. Just like it’s impossible to imagine the opening Star Wars text crawl without John Williams’ soaring anthem; and even if you could, you wouldn’t want to — so, e.g., the lovely Emporium scene is not a fraction of itself without “Hurricane.” And that is true of, almost literally, every single scene of the movie. The radio soundtrack is the soul of the film. It’s tempting to list every of the three-dozen perfect needle drops in a bulleted list, but a few favorites are “Low Rider” during the sunset cruising scene; “Tuesday’s Gone” for the party wind-down; “Why Can’t We Be Friends” for the “air raid”; and “Slow Ride” for the unspeakably perfect and poetic final cruise down the highway. (Every movie that ends with a card driving into the distance is better off for it.)

The miracle of Dazed and Confused is not any of its components, or even the remarkable summation of them, but the way it surpasses that sum of its parts. It comes together into a sublime whole where each piece improves the other. This film simultaneously speaks so many universal, timeless truths about adolescence and finding one’s place in the world… yet gives us a perfect, tiny portrait of a specific time and place. There’s no better movie to make you feel young, or feel old, or feel both at the same time; either way, you’ll want to grab an ice cold brew and go cruising with these kids one more time.

As with my reviews of Toy Story 1 and Toy Story 2, I present my thoughts in a disorganized format. Maybe someday I’ll collect all of these into a cohesive review, but for now I leave you with bullet points.

So here’s my case that Toy Story 3 is not just a masterpiece, but one of the great films of my lifetime.

What I love:

• The end. Of course, everyone cites it as the best part of the movie, but not many go past “it made me cry.” It’s a brilliantly structured finale, paying off on threads set up throughout the film and the entire trilogy. The entire first hour feints hard at a suggested finale: a chase scene to catch Andy before he leaves for college with Woody, with the other toys accepting the attic. And just when it seems that endgame has kicked in motion, the villain tossed in the trash, everything is apocalyptically upended when all of Andy’s toys also get tossed into the trash. This leads to the unforgettable near-annihilation at the incinerator (the moment Woody grabs Buzz’s hand, he fully accepts his toy mortality), then the rebirth at Bonnie’s as the toys get played with by Andy one last time. (Which is what set off the entire story in the first place — Andy’s toys wanting to get played with but fearing the trash so fleeing to Sunnyside.) It’s really one of my favorite endings to any movie, ever. And, yes, it makes me cry, too — a different part every time, but always and inevitably.
• The underrated beginning and middle acts. Toy Story 3 has the bad rap of being mediocre in its first hour. It’s just not true. This is a really daring and fun movie — starting with the premise, a state of despair via toyhood obsolescence due to Andy’s impending  adulthood. That moodiness takes a shift towards the playful genre pastiche (always in the Toy Story DNA) as the false utopia of Sunnyside is deconstructed via kaiju and heist subplots. Toy Story 3 certainly has a slower boil than plenty of other Pixar movies, but it’s never dull and never less than gripping.
• The animation. Pixar’s tech and art design here are leap ahead of Toy Story 2 in every conceivable way. The direction and virtual-camera placement is phenomenal, the lighting fantastic and precisely matching each mood, from the sharp lights of the toddler play session to the hazy golds of the last scene with Bonnie, and so many other variations. All the character animation is best-ever material, with Tortilla Mr. Potato Head a particularly inspired creation. The wear-and-tear on the toys is so tactile and real and thematically appropriate. The humans look better than ever (especially too-cute Bonnie). My favorite single effect is probably the flickering from the heat of the incinerator, rendering everything ever-so-slightly distorted and choppy.

• The score. Randy Newman isn’t at the top of my favorite composers list, but he was the perfect man for Toy Story, bridging the irony and sincerity of the series perfectly, able to tug the heartstrings when needed. (“So Long” is a beautiful, elegant, understated all-timer piece.) My biggest complaint is that the credits song “We Belong Together” is on the bland side. But that leads me to…
• The dance party? I know it’s become an animated feature cliche (and was already one in 2010). But they’ve never been as satisfying as this. And if you’re going to have a dance party, it’s hard to beat a flamenco version of “You’ve Got a Friend in Me” by The Gipsy Kings.
• The symbolic roundness. There’s no question that Toy Story 3 is the most thematically rich of the Toy Story movies, and perhaps any Pixar movie. But what I especially love is that there’s so many ways to read every scenario and conflict — I’ve been arguing with friends about the symbolism of the ending for over a decade now. Whatever your take, there are certainly more spiritual overtones here than ever, which adds an appropriate gravity to a movie flooded with death/afterlife imagery. (“Where’s your kid now, Sheriff?”)
• The conclusion of my childhood. It’s something of a cliche for millions of millennials, but undeniably true: this film is the end of innocence, incarnate. Toy Story 1 came out when I was in elementary school, Toy Story 2 came out when I was in middle school, and Toy Story 3 came out a couple weeks after I graduated college. This trilogy accompanied and refracted my childhood, then sent me off to adulthood with equal parts sentimental gratitude, bittersweet wistfulness, and hope for a bright future. “Thanks, guys.”

What I’m less crazy about:

• Lotso as a villain retread. Lotso is hardly a “surprise” villain — the false generosity/Machiavellian vibes are off the charts from his first appearance. But he hits a lot of the same notes that Stinky Pete from part 2 does, from his curdled resentment due to childhood neglect, to a put-on “best interest” for toys, to even his rotund appearance. It’s not an exact match, though; Lotso, for example, weaponizes southern hospitality charm, and the mechanics of the abandonment and villainy are plenty different. But there’s unmistakably some “sameness” to him. That said… It’s ultimately a minor point, as Lotso is not the film’s true antagonist — that would be Father Time.
• The stereotypes. Ken is not exactly a big gay joke, but he’s pretty close, and the film leans on it way too much for comedy (I could do without the fashion show or the high heels quip). And Spanish Buzz is a character animation delight, but a tango-dancing telenovela heartthrob caricature for sure. A bit outdated in 2010.

So, add it all up, and what do you get?

My favorite Toy Story movie. Not just that, but my favorite Pixar movie, and a movie the climbs higher up my all-time favorites list every time I watch it. (Edit: See just how high here.)

I don’t hate Toy Story 4 by any stretch — I like it, in fact — but, to me, it’s a new spinoff series. “The Bonnie Chronicles” or something. Pixar should have given that film and whatever sequels inevitably come a different title. And so I feel no need to revisit it as part of this retrospective. Who could ask for a more perfect ending for one of cinema’s greatest series than Toy Story 3?