| First,
in the interests of full movie reviewer disclosure, I will
tell you that I hated Caddyshack; I hated Clerks
even worse than Caddyshack—well, I  walked
out halfway so I can’t fairly compare the two, but I
didn’t like it. Knocked Up reminded me, unpleasantly,
of these two movies. Director Judd Apatow’s follow-up
to his hit The 40-year-old Virgin, Knocked Up
is indeed funny with a warm heart, too, like Virgin—but
it’s exceedingly raunchier and relentlessly potty-mouthed,
in the tradition of the dismal Caddyshack.
Katherine
Heigl (of Grey’s Anatomy) plays Alison, a TV junior
exec who lands a promotion to on-air personality at E! Network
and hits a local club to celebrate, dragging along her married
sister Debbie (Apatow’s wife Leslie Mann). There she
meets and flirts with Ben (Seth Rogen) and after a few too
many brewskis takes him home and beds him. Ben and his slacker
buddies soon mythologize his one incredibly lucky one-night
stand into the lynchpin of their loser folklore and are ecstatic,
albeit surprised, when Alison calls Ben some two months later.
But, no, guys, it’s not that Alison “wants more”—she
actually wants to break the news to Ben that’s she’s
“knocked up” with his child. (Plot contrivance
alert: why would this successful, smart woman feel obligated
to share this with a one-night stand?)
The
bad stuff: Knocked Up is a 90-minute movie bumped
to 120 with script pages larded with extraneous four-letter
words. The FPM (f***-per-minute) amps up in the third act
to give Alison’s married sister Debbie her turn at the
verbal pyrotechnics with a profanity-laden diatribe aimed
at a local nightclub’s bouncer. Bu this is not Team
America World Police, its puppet characters hilariously and
idiotically foul—the tone simply doesn’t fit the
suburban mis-en-scene here. Conventional wisdom in Hollywood
used to be that a script should contain at least one f***
to avoid the dreaded PG rating, but I cannot guess what the
motivation is here, except that Knocked Up is pitching
to all demographics, including the one that would only be
lured by the promise of a stoner flick. And in the strange
finale, seemingly from another movie, Apatow presents a graphically
realistic childbirth scene (some sacred to temper the profane?)
that will send women the nation over scrambling for their
birth control.
Seth
Rogen’s Ben is the focus of the film. We can accept
his metamorphosis because of a native intelligence that seems
to gurgle up occasionally from his bong-addled spirit, but
he is mismatched with Heigl’s patrician (by comparison),
leaving them with no chemistry. Alison’s character is
a mere sketch; she lives in a guesthouse on Debbie and Pete’s
property—why?—and we never see any other aspect
of her life or understand her decisions or her affection for
Ben.
The
good stuff: Rogen suggests a young Albert Brooks, and we hope
to see him grow into those shoes. Paul Rudd as Debbie’s
husband Pete charms, while Ryan Seacrest as himself and Kristen
Wiig as Alison’s icy but lethal boss are hilarious.
And the stoner guys do deliver a belly laugh or two.
In
the final analysis, it would be wise to avoid too much analysis,
so go see Knocked Up if you liked Clerks
or Caddyshack. If not, go see Paris, je t’aime.
--
Patricia Ducey
 |
