Boy Gets Girl Pregnant
PODHORETZ, JOHN
Boy Gets Girl Pregnant Obscenely funny, and maybe disturbing. by John Podhqretz Ben is an ambitionless man-boy with no job, $114 in his bank account, and a serious commitment to his bong. Alison...
...Writer-director Judd Apatow has stuffed it full of amazing comic performers who do amazing things with 15-second bits, and he lets the movie run long (two hours and 9 minutes) to allow its leading characters a real opportunity to strut their stuff...
...It's a very sweet way to end a picture...
...He straightens up, flies right, and gets the girl...
...Ben has nothing else going on—and besides, Alison is hot, so he's game...
...The credits roll, and you see dozens of pictures of the actual babies born to the cast and crew of Knocked Up...
...After a while the wordplay seems to sting rather than amuse...
...They meet drunk at a club, hook up, say goodbye in the morning — and eight weeks later reunite when she discovers she is pregnant...
...Maybe that's because, in the universe of Knocked Up, everybody is foul-mouthed and foul-tempered...
...He doesn't even seem moderately nice...
...How you react to this movie depends on how you react to this scene...
...Rogen played one of the buddies in The 40 Year Old Virgin, and he's an interesting screen presence: He has a gravelly basso voice and a quick tongue that belie his cherubic, even dopey, visage...
...It's undeniably funny, and there are moments when it is flat-out hilarious...
...The plot of Knocked Up hinges on Alison finding Ben cute and cuddly, a human teddy bear, lovable despite all his surface flaws...
...Apatow has the power to make a 129-minute comedy because his first movie as writer-director, The 40 Year Old Virgin, was a singular sensation: An inexpensive R-rated raunchfest loved by people of all ages...
...The audience must feel the same way about Ben if the movie is going to work its magic on us...
...When Alison is seven months pregnant, a midnight earthquake shakes Ben's house to its foundations and he runs into the street carrying his bong—forgetting entirely that Alison is alone in the bedroom...
...But later, after a few minutes' reflection, even a sincere pro-lifer might wonder whether Alison should just have gotten an abortion...
...The primary failure here may be attributable to Seth Rogen, who plays Ben...
...ine visiting, or a planet you think exists, then you might be knocked over by Knocked Up...
...Maybe...
...Apatow found a miraculous balance between wild las-civiousness and soulful sweetness in Virgin, the story of an unassuming guy who becomes the target of a campaign by his coworkers to end a lifetime of unwanted chastity...
...None of them works, and it's questionable whether any of them bathes...
...Alison is a gorgeous, polished entertainment journalist...
...Of course, Ben is saved from a life of slackerdom by the impending arrival of his baby...
...But brilliant though Apatow's trash talk is, it has a bitter and angry undertone to it...
...But on what planet would an irresistibly cute teddy bear basically beg for oral sex from a vulnerable woman who is trying to determine whether said teddy bear, a man she barely knows, could be someone with whom she might be able to raise a child...
...In particular, there's a scene in which Alison's sister Debbie (played by Apatow's wife, Leslie Mann, who is onscreen ambrosia) berates the bouncer at a club so violently that he begins to cry and acknowledges that he didn't let her in because she's too old and should be at a yoga class...
...And yet she does...
...Ben lives with a quartet of fellow stoners who lie around a house in suburban Los Angeles talking idly about launching a website filled with clips of naked movie stars...
...Funny...
...It's unnecessary, it does nothing to advance the plot, and it's pure gold—a classic piece of American comedy...
...But while the plot of Knocked Up is far less smutty than the storyline of The 40 Year Old Virgin, the new movie is oddly disturbing...
...He responds that he generally expects oral sex (the actual dialogue is far more explicit...
...With Knocked Up, Apatow is trying to make the same miracle happen twice...
...And he doesn't seem to be kidding, since he tells her that's what he told his buddies he thought he'd get out of the evening...
...Poor Alison seems lost in a world of unpleasant people who don't really mean her well...
...It's not just the slacker stoners who abuse each other verbally from morning to night...
...Alison decides to keep the baby and to try and see whether she and Ben can forge a relationship...
...The movie about them is called Knocked Up...
...Ben is clearly smart—maybe even as smart as Seth Rogen himself, who had a job as a staff writer on a television show before his 18th birthday...
...And here we have the problem with Knocked Up...
...But it seems beyond belief that the sensible and good-hearted Alison would spend another minute with Ben after that...
...It's like The Sopranos without the gunshots...
...But Rogen isn't really an actor, and he isn't able to convey the kind of essential nobility Ben needs if we are to root for him...
...Alison's beautiful and well-to-do sister, the mother of two young children, hurls curses at her good-guy husband (the great Paul Rudd) with Nolan Ryan velocity...
...In furtherance of her goal, Alison asks Ben what he usually expects to do on a second date...
...If that is the planet you live on, or a planet you can imagJohn Podhoretz, columnist for the New York Post, is The Weekly Standard's movie critic...
...But he doesn't seem in the least noble...
Vol. 12 • May 2007 • No. 36
