A Judd Apatow fanboy who was profoundly impressed by The 40 year-Old Virgin and actually believes this film plays on the same level as classic Woody Allen pics — in short, a not-very-worldly GenX monkey who probably has a beefy physique and wears cutoffs and cross-trainer shoes with no socks and plays video games with his 33 year-old buddies — is gushing about Apatow’s new comedy, Knocked Up (Universal, 8.17).
Virgin convinced me that one cannot say “beware of Judd Apatow!” often enough. I listened to him earlier this year at a Santa Barbara Film Festival panel and I think I know what his game is. Apatow was a very hip comedy writer in the ’90s. Now he’s a 40ish maintainer with expenses to cover.
There’s only one graph in this review that’s half-intriguing: “If you’re looking for a movie with wall-to-wall tear-faced laughter, you can’t do any better than Borat and Idiocracy this year. But Knocked Up is the better film.” He’s saying it has more emotional depth than the other two, and maybe even a trace of a soul. But keep in mind the apparent cultural vistas of the guy writing this.
The author adds that “its the sort of film that comes along and makes you realize that the Oscars is such a broken system, because they would never pull a stick out of their ass to nominate a movie like Knocked Up, a movie that has a two-minute conversation about Julianne Moore’s pubic hair no sooner than the opening credits finish up.” In other words, the conversationalists are talking about Moore’s exposed bush in that marital argument scene with Matthew Modine from Robert Altman‘s Short Cuts. Okay….and the ahead-of-the-curve factor in this scene is what exactly?