Melissa McCarthy vs. Paul Rudd and Leslie Mann in the school principal’s office is easily the best scene in Judd Apatow‘s This Is 40, which I rewatched last night and….what’s the phrase?….had an uproarious time with.
“Fuck you, Jill…you’re a horrible fucking woman…this is why everybody hates you…this kind of shit…fucking ineffecitve bullshit hair, and I’m glad your husband died’cause you’re a fucking asshole….he probably killed himself”:
Here’s a phone interview I did with the great Albert Brooks in the run-up to the opening of This Is 40. Brooks’ best years, performance-wise, happened between Real Life (’79) and Mother (’96)…a 17 year run…his career peaked, of course, with the one-two punch of Lost in America (’85) and Defending Your Life (’91). But he was pretty damn good in Apatow’s 14-year-old film, and he wasn’t half bad as a retreating governor in 2025’s Ella McCay,
Again, the HE-Brooks mp3.
Wells to Apatow (12.6.12) letter — honest injun reactions to This Is 40, which are 60-40 but mostly positive:
“Here’s my positivity, my admiration, what I liked: ‘Get through the first 75 minutes so you can savor the really good final 50 minutes.’
“Marriage is hard, marriage is a grind, it’s not easy to keep the fires going, etc. Your film honestly deals with all that stuff, warts and all. And it honestly states that teenage girls (even the ones sired by the director-writer) can be whiny, abrasive and self-absorbed and dismissive of their parents. I just didn’t buy the quirky oddball humor in the first hour (particularly any material related to anal probes) and I didn’t buy the Graham Parker/music business material. But the final 50 minutes is not just pretty good stuff but fully approvable.
“I have to say that being 40 is a pretty easy thing, Judd, if you don’t mind my saying. It’s officially the start of middle age but the ‘uh-oh’ feeling doesn’t really kick in until your mid to late 40s. I’ll tell you this: I look at photos of myself when I was 40 and I think to myself, ‘Wow…almost a spring chicken! Okay, a little bit of wear and tear has started to show by that point but very little, really.’ 40 is when your face begins to acquire a little character, and when moms enter the MILF stage. It’s pretty hot when you get right down to it. So I don’t get the angst.
“What guy is dumb enough to tell his wife or girlfriend that he took Viagra or Cialis before making love to her? It’s not only printed on the warning label. I think 15 year-olds know that when they get older they’re not supposed to tell their girlfriends that they’re taking it. It’s almost on the level of ‘go when the light is green and stop when it’s red.’
“Albert Brooks kills it in every scene he’s in. Melissa McCarthy is really great because she’s committed to the anger and never goes for the laughs. John Lithgow is too pursed and pinched at first, or so I thought, but then he saves it at the very end, especially in that scene between he and Leslie.
“This Is 40 takes off and finds the groove and kicks into gear around the 75-minute mark. Starting with the scene in which Rudd is weeping in his BMW, which directly follows the scene in which he realizes that Graham Parker is not going to save his company financially. Of course, this is something that everybody in the audience knows from the get-go, but which takes Rudd over an hour to figure out.
“But after this point the anger and the fighting and the resentments really let loose, and that’s when the movie starts to really work.
“So much of the hassle and the tension of things comes from the Graham Parker situation, and that just didn’t fly for me. It’s hard to root for anyone who’s so blind to the realities of the music market that he’s pinning his hopes for survival on the ascendancy of Graham Parker and the Rumor. Rudd’s character has done pretty well for himself in the music business (as you have in the film business), obviously, but suddenly he’s an idiot who thinks that he can sell Graham Parker in a big enough way so that his financial pressures will be alleviated? And the solution at the end is representing Ryan Adams, another getting-old guy?”