, hews to that remarkably similar, winning formula in telling the story of a slacker guy s guy, Ben Stone (Seth Rogen), who hasn t let unemployment or California fitness culture cramp his style. Ben lives in a thirtysomething animal house; the poster art alone, featuring bikini babes and Pink Floyd, tells you all you need to know about where these tadpole men s fixations lie. The house includes a motley assortment of fellow slackers who dream of launching a website cataloging movie nudity but do little to execute their vision beyond watching a steady stream of soft-core and keeping the bong fires burning.
Introduced in classic geeked-out style, the boyz practice Jackass extreme buffoonery in the backyard swimming pool to ironic hip-hop, whiling away their days in a culture where adulthood is only a state of mind. Ben s dipstick deflowering arrives in the form of beautiful, ambitious E! Entertainment Television reporter Alison Scott (Katherine Heigl), whom he meets one night in a bar.
Some viewers may need to suspend disbelief in order to buy knockout Alison sleeping with doughy Ben in the first place. But Apatow milks the scenario for comedic value, with Ben waking up as a chubby odalisque draped in a sheet and Alison in a business suit giving him the bum s rush. After that one-night stand leaves Alison in the titular state, she must consider a relationship with the jobless oaf.
It s a not-entirely brilliant premise, but one nevertheless grounded in a familiar experience of 21st-century life: the conflicting urges of modern boy-men to goof off and grow up. crafts pathos and spit-takes from the truism that life will invariably make adults of us all whether we like it or not. And as much as Ben ups his standards to prepare for imminent fatherhood, Alison has to scale back her notions of what makes a good father and embrace a kinder, gentler, flabbier reality than the ersatz vision of life offered at her E!
day job. In chick flicks, though the heroine is defined by her conventionalized search for love, the most enduring relationships are often between women. And so it is with the superior dick flicks made by Apatow, which offer a comforting take on male bonding where the by-turns tragic and tender camaraderie between men is the glue that bonds the comedy together.
To judge by the film s effect on the slacker type seated next to me, whose laughter projected him bodily from his seat, the film manages to yoke its essential hilarity to something that might best be described as a soul. It s an especially laudable accomplishment of marrying raunch and earnestness amid the recent resurgence of retro-knuckle-dragging lad cinema la , hews to that remarkably similar, winning formula in telling the story of a slacker guy s guy, Ben Stone (Seth Rogen), who hasn t let unemployment or California fitness culture cramp his style.
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