Copyright 1997-2007 Omniture, Inc. More info available at Welcome to the new look in screen masculinity.
Frizzy-haired.
Flabby around the middle. Pasty-skinned.
Doesn rsquo;t sound like a package that will give Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt any sleepless nights.
But here rsquo;s the thing: Seth Rogen rsquo;s performance in ldquo;Knocked Up rdquo; is so funny, sweet and charming that he makes nebbishy sexy.
Don rsquo;t be surprised if thousands of American women leave the theater wondering, ldquo;Now why can rsquo;t I find a guy like that? rdquo;
ldquo;Knocked Up rdquo; is the latest from writer/director Judd Apatow, who a couple of years back gave us the hit comedy ldquo;The 40-Year-Old Virgin.
rdquo;
As he did with ldquo;Virgin, rdquo; Apatow here pulls off the not inconsiderable feat of making the profane, gross and crude seem somehow endearing. There rsquo;s something in the Apatow style that makes palatable material that in the hands of other directors would be tasteless and off-putting.
And it doesn rsquo;t hurt that he and his players (most of whom he rsquo;s worked with before and who improvise extensively) crank out fall-out-of-your-chair-funny dialogue.
Alison ( ldquo;Grey rsquo;s Anatomy rsquo;s rdquo; Katherine Heigl) is a young producer with the E! cable network who just got the good news that she rsquo;s being promoted to on-camera personality. She rsquo;s so excited that this normally conservative young woman celebrates by hitting the clubs with her married sister Debbie (Leslie Mann).
Alison begins dancing with the first friendly guy she encounters, an unshaven slacker named Ben (Rogen). They drink, they dance, they drink some more. The schlubby Ben mdash; who looks like a young, unkempt Peter Ustinov mdash; is obviously thrilled to find a pretty girl who rsquo;ll tolerate him.
Later that night they fall drunkenly into his bed.
Result: Pregnancy. And so begins a princess-and-the-frog romance.
It rsquo;s not a match made in heaven. Alison is an ambitious career woman desperate to keep her pregnancy secret lest it mess up her new gig. Ben rsquo;s life rsquo;s work is building a Web site that will specialize in nude photos of celebrities.
Faced with impending fatherhood, Ben goes through the usual stages of grief before rising to the occasion mdash; a big step for a guy who is himself a very large child. Alison experiences her own emotional trajectory, from dismay and alarm to something genuinely unexpected. Apatow occasionally veers away from the Ben/Alison plot to delve into Debbie rsquo;s marriage to Pete (Paul Rudd).
They rsquo;re going through the young-parent doldrums mdash; too much work, not enough sex. Debbie fears she rsquo;s lost her inner fox and frets that Pete rsquo;s having an affair.
There are even little subplots involving Ben rsquo;s dorky roomies mdash; Jay Baruchel, Jonah Hill, Jason Segel, Martin Starr mdash; dateless doofusses who have the temerity to dish romantic advice to their overwhelmed pal.
The abundant humor in ldquo;Knocked Up rdquo; is almost never jokey. Rather it rsquo;s reactive, born of the characters and situations, and seems to spring spontaneously from the character rsquo;s mouths. There really aren rsquo;t that many ldquo;funny lines rdquo; to be quoted.
Nevertheless, I cannot recall a recent comedy that had me laughing harder or more often. Astonishingly, ldquo;Knocked Up rdquo; has a running time of more than two hours, and while it could definitely use some pruning, the movie never gets the bloated feel of so many current films, which don rsquo;t know when to quit.
Technically the movie is merely workmanlike, with washed-out cinematography and TV sitcom setups.
But once the laughs start coming, little else matters.
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