May 31, 2007 -- GET Knocked Up - an era-defining comedy classic to rank with Little Miss Sunshine. It s this generation s When Harry Met Sally, and it s even better than The 40-Year-Old Virgin, because the freakish situation it uses as a setup is life. It begins with a bang: Unemployed pothead Ben (Seth Rogen, in a star-making role) has a one-night hookup with uptight but sweet career girl Allison (Katherine Heigl, ditto).
Oven, meet bun. When she finds out she s pregnant, she hasn t talked to Ben in two months. She doesn t even have his cell number, because he doesn t have one: payment complications, he says.
I m not poor or anything, he offers, but I eat a lot of spaghetti. The entire map of the plot becomes visible. It doesn t matter, because each character, each scene, practically each line is hilarious, thanks to writer-director Judd Apatow - the funniest Long Islander since Joey Buttafuoco.
Ridiculous comedies can be fine, but the ones that matter creep up close to the truth. This one lives in it. Ben s stoned roommates - all four of them - drop a hint at what the expecting couple should do: It rhymes with shmush-shmortion.
But when Allison sees a heartbeat on a monitor, the decision is made. This interferes with Ben s vision of what life should be - smoking weed while wearing a gas mask, boxing his buddies into a swampy swimming pool - but his father (Harold Ramis) serves him a little McWisdom nugget: Life doesn t care about your vision. You just gotta roll with it.
Allison lives with her control-freak sister Debbie (Leslie Mann, Apatow s missus), her brother-in-law Pete (Paul Rudd, giving excellent riff on Robert De Niro and even hotel chairs) and their two kids. Pete and Debbie s arguments are based not on sitcom-level lazy-hubby gags, but real points that can divide smart, committed people. Their fights never end because they re both right: She worries about child molesters living nearby and mercury in the kids tuna; he asks, How much Dateline NBC can you watch?
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