Affection fairly flows from the audience to the screen.
Is there a pleasure more delicious than being part of a movie audience that is
laughing out loud and often? This is what happens in the new movie surprise
“Knocked Up.” All ages they were, and having a wonderful time. So go.
If I tell you
there is a group of slackers whose only source of future income lies in an as
yet unrealized internet site called <“fleshofthestars.com> and who at the moment
spends its time in shared squalor, drinking and talking in the imagery and
language of their pornographic passion, you might stay home. Or if I mention the
prolonged childbirth scene or the graphic sex, that too might be a negative. So
why might you love this movie? Because everything about it is good.
The premise:
Alison (Katherine Heigl) earns a promotion from off camera facilitator for
television station “E!” to on camera interviewer. She celebrates that night in a
bar with her sister Debbie (a terrific Leslie Mann) who leaves early to go home
to husband Pete (Paul Rudd) and the kids. Staying on alone to savor her triumph,
Alison meets Ben (Seth Rogen), drinks far too much and invites him back to her
bed in her sister’s house. In a moment of miscommunication, they indulge in
unprotected sex that results in a badly timed pregnancy.
Speaking
about Katherine Heigl in an interview with Entertainment Weekly writer/director
Judd Apatow said, “It’s fun to see people really take to her….people have such
an affection for her that it became this movie about Seth Rogen trying to earn
Katherine Heigl.” That’s it, right there, and it happens quickly. Heigl’s Alison
comes across as honest, ambitious, and intelligent. Seth Rogen’s Ben is one of
the sluggards. Rogen handles Ben’s transformation without sentimentality which
leaves us free to love the process.
The movie
wins the evening with terrific comic acting, great timing, and a bristling
script under Apatow’s crisp direction. Affection fairly flows from the audience
to the screen – especially for Heigl, but also for Rogen and for the support
system that envelops them. Credit Leslie Mann and Paul Rudd as Alison’s sharp
tongued sister and brother-in-law; and you may even crack a smile at the
slackers you once wanted to sweep off the screen with your feather duster.
You may be
surprised to find yourself not only welcoming but relishing the verbal outbursts
that amount to total immersion in linguistic porn. This stuff is the daily diet
of the slackers but it surprises Alison who finally outdoes them all with an
unexpected barrage of wonderful vulgarity – the last thing we would have
expected from her. Each cast member gets a turn to put a personal stamp on the
material that seems in some odd way to have been born in innocence. In fact the
delivery is so funny and appropriate it comes off, as someone said, like comic
improv. In our serious and humorless world, here’s an evening of authentic
laughter.
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