Word: apatow
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...guess is that Apatow recognized this quality in Rudd and didn't know how to build a movie around it. Some of the leads in his movies dwell in a state of barely suppressed panic (Carell, Cera); but most are guys comfortable in their own skin, however flabby or unsightly it may be. I'm not good-looking, the Rogen-Hill-Segel men say, but I can make people laugh. And in a comedy, funny is sexy. Rudd hasn't that gift (as is obvious in the video-game riffing he does with Rogen in Virgin: his younger partner...
...Rudd's performance is an acutely off-key symphony of lame rejoinders, wildly inappropriate ethnic accents and pathetic attempts at bonhomie. If the movie wants its audience to laugh and cringe simultaneously, as I think it does, then it's the signature film of what could be the post-Apatow era. (Read "Who Killed the Love Story...
...maybe it's proof that the pre-Apatow age of movie comedy is officially over. There's a reason Peter seems so... so very odd. He's an avatar of traditional Hollywood romantic comedy, where the male tries to be suave and caring, to be the man women love. But that form of movie romance is anachronistic, when most pictures insist that the crucial relationship is guy-guy. Peter has honed the wrong skills; in this movie he doesn't have to get the girl; he already has her. He has to become a supporter of Guy Marriage...
...After Knocked Up (a purportedly heterosexual romance where the closest connection is between Rogen and Rudd) and Superbad (where the two high-school chums end up together in a sleeping bag) and another Apatow-produced comedy, I Now Pronounce You Chuck & Larry (where two straight firefighters solder their emotional bond by getting married), the bromance may have reached its logical conclusion: guys going on man-dates. Without ever being gay, of course. The love in I Love You, Man is agape, not eros - but still a higher form of communion, the film says, than those tired old guy-gal relationships...
...party. Rudd has mastered the task of playing the haplessly endearing male lead, and his struggle to be one of the boys is simultaneously laughable and charming. Peter eventually hits it off with supposedly employed slacker Sydney Fife (Jason Segel). Rudd and Segel have worked together on two Judd Apatow films already—“Forgetting Sarah Marshall” and “Knocked Up”—and the strong chemistry between them is evident onscreen. In fact, it’s easy to mistake “I Love You, Man?...