Word: apatow
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Here we go again: the boy-meets-boy love story, the bro-mance. The guys are obliged to hate each other, then love each other, then be separated and reunited. Whatever my reservations about the Apatow-sponsored bro-mances, I have to admit that they know what they're about and aren't shy proclaiming it. In Knocked Up, two frustrated guys get away from their women and have a grand time in Vegas: a quickie affair (without the sex) between people who really like each other. In Superbad the horny teen-boys literally end up in the sack together...
...When a grown women (like the Catherine Keener character in The 40 Year Old Virgin) approaches an Apatow hero, she'll often induce not passion but panic attacks, and need to take the lead, be aggressive, help him learn how to cope in the land beyond his obsessions and fears. (In Step Brothers Alice has that job, and she assumes it with missionary zeal.) Women are the Other to these six-foot kids. Inside, the Apatow movies say, men are really lost boys looking for a Wendy. Or, ever better, another Peter Pan - a rebellious youth who'll never grow...
...funnier. "I'm always a proponent for the comedy involved in people who are under the influence," says Apatow. "I just think it's fun watching anyone acting like an idiot." Alcohol, the comic intoxicant of choice for generations of filmmakers, is now too strongly associated in people's minds with spousal battery and drunk driving to be truly hilarious...
Although their new movies feature drugs, Sir Ben and Apatow rarely use the D word when discussing them, as if willing pot out of delinquency and into mere dysfunction. For The Wackness, weed's a crutch; it takes the edge off loneliness, ennui or the shyness people feel around the opposite sex. Luke, the dealer, lives on Manhattan's Upper East Side and is on his way to college--his safety school, but still. In Weeds, Mary-Louise Parker's a pot dealer who sells to successful, bored, suburban business types. Even the protagonists of Harold & Kumar Escape from Guant?...
Except maybe from the film's cast and crew. "Seth and I always argue whether or not this is an anti-pot movie," says Apatow. "To me, it clearly is. Most of the film is people trying to murder these two guys, them trying not to get murdered, and it's all because they're smoking pot." He pauses. "Seth thinks that's too subtle...