Word: apatow
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...past few years, as I've watched Paul Rudd in Judd Apatow's comedy bromances, I've wondered why Apatow hasn't promoted the actor to star status. In The 40 Year Old Virgin Rudd and Seth Rogen were the hero's two closest buddies (and tormentors). But it was Rogen who got the lead role in Knocked Up, with Rudd in a supporting role as his best friend. In Knocked Up the Rogen character had a couple of stoner pals, played by Jonah Hill and Jason Segel. Quickly, Apatow godfathered their star movies: Hill in Superbad, Segel in Forgetting...
...turn to shine in the school play - while Rudd, the one guy who kind of looks like a movie star, is relegated to the chorus? I've finally figured it out, now that I've seen John Hamburg's I Love You, Man, which is not an Apatow production (but observes all its rules) and in which Rudd finally gets a starring role. It's that Rudd is a handsome nebbish, a fellow programmed to be agreeable, soft, semi-cuddly, in a movie universe that not only doesn't value those qualities but sees them as failings. The actor...
...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...
...writer and director. I actually worked as a second unit director on George Washington, and then an actor dropped out of David's All The Real Girls and I stepped in. Thanks to Foot Fist Way, I ended up swinging by the set to meet Judd Apatow during Knocked Up, and I actually told him that he works on his set a lot like David works and that the two would really understand each other...