Word: apatow
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...Apatow and Rogen just do the honorable thing and tell the world they're gay? It would save them a lot of time wasted pretending their movies are about young men growing up and finding the right young woman. It would also save movie critics from having to find new ways of saying, about their maxi-raunch comedies, "Oh, but at heart they're really sweet...
...there may be one more border to cross. When Apatow appeared last week on The Colbert Report, and was asked what was possibly left to show in male comedies, he instantly answered, "A penis." I don't doubt that Apatow was speaking ironically, yet there was self-revelation there to, since that's exactly the sexual organ that the fellows in Knocked Up and Superbad (and his earlier The 40-Year-Old Virgin) are most obsessed...
...pretty small minority of critics who aren't enchanted by the Apatow movies. The first four reviews I read online this morning of Superbad, all by women, in the New York and L.A. Timeses and the Washington and New York Posts, ranged from favorable to ecstatic. Manohla Dargis' notice in the New York Times described the film's phallo-neurosis with a gusto that soared into poetry: "If the penis is puzzled in Portnoy's Complaint, as Alexander Portnoy's shrink believes, in Superbad it is thoroughly, stunningly clueless and as violently tremulous as a divining rod at Hoover...
...crank at the christening. I'm not a prude. I enjoy a good dirty joke, including more than a few in Knocked Up and Superbad. In my time I've praised ribald comedies (Clerks comes immediately to mind) and male-bonding frolics (Sideways). I don't mind the Apatow movies; I'm not trying to make anyone feel guilty for liking them more than I do. I just wonder why they've become the template for popular and critically acclaimed comedy, and why guy-guy is just about the only kind around...
...fabulous performance by Mintz-Plasse, a first-time movie actor with a beguiling, almost cunning dorkishness. The comedy comes from Fogell's belief that he is somehow cool, though he must have been told the opposite three times a day since he was in pre-school. Apatow has a habit of promoting his featured losers to starring roles. Rogen was one of Steve Carell's friend-torturers in The 40-Year-Old Virgin before getting Knocked Up, and Hill was a Rogen buddy in that film before Superbad. From this natural selection of the lamest, Mintz-Plasse has proved...