Word: apatow
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...first weekend in June, Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End led the North American box office with $44 million. In second place was the no-star comedy Knocked Up, at $30 million. Which number made Hollywood happier? The second, because the budget of the Judd Apatow comedy was also in the $30 million range, about a tenth that of Pirates. And as word of mouth goosed Knocked Up's weekday grosses past Pirates, the film also certified its leading man, Seth Rogen, as a new comedy star. First law of movie economics: an action epic costs buckets...
...tale of two other movies. Apatow's 2005 comedy The 40 Year Old Virgin made a star of Steve Carell, who was then signed to be the lead in Evan Almighty. It's a sequel to the Jim Carrey hit Bruce Almighty, in which an ordinary guy is given supernatural powers by God himself. This time, Congress-man Evan (Carell) is told to build an ark in preparation for a coming flood. A premise for surefire laughs, unless you happen to live in New Orleans. But God didn't foot the bill for the movie's cost overruns; Universal...
...where the scribes often engage in sexually explicit jokes about the show's cast, as an assistant copies it all down. (In 1999 one such assistant, Amaani Lyle of the Friends staff, brought a sexual discrimination suit against the writers for burning her ears with their X-rated gags.) Apatow is a veteran of these rooms, from his own shows Freaks and Geeks and Undeclared, and some of that rowdy zazz gets into his movies...
...friends (including Rogen and Rudd) and finds a compatible mate. But The Girl (Catherine Keener) was hardly a character at all; her only function was to unleash a hearty laugh whenever Carell passed a joke. Alison, granted, is more prominent and complicated here. But for all the lip service Apatow pays to the guy-gal plot of Knocked Up, he invests much more energy and affection in the scenes of Ben with his friends and, emphatically, with Pete - who is the one person in the movie Ben really falls for. It's another old plot: beauty and the beast...
...doesn't get one, as Mr. Skin will tell you, except for a gynecological closeup late in the film) a cute tush. But by Hollywood beauty standards, he's so on the lower side of ordinary, he almost doesn't belong in movies. That's one good thing about Apatow: he subverts the medium's inherent aesthetic fascism - survival of the cutest - and puts funny people center-screen. His mission to devolve the notion of the leading man continues in this fall's Rogen-Apatow comedy Superbad, which will star Jonah Hill, next to whom Rogen is Redford. Meanwhile...