Word: apatow
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...Apatow labors under none of those caveats. Marriage is an option, not a command, for couples living together; nearly 40% of all babies born in 2005 had unmarried mothers; more than a million legal abortions are performed each year in the U.S. So Apatow, like all modern comedy writers, has another challenge: how to create social and ethical barriers - the ones the old screenwriters relied on for their characters to hurdle - when few exist. His tactic: rebuild the old barriers. If those hobbling conventions worked for the old masters, they might be worth resuscitating...
...smart, pretty and nice. She has a good job, that's getting better, at the E! Channel. And where does this independent achiever live? Why, in the home of her married sister Debbie (Leslie Mann), with Debbie's husband Pete (Paul Rudd) and their two kids. Apatow imagines that, in Los Angeles 2007, there's some time-warp housing-shortage like the one in World War II-era Washington, D.C. - the premise for the 1943 comedy The More the Merrier...
...when she's been promoted to being an on-air reporter, she gets knocked up by a loser she barely knows and, when sober, can't stand. Some women would terminate the pregnancy. Alison doesn't, because ... because then there would be no movie - at least, not the kind Apatow wants to make. (Suggestion for an edgier romantic comedy. Two unsuited people get together, girl gets pregnant, has abortion, then decides she likes the guy, and they set about raising a family of kids they really want...
...Having chosen to bring the baby to term, Alison now has to figure out whether she brings Ben into the equation. In such a dilemma, whom can she confide in? You might expect that such a personable sort would have a circle of women friends - what Apatow would call her pussy posse - but not Alison. All right, no girlfriends. But she's got an infotainment job in L.A.; the place must be swarming with gay men, ready to offer their sympathy or tart wisdom. In show business, isn't there a Will for every Grace? No again; Alison is effectively...
...much as Knocked Up hates Debbie (who's played by Apatow's real-life wife!), that's how much it loves her husband Pete - the film's idea of Married Man. Pete is cute and funny, he loves his bratty kids so much he gets soupy-poetic over watching them blow bubbles. He does (in maybe my favorite moment in the film) a devastating DeNiro impression. Most heroically, he tolerates his numbing marriage to super-bitch Debbie. "Marriage," he tells Ben, "is like that show Everybody Loves Raymond. Except it's not funny...