Word: apatower
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...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...
...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...