Word: apatower
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...right now, for Judd Apatow's slacker romantic comedy, it's beginning to smell a lot like Zeitgeist. (Which in this case has underodors of bong smoke and turd jokes.) Maureen Dowd, the New York Times' ageless arbiter of sexual politics, weighed in with a column on the movie. So did just about everyone who writes for The Huffington Post. Yesterday I received a promotion for a 1982 Eastern European art film that the publicist ID'd as "'Knocked Up,' Polish style." And there's the lawsuit from the author of a humorous memoir called Knocked Up: Confessions...
...comedy that captures the sexual confusion and moral ambivalence of our moment without straining, pandering or preaching," as the Times' Tony Scott opined (in, I have to add, a brilliantly written review). Nor can I agree with the declaration of my friend Richard Schickel, here on TIME.com, that "Apatow, represents, for the moment at least, the best in American movie comedy ... a throwback to the kind of screenwriters who created the classic romantic comedies of the 1930s...
...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...