Word: apatower
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...Johnson (Kevin Costner) is a loser, a wastrel, a jerk--and not one of the purportedly adorable kind in the Judd Apatow movies. The stupor Bud drinks himself into each evening leaves him barely able to drag himself to work the next morning, let alone care for his young daughter Molly (Madeline Carroll). His employer has been "insourcing" Mexicans who'll work for less money and firing hapless guys like Bud. It's no wonder that feeling disenfranchised, disaffected and perennially dissed, he belongs to what would be by far the largest U.S. political party: the We Don't Voters...
...Here we go again: the boy-meets-boy love story, the bro-mance. The guys are obliged to hate each other, then love each other, then be separated and reunited. Whatever my reservations about the Apatow-sponsored bro-mances, I have to admit that they know what they're about and aren't shy proclaiming it. In Knocked Up, two frustrated guys get away from their women and have a grand time in Vegas: a quickie affair (without the sex) between people who really like each other. In Superbad the horny teen-boys literally end up in the sack together...
...When a grown women (like the Catherine Keener character in The 40 Year Old Virgin) approaches an Apatow hero, she'll often induce not passion but panic attacks, and need to take the lead, be aggressive, help him learn how to cope in the land beyond his obsessions and fears. (In Step Brothers Alice has that job, and she assumes it with missionary zeal.) Women are the Other to these six-foot kids. Inside, the Apatow movies say, men are really lost boys looking for a Wendy. Or, ever better, another Peter Pan - a rebellious youth who'll never grow...
...root for these teens, even Megan, the somehow-poor little rich girl. But it's also tough to ignore their similarities to countless characters in teen dramas and comedies. John Hughes sculpted a career writing about kids like these in The Breakfast Club and Pretty in Pink; Judd Apatow's Freaks and Geeks mined the same vein. Burstein's film is way more earnest, but she's learned a lot, maybe too much, from the movies' take on teendom. Rather than offer a gritty view, upending the familiar vision of high school angst, she has fashioned a work so smooth...
Except maybe from the film's cast and crew. "Seth and I always argue whether or not this is an anti-pot movie," says Apatow. "To me, it clearly is. Most of the film is people trying to murder these two guys, them trying not to get murdered, and it's all because they're smoking pot." He pauses. "Seth thinks that's too subtle...