Word: apatower
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...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...
...Another way of saying this is that he film's central reversal - Ben and Alison getting to know, and like, one another after their first hasty but consequential encounter - is rendered plausible by Apatow's shrewd observations of the people in their lives. Indeed, one of the real pleasures of this movie is derived from the fact that Apatow writes his minor characters - a TV host, a wardrobe mistress, a slyly envious production executive - with the same care and wit as he does his major figures...
...course of pregnancy runs no smoother than the course of true love, and Apatow's obstetrical observations - yes, natural childbirth devotees may well call for painkillers when labor becomes more intense than advertised - are shrewd and edgy. And Alison's hormonally induced moodiness, as well as Ben's slouching progress toward grown-up status, are craftily presented. But for all his hipness and Hollywood hotness, Apatow is, at heart, a square. He clearly believes in marriage, family, bourgeois dutifulness. Maybe his movie is a little repetitive, but that's a negligible price to pay for the careful blending of wildness...
...movie premise, it's about as simple as they come. What transforms it into something quite wonderful to see is that Apatow, unlike those teams that fashion comedies for the young and retarded, is a real writer - one with something on his mind other than barf jokes and public flatulence (though he includes a few such moments here). He knows how to write funny, "he said, she said" jokes. More important, he's a tender observer of ordinary life. Think of him, perhaps, as a throwback to the kind of screenwriters who created the classic romantic comedies of the 1930s...