Word: hollywood
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...lawsuit from the author of a humorous memoir called Knocked Up: Confessions of a Hip Mother-to-Be. Rebecca Eckler, whom Booklist describes as "Canada's answer to Sex and the City author Candace Bushnell," claims suspicious similarities between the movie and her book, which was submitted to several Hollywood producers after its publication two years ago. Apatow denies the charges...
...some strange, yet strangely familiar new species. Then I realized what I was seeing: a 1930s movie in contemporarily grungy garb. And I don't mean that as a compliment to Knocked Up - that it has a clever plot or dazzling dialogue. Long ago I wrote a book on Hollywood screenwriters (the 1974 Talking Pictures), and in that spirit I have one or two tuts...
...Knocked Up is, essentially, a rich-girl-poor-boy romantic comedy, of the kind Hollywood manufactured by the hundreds in its glamorous, sexually restrictive prime. Back then, an unmarried woman with a baby would usually be the victim of mistaken identity. Ginger Rogers, say, in the 1939 Bachelor Mother: she notices an abandoned infant outside an orphanage, gathers the child up and is thought to be its mother; comic discomfort ensues. On rare occasions, and with back-breaking dexterity, a gifted writer could work the sex act into a movie's plot. Preston Sturges' The Miracle of Morgan's Creek...
...mind Rogen. He has sweet eyes, a voice too deep and rich for his age and, in his one nude scene (Heigl 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...
...Ending the story there would make Knocked Up not only consistent with the male-male romances that stock so many Hollywood movies (check my reviews of 300, Blades of Glory and Spider-Man 3 for extensive notes on this trend) but a more honest parable. Instead, in the middle of their stoned bliss, the guys decide to go back home: Pete to his loveless marriage, Ben to the foxy lady who somehow wants him to be the father of their child. Comic birth scene and declarations of love ensue...