Word: pete
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...gets better-looking. It's so unfair." Her theory of getting men to do a woman's bidding - "You criticize them a lot, and then they get so down on themselves that they change" - sounds like extreme rendition. At one point she freaks out in exasperation at Pete: "I wanna rip your f---ing head off because you're so f---ing stupid!" Yet Debbie is the person who's meant to represent all domestic options for Alison, beyond sticking with...
...know. Debbie has to be a shrew, and her marriage with Pete a sad charade, to give Alison one more hurdle to jump: that she'll wonder if living with anyone, let alone Ben, is doomed to failure. But here's a little tip to budding screenwriters. If your refutation to questions of plot irregularity is "Because it's a movie!" - and especially if that card has to be played more than a few times (no friends, no abortion, supporting characters who are caricatures, a website subplot that collapses on closer inspection) - then maybe your script has plausibility problems...
...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...
...that Pete can stand being with her and the kids all the time. He gives bogus excuses and sneaks out at night, not to have an affair, as his wife suspects, but to take part in a fantasy baseball draft - which outrages her more. You're cheating on me to get freaking companionship? she asks. Am I not enough? The movie's answer: No, you are not; no one person is. Nobody can be everything to anybody...
...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...