Word: rudd
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...past few years, as I've watched Paul Rudd in Judd Apatow's comedy bromances, I've wondered why Apatow hasn't promoted the actor to star status. In The 40 Year Old Virgin Rudd and Seth Rogen were the hero's two closest buddies (and tormentors). But it was Rogen who got the lead role in Knocked Up, with Rudd in a supporting role as his best friend. In Knocked Up the Rogen character had a couple of stoner pals, played by Jonah Hill and Jason Segel. Quickly, Apatow godfathered their star movies: Hill in Superbad, Segel in Forgetting...
...that, at Judd University, all the freaks and geeks get a turn to shine in the school play - while Rudd, the one guy who kind of looks like a movie star, is relegated to the chorus? I've finally figured it out, now that I've seen John Hamburg's I Love You, Man, which is not an Apatow production (but observes all its rules) and in which Rudd finally gets a starring role. It's that Rudd is a handsome nebbish, a fellow programmed to be agreeable, soft, semi-cuddly, in a movie universe that not only doesn...
...guess is that Apatow recognized this quality in Rudd and didn't know how to build a movie around it. Some of the leads in his movies dwell in a state of barely suppressed panic (Carell, Cera); but most are guys comfortable in their own skin, however flabby or unsightly it may be. I'm not good-looking, the Rogen-Hill-Segel men say, but I can make people laugh. And in a comedy, funny is sexy. Rudd hasn't that gift (as is obvious in the video-game riffing he does with Rogen in Virgin: his younger partner...
...That's the stranded soul that Hamburg, and his fellow writer Larry Levin, have put at the center of their movie. Rudd's character, real-estate agent Peter Klaven - rhymes with craven - is a nice guy, engaged to a nice girl, played by Rashida Jones. No problem... until, as he approaches his wedding day, he realizes with a spiraling horror that he has no male friends. (Apparently he went to an all-girls' college, if there are any left.) He's not a man's man, a guy's guy, he's a woman's man, and the suggestion...
After about an hour, our new friend has to leave for dinner. As we walk out into the cold with the satisfaction of men whose mission is complete, Rudd seems just as smiley as when we walked in. I get the feeling that even if Politziner had been a Clueless-hating jerk, Rudd would have been just as smiley. He's that rare, edgy, adorable leading man you could drop into any bar. Or any movie. I think he could even handle being in one with a woman...