Knocked Up: A Happy Accident
Katherine Heigl, Seth Rogen

By Breanne Boland June 14, 2007 Issue

Here are the ways I laughed while watching Knocked Up:

Judd Apatow, one of the architects of two of the most brilliant-yet-cancelled shows in recent times, Freaks and Geeks and Undeclared, continues the streak he started with The 40 Year Old Virgin. The films share casts and a comfortable mix of crassness and palatable sentimentality. Like his previous movie, Knocked Up creates a cast of characters that could easily be insulted and used for dumb, unkind jokes — a coven of porn-watching stoners, a bickering married couple, superficial TV executives, and a pretty blonde with aspirations of tabloid TV fame.

Instead, the film routinely takes the high road. Yes, the stoners are not the sharpest knives in the drawer, but their scenes have some of the funniest dialogue in a script full of quick, subtle jokes. And while the film explores the “leagues” in dating, Seth Rogan’s slightly rotund, Jew-with-an-Afro self is as respected a character as Katherine Heigl’s tall blonde. The result is a comedy that explores a difficult situation in a creative, funny way and doesn’t leave the bitter aftertaste of lazy, disposable comedy.

Heigl and Rogan play an unlikely pair brought together by an unexpectedly fruitful one-night stand. Eight weeks after their drunken encounter, Heigl’s character realizes she’s pregnant; after much hemming and hawing, she decides to include Rogan in her decision to keep the child. Over the next several months, her overachieving TV personality tries to make a go of it with his pot-smoking, unemployed slacker.

The film must inevitably end with a sentimental birth scene and a happy ending, but a surprising and welcome amount of time is devoted to showing the natural progression of a couple that shouldn’t have been. Heigl and Rogan have some vicious, honest fights, and one long, funny sex scene explores the emotional and physical difficulties of intimacy when an eight-months-pregnant belly is involved.

Apatow’s script deftly exploits comedy and emotion in each scene. Most films featuring a psychedelic mushroom trip set to Cirque du Soleil probably would not use a character’s acrobat-induced freak-out to further the plot and delve into characterization. Knocked Up does. There isn’t a cheap joke in all 129 minutes of the movie. Theaters have been deluged with shoddy, insulting comedies in recent years — talented men wallowing in fat suits and bad scripts, parodies of undeserving parodies, and others scarcely worth mentioning. It’s a marvelous thing to have a truly character-driven comedy out there, especially one as gentle-hearted and well written as this one.

Bottom line: smart, tender, and hilarious

Coming Attractions
June 15
Nancy Drew - A modern-day adaptation of the famous young-adult book sleuth. Nancy is played by Emma Roberts, Julia’s niece. Ads position Nancy as a slightly anachronistic over-achiever in a normal high school, something that’s curiously intriguing.

Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer - Old enemies and new enemies threaten the crime-fighting team, such as the Silver Surfer, a CGI villain second only to CGI penguins in the list of irritatingly overexposed characters in summer movie previews.

June 22
Evan Almighty - Steve Carell almost stole Bruce Almighty out from under Jim Carrey. In the sequel, the uptight newscaster has become an uptight politician who is charged by Morgan Freeman’s sardonic god to build an ark and wait.

A Mighty Heart - Angelina Jolie plays Mariane Pearl, who was married to Daniel Pearl, the journalist beheaded by extremists in 2002, who embarks on a search for her husband after his abduction in Pakistan.

1408 - In an adaptation of a Stephen King short story, John Cusack plays a professional skeptic who meets his match in a legendarily haunted hotel room.

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