Entries associated with the tag "Knocked Up":

Film comedies have always been a problem for me, since for the most part I don't find 'em "funny." (Funny: what's that? When you laugh, I guess, though Rob Zombie movies—or Milla Jovovich in Resident Evil: Extinction ... can't hardly wait for that one!—probably don't count.) And with the recent canonization of everything Judd Apatow touches, things are looking bleaker all the time, at least from my side of the aisle. Poker-faced through The 40-Year-Old Virgin, poker-faced through Knocked Up, poker-faced through Superbad (I mean, what's with the decibel count: if the characters don't immediately turn into screaming, gesticulating ferrets, does it mean the "comedy" has somehow failed?). As desolating as it undoubtedly is, Aki Kaurismaki's Lights in the Dusk seems more chortlesome (now there's a word!) than anything Apatow et al have been able to cook up. Maybe it's the very numbness of it, like a whiff of nitrous oxide in the dentist's chair: cleaned out and bracing, daring you to find subliminal riffs in an open, airy void—what's not to like about that?

But still I'm not laughing, since that's not primarily what Kaurismaki's about ... so what does set me off comedywise? Probably a window to the soul in this—and maybe I should close it while the opportunity's still there—but so far this year it's been DeCillo's Delirious, Hartley's Fay Grim (two-thirds a white telephone movie elegantly skewed ... until the deplorable imploding finale), Maddin's Brand Upon the Brain!, Edgar Wright's Hot Fuzz, Waitress if you care to count it, then ... nada, zilch, zero. What all these personal faves ultimately share is a reliance on mise-en-scene—on spatial relations and blocking, attitudes and movement, visual filigree—rather than literally "funny" lines. Obviously not into the yackety end of things, which wretched hearing partially accounts for—but only partially, since the same division holds with subtitled movies. And I do hate stand-up, the expectation to laugh's too overbearing and brutal—no Sarah Silvermans for this guy, please.

So what's the "best" comedy in the last five years? My own vote goes to—whoa, credibility alert!—Catherine Breillat's Sex Is Comedy (2002) ... which hardly seems anyone else's idea of a good time at all. Except for me it's almost a "been there, saw that" kind of deal—just a typewriter-wielding factotum at the derriere end of the trade (apologies for the imagery)—and, my god, she's got it all down cold: yes, they do actually debate which body parts to crop out of the frame and which photogs do or don't know how to shoot breasts and schlongs, etc. It's also extremely perceptive in what it emotionally deconstructs and clarifies ... maybe even too much so. You wonder how anyone with Breillat's kind of knowledge (or for that matter Anne Parillaud's, her alter ego in the film) can sustain a "romantic" relation at all. Or maybe she doesn't: insight as the ultimate incapacitator, a life beyond all fantasy ... but who's in a position to say?

Judd Apatow's decided to wade into the Knocked Up abortion debate with this video clip, which he announced via MySpace with this preface:

"Here is what many have requested—a scene from Knocked Up where the issue of abortion is debated in a brave, thoughtful, comprehensive way. We're just the messengers of two sides of this very important discussion."

So for those attached to lone-standing trees while the surrounding forest is being clear-cut, here's the answer to your prayers.

Abortion makes me uneasy. Don't like thinking about it, talking about it, listening to other people debate about it . . . I mean, even the embryos in chicken eggs make me squeamish: oops, cracked that one, there goes another potential avian life.

Not being an active party in the creation/extinction of anything recognizably humanoid, I can more or less indulge this visceral discomfort on an immediate, pragmatic level without being held seriously accountable. Judd Apatow's slacker romantic comedy Knocked Up would like to get away with that too—aaiiieee, the A word, let's not talk about it, OK?—but the behavioral understanding that underlies the film, about what people of a certain age/class/education/earning capacity do when confronted with purportedly "real-life" choices (though in fact they're all stereotypes—which actually reduces the amount of wiggle room available), doesn't make that option feasible. Since here's this putatively bright, upwardly mobile young media pro who's suddenly faced with the prospect of unplanned maternity (not to mention a coparenting doofus who doesn't remotely fit the social-status mold of self-actualizing mate), and we're expected to believe she never directly considers the possiblity of . . . well, you know. (Of course there's the brittle, neurotic sister—an avatar of self-entitlement, and we all know what that means in terms of whatever advice she has to give—who at least sends out exasperated signals; but it's all implicit, in quizzically raised eyebrows and grimaces of concern.)

And what about the audience? Are we feeling that 500-pound gorilla breathing down our necks? Waiting for some unspoken dramatic shoe to drop? Whew, what a relief it never does!—so now we can all stop holding our collective breath. But out in the hedonistic subdivision wilds, where notions of realizing your "me me me" potential, satisfying your innermost needs/urges/desires, etc, have been pounded in since birth, the likelihood of something like this happening seems vanishingly small. It's not a credible outcome, for these cardboard characters anyway. But the issue never literally comes up at all. 

Now if it were Carl Dreyer's "spiritualized," anhedonic Gertrud as aspiring mom . . . though Keri Russell in Waitress seems counterpoint enough. Not pro-life or pro anything necessarily, just tuned into something that goes beyond middle-class caveats and constraints. "Rationality" be damned, some decisions just run against the grain.

For them as care, a recent teapot tempest involving lawyers.

Though frankly I'd say the parties involved probably deserve each other—soul of a TV sitcom, hardly worth anyone's attention, much less all the critical kudos it's been getting . . . but that's my own dyspeptic view.

3 Men and a Cradle, anyone?