It’s not that I reject every comedy that comes my way. I embraced Apatow’s 40-year-old Virgin and Wedding Crashers and I even had a soft spot for Benchwarmers. I knew that that this movie wasn’t going to be even close to the Virgin and I was right in my prediction.
I don’t want to say that this movie attends to be preachy and tries real hard to get a point across but sadly it does. Not bailing out on your problems and such which is set to a bunch of loser characters that are in this movie. How a not so handsome man can get work it out with a woman out of his league. Also, at the end there is too much drama in the hospital room about the baby coming out.
A beautiful girl Allison Scott (Katherine Heigl) is a behind the scenes worker on the E! but then she gets a promotion to be seen on TV as she gets to interview celebrities. She’s so excited that she goes out to a club with her older sister Debbie who is married, well to do and has two children but she still needs to know if she is still hot to other men. It’s here where Allison meets a real loser Ben (Seth Rogen) whose job consists of smoking pot all day and constructing a website (where people can go to find celebrities nude in certain parts of a movie) with his four loser buddies all living under one roof! She gets so drunk that she doesn’t care if Ben looks like a wild animal. Why does she fall for him and have sex with this guy so easily? I’ll never know. She rushes him on putting on his condom and he can’t wait any longer and digs right in without it. Drunk or not you have to be able to know if a guy looks half decent or not.
What follows is eight ten sixteen and eventually twenty-eight weeks later ( I wish those zombies came and tore some of these people up). She gets symptoms and doesn’t want to face the fact that she is pregnant to this guy. She then wants him to take this seriously. Buys books, cribs and wants him to give up his childish games and focus on reality for once. Allison seems like she comes from a nice family (she lives with her sister) but there is only one scene she talks about the problem with her mother. Nothing more.
The tagline for this movie is: What if this guy got your daughter pregnant? The answer: I’d hunt him down. No offense to Seth Rogen at all but he just isn’t what you would call a “leading man” in Hollywood. He did very funny work in Apatow’s previous film Virgin because he wasn’t the main focus. Steve Carroll was in a very little cameo for this film and to tell you the truth he was better than Rogen. While he was on screen I wasn’t laughing at his obscene-not so funny jokes but laughing at him as he made a fool of himself. Plain and simple: Seth Rogen is no lead actor.
I can’t sympathize with characters that don’t care about their own lives.
A bright spot in this long running movie is Debbie’s husband Pete played by the ever so likeable Paul Rudd. He also was in Virgin. When he’s on screen it seems that we want to see more of him and his charm. Very good role for him in this film. His marriage isn’t working out so Ben and him head to Las Vegas to get away from their troubles to do “man things.” Ben eventually tells him that he actually has it good because Debbie actually wants him to be around every second. Ben, sadly, is trying out his Mr. Phil segment while his own life is already in shambles.
This movie is also very hip and up to the minute on the hot topics of the entertainment world. They talk about going to see Spider-Man 3, Cirque du Soleil in Las Vegas, in a hilarious scene Ryan Seacrest talks about his career dominating the entertainment world, “Lost” with Matthew Fox, and all the movie referrals from Wild Things to Total Recall. That stuff makes this movie seem like you are watching your next door neighbors. Apatow does a good job at making conversation and making us want to join in sometimes only when the people who are doing the talking are not talking about rubbish, which goes on a lot in this movie.