Big screen comedy is of course a fickle thing. What constitutes a laugh today can seem tired and played out only a few short years later, and there are all sorts of barriers, both cultural and generational, that combine to produce distinctively flavored subsets of humor. When it comes to more willfully vulgar comedies, the slope is even slipperier. Life is naturally a bawdy thing, but in the past 25 years there have only been eight R-rated laffers to gross more than $80 million domestically, and three of those were slices of the American Pie franchise.

Writer-director Judd Apatow’s feature debut, The 40-Year-Old Virgin, joined that rare club in 2005, ringing up just under $110 domestically and another $67 million overseas on the strength of his heady blend of effusive personality, light raunchiness, heart, sexually frank dialogue and quasi-improvisational hilarity. After years of still-birthing critics’ darlings like Freaks and Geeks and Undeclared for the small screen, Apatow’s first film punched through with audiences in no small part due to its distinctive relatability, and it’s largely for this reason that Knocked Up — the story of a one-night stand between a very mismatched couple (Katherine Heigl and Seth Rogen), and a resultant pregnancy that throws each of their worlds out of orbit — will almost certainly join the aforementioned R-rated smashes in the box office winners’ circle.

Refreshingly, Apatow allows for real arguments between his characters, and in Knocked Up he thankfully doesn’t feel obliged, by mandate of some test audience scorecards, to tone down a sequence in which his two leads say some really nasty things to one another... and yet also never stop trying to see if they can work things between the two of them and reach some plane of accord. Despite all the masturbatory, vaginal and bodily function jokes, and despite his high fidelity to topical one-liners, Apatow remains seriously dedicated to assaying the mysterious distance between men and women that alternately maddens, entices, bemuses and confounds us all. Knocked Up is in its heart a film with a searcher’s soul. It just happens to also be a very funny, R-rated comedy. For the full review, from FilmStew, click here.

        

 

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