Movie Review: Knocked Up

Writer-director Judd Apatow wrote his ticket in Hollywood a couple of years ago with The 40-Year-Old Virgin, another movie that boldly blared what it was about in its plain-spoken title. That Steve Carell movie had its funny moments, but a lot of filler, too. But Knocked Up has no extraneous stuff, no slow spots. Although Knocked Up runs a little over two hours - long for a comedy - it sustains the laughs from beginning to end, never slowing down to let the audience catch its breath.

AUDIENCE WARNING! AUDIENCE WARNING!

True to its title, Knocked Up is not for the faint of heart. No question why it's rated R. There's lots of drug use, nudity, raunchy talk, a liberal use of the F word (although here it doesn't seem as naughty, used to punctuate laugh lines), a surprisingly frank birthing scene that includes a clinical peek at the actual arrival. Oh, and sex. That holds surprises, too, in that Katherine Heigl, star of TV's "Grey's Anatomy" and currently filming 27 Dresses in Rhode Island, may be the only actress to play sex scenes without removing her bra. (Her lower half is either covered by a blanket or out of camera range, as well.)

Move over, Cameron Diaz. Watch out Drew Barrymore. Heigl plays Alison Scott, a woman who gets pregnant following a one-night stand with a man she doesn't know, with such charismatic charm that the screen glows whenever she appears. Not only is she beautiful, she has a terrific sense of comic timing.

Alison, a woman on the way up with a new career as on-camera interviewer for a cable entertainment network, is an odd match for Seth Rogen's Ben Stone, a slacker schlub who lives with four man-child dimwits, has $900 in his bank account and dreams of setting up a Web site that cues viewers to movie scenes in which the female stars are naked. (Apparently, you won't find Heigl on this site.)

The slightly chubby, round-faced, curly-haired Rogen and the goddess-like Heigl may be the year's odd couple, but Apatow has set up their meeting at a dance bar and subsequent coupling with enough pregnant possibilities that you'll think maybe, just maybe, something like this could have happened.

That's the key to the rest of the movie, in fact. We've got to believe that something like this could have happened, as unlikely as that may seem in retrospect. For it's weeks later that Alison discovers she's pregnant and that Ben is the only candidate for fatherhood. After dismissing him in a funny morning-after scene - he's incredulous that she "doesn't smoke weed not even in the morning?" he asks plaintively - she never expected to see him again. Suddenly he's Father of the Year.

It's a funny setup, but there's much more to Knocked Up than only that and a funny title. Apatow has filled his movie with oddball characters and off-the-wall situations, from Ben's nerdy roommates, horny slackers who live for getting high and looking at film clips of naked women, to Alison's overbearing sister and henpecked brother- in-law. The four roomies - Jay Baruchel, Jonah Hill, Jason Segel and Martin Starr, who is the butt of jokes about his furry face - are likable clowns whose appeal is that they don't realize they are zeroes.

Meanwhile, Leslie Mann is pitch perfect as Alison's frustrated, demanding sister Debbie, a woman who is stressed out by her Suburban Mom lifestyle and yearns to break out. Paul Rudd is sympathetic as husband Pete, a nice guy who can never do enough right things for Debbie, but gets a chance for his own little middle-class fling in Las Vegas as well as in secret late-night meetings that the ever- alert Debbie believes in her heart is adultery. "It's weird," he says "that when you have a kid all your hopes and dreams change." He and Debbie have a pair of daughters who deliver the kinds of zany one-liners only TV and movie kids get to say.

Heigl has fun, too, trying to find a gynecologist who doesn't give her the willies; and trying to make it through a couple of meetings with a female TV producer who clearly doesn't like her very much. Alison is a woman who tries to be nice, tries to give everyone the benefit of the doubt, which is how she got hooked up with Ben in the first place.

Rogen looks and acts like a young Albert Brooks and he has that same dry sense of humor. As Ben tries to turn himself into a man who can take responsibility, something he has never thought about before, he becomes more appealing but without losing his boyish sense of wonder at all the strange things that he has become a part of.

Marriage, and the relationships between men and women, who really do seem to be from different planets at times in Knocked Up, are explored and turned on their ear. "Marriage," explains Pete at one point, "is like an unfunny, tense version of Everybody Loves Raymond." But in Knocked Up, it's a very funny, very loose affair that will leave you laughing.

Rated: R, contains sex, profanity, nudity, drug use, adult themes.

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