I finally made it out to see Knocked Up this week, and enjoyed it, but wasn't knocked out by it. It's a lot like Judd Apatow's first film The 40 Year Old Virgin, a series of funny scenes strung together by a fairly weak. Both movies are like early 80s teenage sex comedies updated for middle-agers who remember the time before AIDS and "Just Say No". I heard 40 Year Old Virgin referred to as a "middle-aged sex comedy", which is a pretty apt description of that film.Actually, Knocked Up reminded me a lot of 1982's Fast Times at Ridgemont High. When it came out, Fast Times was perceived as another mindless teenage sex & drugs movie (Roger Ebert called in a "scuzz-pit of a movie"), but now it's seen as a classic of the genre. A raunchy teenage sex comedy with a heart and a mind. The cast included three future Oscar winners (Sean Penn, Forest Whittaker, and Nicolas Cage) and other actors who went on to greater things (Sean's stoner buds were played by Nic Cage, Eric Stoltz, and Anthony Edwards).
There was one part of Fast Times where Jennifer Jason Leigh's character Stacy gets pregnant and then decides to have an abortion. This was all handled completely matter-of-factly, like it was something that happened every day. Fast Times was the first R rated movie I saw in a theater (it came out right after I turned 17), and it's also one of the only times I remember a pregnancy being aborted in a comedy (this was before I saw Polyester).
In Knocked Up, Alison gets pregnant by some guy she barely knows, and then decides to keep the baby. It's all treated the same way that Stacy's pregnancy is treated in Fast Times, as something that needs to be taken care of. Some reviews have said that the values in the film "defy credibility". The story of the film is not really why she gets knocked up or decided to make a go with an aimless slacker, but how they both handle the situation of having a baby. Sometimes you need to suspend your credibility in a comedy. Just repeat to yourself "it's just a movie, I should really just relax... and remember to laugh!".
1 comment:
The story of the film is not really why she gets knocked up or decided to make a go with an aimless slacker, but how they both handle the situation of having a baby.
Thank you, well said. I was just in a heated debate about this with someone who contends that the film makes a political statement about abortion that fits too cozily with the right-wing agenda.
I said, "Dude, it's a comedy."
However, I was forced to concede that it is everyone's right to interpret art within a political context even if it is not the intention of the artist.
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