- guardian.co.uk, Wednesday January 2 2008 11.54 GMT
Katherine Heigl is a pretty girl with a future, celebrating her promotion to onscreen talent at a TV station with a night out at a bar. Seth Rogen is an uncharismatic, unemployed Rory McGrath lookalike who happens to be in the same place at the same time. The resulting next generation soon threatens to change both of their lives forever (despite her 68 pregnancy tests - it's best to be certain). The nearest thing to a job that Rogen and his mates at Dork Central have is planning a website telling you exactly where body parts are exposed in movies. This could be a viable financial proposition, except that of course 655 websites already provide a similar service, a fact the lads might have discovered, were they not primarily concerned with other bong- or dong-related activities.
Knocked Up is the follow-up to The 40-Year-Old Virgin and faces the same problem as the Shaun of the Dead/Hot Fuzz duo: the first is a pleasantly hilarious surprise but the second time around you expect to be amused. Fortunately, Knocked Up meets the raised expectations skilfully, rejigging the cast to give Rogen and Paul Rudd the key roles (they contributed the memorable "Know how I know you're gay?" riff in Virgin), while the star of the first film, Steve Carell, is reduced to a cameo as a posturing version of himself. Both times director-writer Judd Apatow has given us a comedy that embraces the gross-out concept, but you'd never mistake it for a Farrelly brothers or American Pie knock-off. Apatow movies bear a close relationship to real life, celebrate all their characters, never using them just for cheap laughs, and are shot through with little chinks of wisdom and jokes that reverse your expectations. (For instance, there's nothing funny about a bunch of frat brats checking out movies for flesh, but when Heigl takes over DVD-spotting duty and calls out "Boobs and bush!" to Rogen while he's out of the room, it's charming and gross at the same time, a very Apatow combination).
Knocked Up contrasts the central couple's fumbling attempts to create a proper relationship with Heigl's elder sister's crumbling marriage. This is very close to home as the wife (Leslie Mann) and kids are Apatow's real-life family. There's also a running beard joke: Apatow has a beard and has probably stored up years of insults to use here. His films, largely improvised, are far closer to Christopher Guest than Kevin Smith. Both are in the tiny minority who make deleted scenes not only worth watching but often funnier than what gets into the finished product (they're on the "extended and unprotected" special edition) and both prefer to create their own stars from a loose rep company that seems brimful of ideas and confidence. This is a winning run that looks set to continue.
