By ROGER MOORE
The Orlando Sentinel
What's wrong with this picture?
Aside from the fact that there isn't enough alcohol in Anaheim to get Katherine Heigl drunk enough to have sex with Seth Rogen, I mean.
And that running time. Two hours and nine minutes? Even a good romantic comedy outstays it's welcome after 100 minutes.
"Knocked Up" positions itself as this summer's "40-Year-Old-Virgin." But it's actually this summer's "Jersey Girl," a tone-deaf skip down parenthood lane for a generation that grew up on bong hits, blogging and supposedly safe sex.
It may touch a nerve among the uncensored, the uncommitted and the irresponsible. It may even be a smash hit. The bong hits have a way of adding up ... and subtracting.
Rogen plays Ben, a charm-impaired, perpetually stoned Net-nerd living with his post-grad pals waiting to launch their novel idea of a Web site dedicated to documenting movie nudity - - fleshofthestars.com. One of the movie's best jokes is that anybody drawn to the film will know there's already a site like that - - mrskin.com.
Heigl, of TV's "Grey's Anatomy," plays Alison, an up-and-coming TV floor-director for E! television who's just been promoted to on-camera. Provided she loses weight. Not that her boss can come out and say that.
"We just want you to be healthy. By eating less."
The Web site loser and ambitious TV beauty hook up, after drinks. And weeks later, Alison gets the bad news. She's "with child," or as the crude, devoid-of-social-skills Ben puts it, knocked up.
Since it's hard to make comedy out of abortion, and that would make a movie considerably shorter than this one's two hours, she decides - - for no moral or intellectual reason we can discern - - to bring this fat, hairy loser-stranger's seed to term.
Ben tries to bond with Alison's family (Paul Rudd, less funny than usual, is Alison's brother-in-law, Leslie Mann is her funny-shrewish sister).
Alison and Ben audition OB-GYNs, try to make a relationship out of an accident (they have nothing in common) and Ben comments, in the most tactlessly vulgar terms possible, about their/his predicament. Not that he isn't clinging like grim death to the hottest woman ever to glance his way.
"The 40-Year-Old-Virgin's" director Judd Apatow becomes the latest filmmaker to discover the wonders of pregnancy, as if he's the first father-to-be to ever experience it. His new wrinkle is in how he goes for the gross and the graphic (childbirth, in all it's glory) as he tells us this tale of a one-night-stand that could never be and an aftermath scripted straight out of anti-abortion pamphlets you sometimes find stuck under your windshield wiper.
Apatow manages these amazing scenes - - a doorman emotionally unburdens himself to a beautiful but over-30 woman he has denied admission to the hot club; a heartfelt telephone cursing jag at an absent OB-GYN and a pleading confrontation with that doctor's ill-tempered, no-nonsense replacement. Bit players (one roommate's stoned girlfriend) land the big laughs. And celebrities score points by "being themselves" in the E! scenes. Ryan Seacrest has never been funnier.
Then Apatow slouches back to another moment with the Ben's friends. The movie settles into marijuana mode. The guys banter and take bong hits in the sincere hope that you're as stoned as they are and will laugh at whatever they say.
The bigger message, that the men folk aren't adult enough to deal with condoms and safe sex, much less pregnancy, is trite but time-tested. No, it's not new, but it still can be funny.
But the stars have so little chemistry that "Knocked Up" can seem nine months long, and not just two-hours plus.
Star Beacon Print Edition: 6/1/2007
