Knocked Up and why I never need to enter a theater again

knockedup_resized.jpgI could turn this into a simple review of Knocked Up. I could say that, while funny, well-cast and full of Katherine Heigl hottness, its needless and mostly uncritical obsession over celebrity culture (and the repeated celebrity cameos) dulls it faster than an evening watching C-SPAN. I could point out the major disconnect of the main character's obsession with celebrity nudity with the fact that we never get to see any of Katherine Heigl's naughty bits, despite two sex scenes and a tub scene. I could list all the ways that Judd Apatow, Seth Rogen and all the supporting characters are interconnected in such a way to make Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon devotees cream their jeans. But no, the reason Knocked Up has me swearing off paying $8 for a theater ticket and another $8 for popcorns and sodas (yeah, things are cheap here in Vermont sometimes) is because I've already seen it. Sure, it's a largely original movie, and I'm not going to claim Apatow stole the ideas for it from an previous work (barring, perhaps, the Miracle of Life, that sex-ed film we all had to watch in the eighth grade). But if you've seen just one trailer for the comedy, then you've seen the whole damn movie. Nearly every comedic scene of that movie was in the trailers, either online or on TV, from Rogen's "You're prettier than me" comment to his buddy's attempt to help with the birth and subsequent warning not to go in the birthing room. While they were indeed worth a chuckle when first watching the trailers, nothing about those scenes evolved into something funnier in the theater. And everybody else in the audience noticed it too - hardly a laugh at the scenes already played over and over again in the trailer. The scenes that did elicit laughs never would have had a chance in the trailers, such as the constant ridiculing of the roommate who bets he won't shave his beard for a year or Ben's worry that having sex while Alison is pregnant will mean that the first thing his child will see is his cock in its face. And this phenomenon didn't just ruin Knocked Up. A good half of the movies my girlfriend drags me to nowadays suffer from the same syndrome - let's call it premature cachinnation. Theoretically, that's not what a trailer's for, to give the whole movie away. Instead, a trailer should entice you with just enough of a sneak peek behind the curtain to give you an idea of what the movie is about and just enough information to decide whether it will be worth your $8. But hey, I don't mind saving my money and hitting up the Apple trailers page. It's another dime the MPAA and the celebrity-industrial complex won't be getting from me.

  1. I am shocked how can you disagree with all of the critics who say that Knocked Up is as if not more important than the second coming of Jesus! I do agree they show all the best stuff in the trailers nowadays. That and betwwen the spoilers on the internet how can you not know everything about the movie before you see it. My advice is to see the movie on Mondays when tickets are $5 and you get a free popcorn. Of course the Ivy League Liberals in Vermont probablly don’t allow that sort of thing.

    D WallZ
    June 5th, 2007 at 12:49 pm

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