How can mainstream comedy be dead when is all about inventive delivery? (Get it? "Delivery?")
Stronger than Judd Apatow’s last bluntly-titled summer comedy (The 40-Year-Old Virgin), Knocked Up stands up to both scrutiny and high expectations. The film is so funny it’s sure to have another life on DVD where you won’t be missing any of the punch lines because of the audience laughter. (We missed like 25% of the jokes due to crowd appreciation.)
How'd the locals like it? Mick LaSalle gave it a clapping man, and the Examiner's Sally Kline called it "the best mainstream movie of the summer so far." However, local boy Fernando Croce was more skeptical, saying "Wasn't "having a baby" elected the ultimate going-to-suck warning in that Jump the Shark website?"
But we're most interested in what Peter Cavanese says at Groucho Reviews -- that Apatow is taking a “part in the rehab of the mainstream comedy." It’s a necessary issue that mainstream comedy has gone the way of sassy or stupid. On one hand there are the eternal head injuries of the broad boned Employee of the Month and on the other hand there are the sardonic inference of less widely-seen genre bending John Cusack comedies like the Ice Harvest. Let’s be fair: both brands have done as much to polarize audiences as they have to sour them.
So, is that it? Is the issue that we expect belly laughs from smart jokes or enlightenment from head injury? (Aren’t those things incompatible?) Or maybe this compromise is part of the “rehab” Cavanese talks about -- maybe Seth Rogen (smart but immature Ben) is somehow representative of the public.
Maybe we're all hoping to get enlightenment through irresponsible, drunken sex. If it was that easy for him...
SFist Sara, contributing.
