Knocked Up

[modage]

Apatow adds Hathaway to 'Knocked Up'
Source: Hollywood Reporter

Anne Hathaway is joining the cast of Universal Pictures' "Knocked Up."

The actress, who most recently played Jake Gyllenhaal's icy wife in "Brokeback Mountain," is set to star opposite Seth Rogen, Paul Rudd and Leslie Mann in the Judd Apatow romantic comedy.

Apatow is writing, producing and directing the movie, which follows a twentysomething guy who finds out he impregnated his one night stand. The picture will be similar in budget to his last film, "The 40-Year-Old Virgin," which grossed $109.5 million at the domestic boxoffice and garnered a WGA nomination.

Shooting is slated to start in the early summer.

Shauna Robertson also is producing "Knocked Up," while Rogen and Evan Goldberg are executive producing.

Universal president of production Donna Langley, senior vp production Holly Bario and creative executive Erik Baiers are overseeing for the studio.

Hathaway, who made her feature debut with the Walt Disney Co. hit "The Princess Diaries," will next be seen in "The Devil Wears Prada." She is repped by CAA and Management 360.

[RegularKarate]

I saw the rough cut of Knocked Up and I will go ahead and call this a better movie than 40 Year Old Virgin.
It's very similar in tone and timing, but I think he's found a way to make it all come together a little better.
Also, Seth Rogen has needed a lead role like this and he can finally prove here how great he really is.
The relationship between Rudd and Rogen's characters is definitely a well-built expansion of the "you know how I know you're gay" scene from FYOV.
The end is kind of sappy like Virgin, but it doesn't feel tacked on like Virgin did... everything builds up to it.
I laughed pretty non-stop and hope that the cut we saw remains pretty similar because with a few very small exceptions, it's pretty consistantly hilarious.

[meatwad]

awesome news. very much looking forward to seeing thing.

how was katherine heigl?

[modage]

[polkablues]

The similarity has to be intentional:

[MacGuffin]

Domestic Trailer here.



International Teaser Trailer here.

[diggler]

"what the hell is a dental damn?"

"it's like cyran wrap, it's disgusting"

once again the international trailer is way better

[Pubrick]

once again the international trailer is way better

i don't think they're comparable. the international is a teaser and has swears in it. it's a real sample of what you'll get. the domestic is a full spoilerful trailer that uses many great gags to tell you pretty much the whole story and remove any element of surprise from the viewing experience. the distinction is more typical of teasers vs trailers. i suspect the full inter trailer would be spoilerful too but with swears.

hiegl looks really good in this, and not sagging, old and tired like she's been looking in every other pic i've seen lately.

[RegularKarate]

I loved this movie so much that it makes me sad how revealing the domestic trailer is... I recomend anyone who hasn't watched it not to.

[MacGuffin]

Judd Apatow Says Critics Are Always Right — Even If They're Not
In his latest column for MTV News, 'Knocked Up' director says he fears 'painful backlash' to good reviews.
By Judd Apatow

Judd Apatow is the writer/director of "The 40-Year-Old Virgin" and the upcoming summer comedy "Knocked Up," and the producer/writer of the acclaimed television series "Freaks and Geeks." The following is the latest in a series of guest columns by Apatow for MTV News.

This has been an odd week because "Knocked Up" premiered at the South by Southwest film festival in Austin, Texas, and has been getting fantastic reviews. Reviews that make me think that a painful backlash is inevitable. I feel like starting the backlash, just to get it over with. It makes me want to examine my entire relationship with criticism.

Throughout my career I've gotten good reviews and bad reviews. I have gotten reviews that are so bad a weaker man would never get up off the canvas after reading them. I recently saw Maya Angelou on the TV show "Iconoclast" on the Sundance Channel telling Dave Chappelle that when it comes to what people in the press say, her theory is "don't pick it up, don't put it down." I think her point is that you shouldn't believe them when they're good and you shouldn't believe them when they're bad.

I have a different theory: I like to pick it up and never put it down. I like to put my name in the Google news and blog alerts and receive every single thing written about me and my work on the Internet. Then I can go home and stew on all of it, feeling both good and ashamed in quick succession. There is really no limit to the amount of time I can spend looking for any madman's rambling about something I have been a part of. Time never moves faster than those hours I spend after midnight sitting at the computer searching for criticism and insults, which inevitably leave me feeling soiled to my core. I feel just as bad when I get a negative review in The Village Voice as I do when some kid blogging in Thailand says I suck.

I never think about critics when I'm making a movie, so it doesn't affect the process. But when the filmmaking is complete, the ongoing conversation about the movie's value never bores me. One would think that after the beating I have taken on movies like "The Cable Guy," I would have decided that critics don't know what they're talking about. But if I did that, then I couldn't enjoy the moments when they are so clearly on the money. So I always think of them as being brilliant. Because if I didn't I couldn't enjoy today. If I ignore the jackass slamming "The Cable Guy" then I am not allowed to enjoy his incredibly insightful review of "Knocked Up." On this day, when the reviews are good, I say to all who have written anything about a project of mine: You have always been right about everything. And you continue to be right today.

The first review I ever received was from The Hollywood Reporter for an HBO special I wrote for Tom Arnold called "The Naked Truth." The only line I remember in the review was something about it being the worst cable special ever made. At the time a lot of people were down on Tom Arnold, and I'm not really sure why. I always found him really funny and unpredictable, but I was instantly able to rationalize this bad review as an attack on him and not on my work, which I am sure was very strong. I knew then, as I know now, that if that special had starred someone other than Tom Arnold, they would have said it was perhaps the best cable special ever written.

The reviews for "The Ben Stiller Show" [which Apatow produced, and in which he appeared] were mixed. People seemed to love it or hate it in equal parts. I remember one reviewer said it was like watching scraps from MTV's editing-room floor, but I knew that the review was only bad because castmember/writer Bob Odenkirk made a joke at a press conference after that same reporter repeatedly asked Ben Stiller about his parents, Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara. Bob rudely shouted out, "Why aren't you asking about me? My dad's Bob Hope." A month later we were trashed in the paper, and the reporter surely won that battle of wits. By the way, Bob's dad is not Bob Hope.

The first film I co-wrote, "Heavyweights," was panned across-the-board. It has become a little bit of a cult classic since then, if you define cult classic by this standard: More than 1,000 people in a country of 300 million really dig it. I consider myself one of them. "The Cable Guy" is remembered as a movie that got terrible reviews, but I always remind people that Gene Siskel loved it, as did Michael Wilmington in Chicago. If you e-mail me, I will send you a list of every good review that movie got. Almost 20 percent of the reviews were good, not that I'm counting. I really loved that movie, so the bad reviews were especially painful. We were all very proud that we did something different, and we were quite happy with the result. Not that I didn't realize that a Jim Carrey movie that ends with his suicide attempt was a bit of a risk.

I remember thinking at the time that reviewers would appreciate the fact that Jim Carrey had taken a chance and tried to blaze some new territory. I must say I actually thought the reviews were going to be great.

As clear as day I remember standing at the premiere when a publicist walked up and handed me two faxes containing two brutal reviews from major magazines. One of them said that there was not one funny moment in the movie, and that was enough for me to disregard that particular review. One could argue how good or bad the movie was, but it certainly got a lot of laughs. I used that rationalization as my way of not crawling into a ball and moving back to Long Island, New York, to recapture my previous job as a busboy at El Torito.

"The Cable Guy" is still one of my favorite films that I've worked on, and it never ceases to make me laugh. I must say, however, that the rough critical reaction made me doubt my instincts and sense of humor. I didn't make another movie for eight years. I spent those years making critically well-regarded television shows that were canceled instantly. In television, the network executives don't like good reviews because it makes it more embarrassing for them to give you the ax.

I was thrilled when "The 40-Year-Old Virgin," my directing debut, was warmly received. In fact, I was somewhat shocked because at no point during the making of a movie called "The 40-Year-Old Virgin" do you expect anyone to go out of their way to praise you. It may be the first time that a movie in which a man pees in his own face got a good review from The New Yorker.

So now, as I sit here having felt the pain and pleasure of critical response, I must again state that the critics are always right. They are certainly right about "Knocked Up," which Variety says is "uproarious" and "more explosively funny, more frequently than nearly any major studio release in recent memory." They were right about that Tom Arnold special and they are right about this.

[hedwig]

I like to put my name in the Google news and blog alerts and receive every single thing written about me and my work on the Internet.

the jig is up, apatow. i know you're on xixax and i even know your username.

you thought you could hide, didn't you... DIDNT YOU.

[MacGuffin]

Giving the Last Laugh to Life's Losers
By SHARON WAXMAN; New York Times

schlub U.S. slang. A worthless person, a "jerk," an oaf. — Oxford English Dictionary

IN the world of "Knocked Up," the latest big-ticket comedy to take on American mating rituals, the formula is basically thus: Girl meets schlub. Schlub nails girl. Girl hangs around to discover schlub's inner mensch.

However unlikely a premise, this territory has already been staked out and explored, with considerable success, in television shows like "According to Jim" and movies like "The 40-Year-Old Virgin," the runaway hit of two summers ago, with a virgin nerd (Steve Carell) in place of the schlub. But "Knocked Up," whose main promotional image is a close-up of Seth Rogen as the pudgy, pot-smoking, porn-addled, job-free hero of the tale, Ben, may well take its celebration of American schlubitude (loserdom? schlemieliness?) to a new level.

In the film he wins the carnal attentions, then seeks the romantic ones, of Alison (Katherine Heigl), a statuesque, blond-haired, career-oriented entertainment journalist who is carrying the fruit of their drunken one-night stand.

And Ben's not the only schlub in the picture, which opens on June 1. He lives in an apartment surrounded by fellow losers who spend their days in pajamas trolling movies for the dirty parts, which they tabulate for an eventual Web site. Their world — a stark women-are-from-Venus, geeks-are-from-Mars zone — has precious few women in it, and almost none who could qualify as friends with whom they might, say, share conversation, or even a video game.

The film is the product of a dedicated core of comedy geeks, led by the writer and director Judd Apatow and including Mr. Rogen and Paul Rudd, propelled by social sensibilities that all of them acknowledge are lodged firmly in high school. Their high schools.

"I always thought of myself as a nerdy guy," said Mr. Apatow, in a trailer during a break in the filming of yet another satire from the ever-growing Apatow comedy oeuvre: "Walk Hard," a comedy he wrote starring John C. Reilly as a faded rock star. "I was a kid at home watching 'The Dinah Shore Show.' I relate to underdogs. It may be my way of saying to every girl who ever broke up with me, 'Why did you do it?' "

The feeling has apparently never gone away, despite the fact that Mr. Apatow, 39, is now married to an attractive actress, who is in his film, with whom he has two daughters, who are also in his film. "We've been married for 10 years in June, and he's still really uncomfortable with me sometimes," said Leslie Mann, Mr. Apatow's real-life wife, who plays Debbie, Alison's unhappily married sister. "He still spills things before giving me a kiss. He'll knock a glass over and get flustered by it. Sometimes it feels like we're on a first date. He didn't outgrow the geeky boy he was. It's still there in him."

But what is most amazing about Mr. Apatow's sensibility is just how deeply it resonates with an entire generation of young American men, and perhaps of women too. Not only was "The 40-Year-Old Virgin" a blockbuster hit, but raucous audience reactions to "Knocked Up" in test screenings held in numerous cities by Universal, which is releasing it, suggest that it too may hit a nerve. Mr. Apatow said a common response after screenings was from young husbands, who said they felt guilty that they weren't at home more with their families.

What is it about these American men? The reactions to Mr. Apatow's work suggest something close to catharsis in the depiction of hapless losers as heroes, a notion that, in movie terms, probably starts with Dustin Hoffman in "The Graduate." But Mr. Apatow turns out mainstream comedies, not cutting-edge fare, and unlike Benjamin in that 1967 film, the men in these contemporary comedies often consider women as scary (like the self-pleasuring vixen in "The 40-Year-Old Virgin") as they are unattainable (Alison in "Knocked Up"). Perhaps there is something in the culture, a generational cue that may come from the rise of women's economic and sexual independence or from the arrival of a recognizable geeky archetype, that makes this paradigm comforting for audiences.

Call it the revenge of the nerds, and there are plenty of those in Hollywood. "The culture in the last 5, 10 years is one of shame and humiliation, and Judd gets that," said Jon Kasdan, a writer-director who worked for Mr. Apatow on the short-lived television cult hit "Freaks and Geeks" and recently released his first film, "In the Land of Women." He continued: "Part of the experience of being a man in this postmodern life is humiliation, and wearing it as something to be proud of. This is a true frustration that Judd is expressing in his work, almost a romanticized version of being a schlub."

In that same vein, immaturity in the pursuit of women is, if not a virtue, then at least a hallmark of this genre, a reinforcement of the American man's reluctance to give up childish things and face adulthood. In the film Mr. Rudd plays Pete, Debbie's husband, whom she suspects of cheating, though he is actually sneaking out to be with his buddies. And as Alison grapples with the stark choices of an unwanted pregnancy, Ben's friends shudder at the thought of what one will refer to only as a "shmashmortion."

This reflects a view thoroughly shared among those who made the movie. "Guys who behave like our characters and the guys in '40-Year-Old Virgin' are the gross majority, if anything," said Mr. Rogen, who called from the set of his next movie, "Pineapple Express," based on a story by Mr. Apatow about two pot-smoking buddies being chased by drug dealers. "I look at the people I meet. No one's dying to have a lot of responsibility in their lives. Very few people are looking at life and thinking, 'Gee, I wish there was another thing to occupy my time and energy.' Our characters are definitely trying to avoid that type of thing."

Mr. Rudd, who contributed to the "Knocked Up" script, said: "We were all pretty nerdy dudes. I had horrible skin. I was Jewish, living in the Midwest. And I don't think we're alone. I think there's an army of young dudes out there who are really into comedy. They're not on the first string of anything. They're varsity nothing. That's just us, and we're older now, with the studio giving us a little bit of money."

As for the dreaded pursuit of the female species, no confidence is the norm. "So much of your psyche growing up is 'How am I going to obtain a woman?' " Mr. Rogen said. "Most people who are married are half convinced their wife might dump them at any second and they'll be thrust into the world of finding a mate."

Mr. Rogen has been dating the same woman for two years. "I had a dream last night that she broke up with me," he said. "I woke up in a terrible mood, feeling terribly betrayed. Deep down inside we all feel like 40-year-old virgins. It's lame, but true. Everyone, no matter how many times they've had sex, is still afraid he might be bad at it."

In Hollywood, humor tends to go in cycles, with the late '80s and early to mid-'90s heavy on romantic comedies ("Pretty Woman," "When Harry Met Sally ...," "Sleepless in Seattle,") and I'm-with-stupid-style movies ("Dumb & Dumber," "Kingpin," "Ace Ventura: Pet Detective"). The latter part of the 1990s was thick with gross-out comedies like "There's Something About Mary" and "American Pie."

This decade seems to be the province of Mr. Apatow and his broader group of comedy buddies — Mr. Carell, Ben Stiller, Owen Wilson and Vince Vaughn among them. But not everyone thinks this vein of humor is entirely worthy. Mike White, who worked with Mr. Apatow on "Freaks and Geeks" and recently directed his first film, "Year of the Dog," wonders if his friend has wandered away from championing the underdog to validating the underdog's flaws.

Mr. White is particularly bothered by jokes in both "Knocked Up" and "The 40-Year-Old Virgin" that skewer gay men and dismiss women. "To me, I definitely stand in the corner of wanting to give voice to the bullied, and not the bully. Here's where comedy is catharsis for people who are picked on," he said.

"There's a strain in 'Knocked Up' where you sort of feel like something's changed a little bit," he continued. "My sense of it is that because those guys are idiosyncratic-looking, their perception is that they're still the underdogs. But there is something about the spirit of the thing, that comes under the guise of comedy, where — it's weird. At some point it starts feeling like comedy of the bullies, rather than the bullied."

Mr. Apatow continued to chew over the subject after an initial interview in which he said he believed "Knocked Up" was about taking responsibility, rather than the reverse.

He sent a series of e-mail messages and finally concluded: "I think there is a nerd's fantasy involved in many of these films. We all wish that somebody would take the time to get to know us, and love us, warts and all."

He added: "I always wanted to be given a shot. And the sick part is this: No matter how many shots I get, I never completely lose the feeling of inadequacy that makes me wish I would get a chance to prove myself."

[The Red Vine]

I saw an early screening tonight and was underwhelmed. The "dirty mind with a heart of gold" concept is very difficult to pull off but Judd Apatow did a better job with it in "40 Year Old Virgin". With "Knocked Up", the lead character isn't as likeable or amusing as the Steve Carrell character. He's more annoying and irresponsible. Of course they try to make up for that in the last 10 minutes but at that point it's a little late. The sentimentality was better earned in "40", while it seems a little too forced here.

Some funny scenes here, but not much substance.

[modage]

you're crazy.  this was a million times better than 40YOV and its the best movie of 07 (so far).

[Gold Trumpet]

I'm still in awe of Mod's great counter to Red Vines, but man, I hope he is right. I talk and reminscience about 40 Year Old Virgin the way fanboys of John Huges do about him.