Over the course of the weekend I saw three movies. I really liked all of them.
The first was Knocked Up, which I know the rest of the world saw years ago. I never got around to it and in fact almost bailed on it this time. I wasn't thrilled with the set up, which took a good half hour. Jay said he'd seen it and hated it, so we watched a couple episodes of 24 instead. But the next night I put it back in and watched the rest of it and it improved remarkably. Judd Apatow's work usually involves really good natured characters and a plot with a heart of gold, covered in a thick slimy layer of potty humor. How else could he tell stories teaching kids that abstinence is the better choice and taking responsibility for your actions can be rewarding? Knocked Up was no Forty Year Old Virgin, but like that movie, it had a very old fashioned
our grandmothers were right nugget deep inside.
We live in a culture that has been trying for forty years to disassociate sex from procreation (and increasingly, procreation from sex (octomom, SJP, Melissa Etheridge etc.) but in the immortal words of
Dr. Ian Malcolm "Life will find a way." The characters in Knocked Up are at first shocked that sex causes pregnancy but they man up and deal with it like responsible adults without resorting to killing anyone. The story is really about how Seth Rogan grows from a harmless boy into an alpha male. I loved the final scene in which he tells his new born daughter "It was the best mistake I ever made because now you're here."
I've heard a few people say that they couldn't buy the premise that a hottie like Katherine Heigl's character, Allison, could ever fall for a schlub like Seth Rogan. This view presupposes that Allison is a shallow girl, in thrall to the superficial. But what if she isn't? She meets Ben while standing at a bar, incapable of getting the attention of the bartender. Ben gets her a beer. Then he makes Allison laugh and gets her sister a beer, too. Unless you're a stuck up bitch, you're going to dance with that guy. Hopefully, you're not going to be stupid enough to take him home that night, but Allison did. She's understandable disgusted with him (and herself) in the morning but when the ishtay hits the anfay, throughout the rest of the movie, any time Allison needs something or somebody, Ben is the guy who makes sure she gets it. What's not to love?
The second movie I saw was Ghost Town, starring Ricky Gervais. I really liked it alot. The only problem with casting Ricky G in your movie is that his own stuff is probably light years better than the script you've come up with. Fortunately, I don't expect any movie to be as good as the original The Office or Extras, so I wasn't disappointed.
Like Knocked Up, Ghost Town is really about a guy who meets a woman who inspires him to become a better man. In this case, with the help of a bunch of dead people. It's funny.
The final movie was 17 Again.
Let me start by saying that I've been a Zac Efron denier from the start. I have no intention of ever seeing any of the High School Musicals, I thought he was okay but nothing to sing about in Hairspray...I'm not a fan in general of pretty boys and I think Zac looks like my daughter Katie in a suit.
I was wrong.
Halfway through 17 Again I surrendered and leaped wholeheartedly onto the Zac Efron bandwagon.
The movie is just plain good, for starters. It's funny and well done and the secondary characters are brilliant. There have been so many movies in which older folks find themselves in younger bodies and vice versa and most of them fail because the actors don't really pull it off. That's why Big was so amazing; Tom Hanks really nailed the part of a twelve year old. (I originally wrote that Tom Hanks really nailed a twelve year old boy but decided to reword it out of respect for Mr. H) It seems like it shouldn't be so hard for an adult actor to do that, after all, they were all kids once, but so many of them play it broadly for easy laughs. They don't even try to make it real and I definitely get the feeling that in Hollywood, very few people know what real kids act like. I'm thinking of Jamie Lee Curtis in Freaky Friday. I love Jamie Lee, but...she's no Tom Hanks.
It has to be much harder for a twenty year old actor to pull off the character of a thirty five year old dad, but Zac Efron does it brilliantly. And he's completely delicious.
This is hardly new ground for a movie to cover; plot-wise it borrows from Big, Freaky Friday, It's a Wonderful Life, Broadcast News, and Star Wars just to name a few, but whenever it gets into cliché territory, it veers hilariously into left field and occasionally Middle Earth. I laughed myself silly.
The biggest problem with the movie is that the idea that Mr. Efron could ever turn into Matthew Perry is less realistic than Katherine Heigl having a one night stand with Seth Rogan. They could have cast
someone better to play grown up Zac.
