Knocked Up is one of the sweetest movies I've seen in a long time. Everybody in this movie is nice, and that's kind of rare in movies these days where the cool kids are all assholes. Much like director Judd Apatow's last feature, The 40 Year Old Virgin, our hero and all of his cohorts are cuddly wuddly teddy bears underneath it all.
Our slacker hero is Ben Stone (Seth Rogan, who I completely didn't recognize from his Freaks and Geeks days...I'm guessing he was a freak), a furry pot-smoker who originally looks to be the offspring of the equally furry Will Ferrell. Ben Stone is lazily wiling away his days shooting the shit and half-assedly making a risque web-site with his equally doofish pals, when he meets Alison Scott (Katherine Heigl) in a bar. Alison is everything Ben is not: driven, shiny, and good-looking. The two of them have a drunken one-night stand, and, well, Alison gets knocked up.
And then the movie basically lets its characters lead the way. Ben tries to do the right thing by his classy babymama, but there are Many Things impeding him. Alison's fussy, controlling sister Debbie (flawlessly played by Leslie Man) hates Ben, and Alison isn't too impressed with the dude herself. Ben has no job, lives college-style in a decrepit house, and is utterly unprepared for fatherhood. However, Debbie's husband Pete (Paul Rudd, one of the most likeable guys in movies today) is gradually is won over by Ben's sleepy sweetness, and Alison eventually follows suit.
These are good, impeccably-cast characters to drive a movie. The dialogue, largely improvised, is a huge part of this success, and there are some horribly amusing moments. This is a movie that makes comic gold out of a character's ever-lengthening beard ("Hey! Late John Lennon!") and lets comedy flow from witty, bubbling conversation rather than from one-liners. Debbie and Pete, in particular, can't help but elicit giggles just by being in the same room together. The two characters are like oil and water, and can't help but bicker and bounce off each other, to good effect. But their jousting is never really mean-spirited, and neither character is vilified/glorified at the expense of the other. In the end, Knocked Up is about people, normal people who just happen to be funnier than the rest of us.
The movie could have been trimmed, and there's a really gross shot of a baby being born that had the entire audience cringing (and the female half crossing their legs together firmly). But everybody in my theater laughed throughout the movie, and we all left with really dumb smiles on our faces. We need more movies like Knocked Up that just let characters blossom without being jerks about it.
