Knocked Up

Reviewed by:
Pete Hammond

Nerds everywhere unite—Hollywood has finally made your fantasy movie. When a pudgy slacker slob (Seth Rogen) gets super lucky and hooks up for a drunken one-night stand with a hot, blonde TV entertainment reporter waaaaaay out of his league (Grey's Anatomy's Katherine Heigl), an unexpected pregnancy develops. She decides to keep the baby and eventually tells the sad sack father, who must step up to the plate and rise to a level of responsibility unexperienced by a guy who hopes someday to make money with his loser roommates by running a Web site that identifies nude scenes in movies! With her promising career and his downscale ambitions, they make the imperfect pair. Watching these two disparate worlds trying to merge is what makes this enterprise a total comedy knockout. In fact, Knocked Up contains some of the biggest laughs ever heard in a theater. Writer/director Judd Apatow knows how to wring humor from just about anything, and he has a rare talent for putting real, recognizable people and all their foibles on the screen to masterful comic effect. If you thought his The 40-Year-Old Virgin was funny, you ain't seen nothing yet. He's reunited some of the stars of that film here, including the talented anti-leading man Rogen and the terrific Paul Rudd, who is married to Heigl's cynical sister (Leslie Mann). Both are hysterical, and Heigl is pitch-perfect, emerging as a bona fide movie star in this role. Knocked Up is a virtual cinematic pop culture guide; and how it all plays 10 years from now doesn't really matter, because we guarantee you will be quoting lines from this film for a long time to come.