Knocked Up - Review

Judd Apatow gets guys. For years men in movies have been cookie cutter presentations of ferocious might or sensitive driveling. In his movies, Apatow brings a different breed of man: one who falls between the stereotypes of the sensitive man and the ubermensch and paints a complete picture of just how complex men can be.

Nowhere is this more true than in Apatow’s latest flick, Knocked Up. The 40-Year Old Virgin director tackles the worst nightmare for the single man – having a one night stand with a girl and then finding out that you’ve knocked her up. It’s a simple enough concept for a story, but thanks to Apatow’s delightfully complex characters and hilariously irreverent approach to the subject matter, Knocked Up runs the chance of being one of the most brilliant comedies of the decade.

Seth Rogen, who was one of The 40-Year Old Virgin’s highlights, takes center stage for Knocked Up, playing the epitome of irresponsibility and young male foolishness. Ben Stone (Rogen) lives in an apartment with four of his friends, smoking pot and insulting each other. His only prospective income is from a website he and his friends are putting together that lists when celebrities get naked in movies. For someone like Alison Scott (Katherine Heigl), a successful up and coming reporter for E! Television, Ben would be the last choice for a boyfriend, let alone someone to have a kid with. Yet after the two hook up after a drunken meeting in a nightclub, that’s exactly the position they find themselves in.

The idea of suddenly and surprisingly being pregnant has been done before in movies like Nine Months so it’s not the most original concept. In fact, the situation is practically cliché fodder for sitcoms. In Apatow’s capable hands, however, the plot becomes a way to shed some light on the male psyche and show that we aren’t all dick and fart jokes… although that certainly makes up part of who we are. Rogen’s character is joined by a smorgasbord of previous Apatow actors, including Jason Segel, Jay Baruchel, and Martin Starr, as they make stupid wagers and carry on pointless conversations stoned out of their minds. Before the stoner humor can wear too thin, Ben starts buddying around with Alison’s brother in law, Pete (Paul Rudd), who Apatow uses to reveal some of man’s biggest fears and problems with being married with children.

Considering the nature of Ben’s personality, crude humor is prevalent through the picture, but somehow it’s an endearing trait for the character. Between pranks, like farting on each other’s pillows, there are some poignant moments about how these characters view life; moments audience members will be able to connect with. Rudd’s Pete compares life to an endless episode of “Everybody Loves Raymond” without the humor. Ben goes off on a tirade about how women have been giving birth to babies for centuries without the damn “how to” books out there he’s being harassed for not reading. Apatow shows an absolute mastery for balancing humor and drama, never letting the weight of the story become pervasive, but always keeping the idea in mind that the subject matter is serious. These are people bringing another life into the world after all.

The only thing keeping Knocked Up from becoming an instant classic is how dated the movie already is, even in its release. There are pop culture references every couple of minutes and, as culture changes, those references will become obsolete and some parts of the movie may lose meaning. Apatow did his best to keep those references as up to date as possible, including the characters gong to see Spider-Man 3, which has only been in theaters for a month, but the movie will inevitably be dated. Still, Knocked Up is the strongest movie from Apatow so far and definitely the best comedy this year.

Your Mommy Kills Animals - Review

Quick trivia question: in 2005, who did the FBI deem to be the number one domestic terrorist threat in the United States? If you answered al-Qaeda, you're wrong. According to the FBI, our biggest danger in 2005 came not from Islamic fundamentalists, but from homegrown animal rights activists. That astonishing (especially if you consider that the KKK, anti-abortion movement, and other violent groups have never even made the list) fact is the starting point for Curt Johnson's riveting film Your Mommy Kills Animals, an incendiary but balanced account of the battle over animal rights. It's the best kind of documentary, in that if you're a thinking person it is nearly impossible to watch the movie without having your point of view challenged and questioned—no matter what side of the issue you're on, this film will give you evidence that both supports and contradicts your beliefs. It will also scare the hell out of you if you have any kind of passion for the first amendment, as it shows how the boogeyman of "terrorism" can be used to suppress any speech that the government doesn't like.

The documentary begins with two equally shocking scenes designed to put the audience on edge: in one, an animal rights activist grabs a fur-wearing woman and beats her in the street, and in the other a series of pets are brutalized in a "shelter." It's unclear whether the first incident is staged (the second clearly isn't), but the point is obvious: whichever side of the animal rights movement you're on, Johnson is going to rub your face in the cruel extremes of your point of view. Yet the movie as a whole is less binary than this introduction implies; as the film unfolds, Johnson showcases a wide variety of perspectives on the issue, showing how even within the animal rights movement there is great disagreement and how there's plenty of hypocrisy to go around on all sides.

The most extreme and outspoken activists—and the ones who most justify the FBI's designation as terrorists—are the members of the Animal Liberation Front (ALF), a group so devoted to their cause that some of them publicly endorse the murders of researchers engaged in animal testing. Johnson interviews several spokespeople for the group and provides footage from their speeches and attacks (including bombings and assaults on doctors), and he juxtaposes this material with contrary points of view regarding the importance of animal testing in curing human diseases and the parallels between ALF and the wackiest fringes of the pro-life movement. Yet before the viewer can get too comfortable, Johnson challenges these arguments with footage that indicates nothing short of extremism will stop the undeniable savagery that corporations practice, and he demonstrates that militant tactics work—a number of financial institutions stop doing business with Huntingdon Life Sciences, a company engaged in massive animal abuse, after being harassed by activists.

Johnson also implies that extremism on the activist side is a natural response to governmental abuse; why wouldn't activists move to more outrageous behavior when conventional free speech is prosecuted, as it is in the case of six animal rights proponents who are imprisoned simply for campaigning to shut down Huntingdon's animal testing facilities? What ultimately emerges from the documentary is the terror inflicted by absolutists on both sides—people who, as journalist Christopher Hitchens notes, are terrorists because of their absolute conviction that they are right, a conviction that leaves no room for tolerance or debate. This means that the villains of the piece range from the most aggressive members of the ALF on one side to the President of the United States on the other. Indeed, one of the most chilling aspects of the film is its depiction of how George W. Bush and the Department of Homeland Security deflect attention from their own failures in the "war on terror" by redefining what terror is—only an administration this out of touch with reality could make a convincing case that college kids protesting animal cruelty are a threat on a par with Osama bin Laden. In the end, this is the greatness of Your Mommy Kills Animals: that it moves beyond animal rights to consider the larger issue of how political speech of a certain persuasion is persecuted more vigorously than murder, rape, or other violent crimes. Perhaps it shouldn't come as a surprise that Johnson himself has claimed to be harassed by federal agents just for making this film, something that proves the movie's point. If a director of a relatively even-handed documentary who is far from a radical leftist (his last film as a producer, in fact, was entitled Michael Moore Hates America) is considered a threat, who's next?