Movie Pick of the Week

Judd Apatow is moving in on "must-see" status fairly quickly. I found this movie more consistently funny than The 40-year Old Virgin. It's the type of movie you might see twice, because you were laughing too hard and loud to hear all the jokes the first time. I only saw one trailer for this and it didn't look that funny, but I kept hearing good pre-release notices on the movie. Having watched it, I don't think you could make a general audience trailer that would make somebody want to go see this film.

I expect word-of-mouth to be great. It's long, but for me it honestly never feels padded and doesn't lose steam. Like most movies it follows its genre conventions in an almost desultory way, but I didn't care because it was so funny almost all the way through.

I would like to see Apatow learn to write women better. Paul Rudd's wife is a shrill, castrating, humorless brow-beater (seriously, would a woman say that her husband playing fantasy league baseball is worse than him having an affair?). Catherine Heigl is a bit of a cipher. We get enough of Seth Rogen's character to understand why someone might find him endearing after a while, but with Heigl, there just isn't much there. Yeah, she's pretty, but after that? What's frustrating about it is that she is at times likeable and you just wish you would have gotten more of what makes a character like hers decide to be with this guy who is somehow an utterly charmless charmer.

Enough of that though. The movie made me laugh. A lot. A whole lot. I'll be seeing it again. Just to hear Paul Rudd say, "Roads? Where we're going, we don't need roads." again is worth $10.50.