Apatow is the king of crude but kind comedy

Rating: 9/10 (4 September 2007)

Judd Apatow's movies have gained a reputation for being extremely vulgar and uncouth in their humour, while at the same time containing a core of genuine emotional weight and sympathy, and this has proved to be a winning combination with audiences, who have made three Apatow-backed, R-rated productions into 100+ million dollar hits in the last two years (although the third, "Superbad", has somewhat less involvement from Apatow himself, instead being a production made by his reliable company of actors, including Seth Rogen and Jonah Hill).
This, the second of the three Apatow films, takes Rogen, a supporting character from "The 40-Year-Old Virgin", and makes him the leading man, rather implausibly (on purpose) paired up with the beautiful and winning Katherine Heigl ("Grey's Anatomy"), who plays a beautiful up-and-coming reporter who is quite clearly out of Rogen's league (a similar situation was faced by the Seth character in "Superbad", incidentally). This sort of mismatched, accidental relationship has been done a thousand times before, but rarely this winningly. Rogen demonstrates promise as a real romantic lead, not just as a brilliant frat comedian, while Heigl makes her character's interest in Ben (Rogen's character) seem reasonable. Also notable in the supporting cast is the always-charming Paul Rudd, who plays Heigl's character's brother-in-law, whose marriage is a sort of worst-case-scenario for the movie's main couple.
Bonus points for Rogen playing an actual Canadian character on film, which one rarely sees when my country's great comics head south of the 49th Parallel.