Get thee to an abortionist

Rating: 2/10 (29 November 2007)

Judd Apatow uses a camera as if he's going to study up on the basics tomorrow. He directs actors like barking seals, satisfied if they even partly hit the mark. Every scene screams out for a second take; every other line begs a rewrite; every one of these performers has been better elsewhere. Apatow behaves as if there is no genuine comedy to be mined from the genuinely humorous premises he sets up. Instead, he lectures us that all the world's a sitcom, drowning in schmaltz, clumsiness and bad taste any sympathy I might have had for his characters. "The Aristocrats" has a more sophisticated central joke than this piece of crap.
Let's begin with the heroine, an unlikable ditz who thinks working at E! is a good thing. In the course of this film she makes exactly zero decisions that I would call socially responsible. Why, for instance, need I accept the titularly impregnated woman's inexplicable decision to have this baby? The movie offers no credible logic behind her position, like a religious upbringing or a definable philosophy. She is young, hip, sarcastic, apparently a functioning part of her generation, and somehow never once considers the possibility of not giving birth. Apatow tries to skirt the moral issues involved, like the negative social and practical implications of single parenthood, and avoids even the obvious abortion debate, which if nothing else could provide some comic relief to a tedious exercise in mawkishness. I'm not bloodthirsty. I don't have a pro-abortion agenda. But this is a story, and as such it should make some kind of sense. Instead I am given no excuse beyond her tearful statement: "I want to keep it." Her tears are understandable, as she just landed what she thinks is a good job, and the father is if anything a less promising parent than herself. So why have it? Nothing in her behavior suggests a particularly moral or even generous, much less maternal, instinct. So Apatow embraces this pregnancy in a void, with no counter-option, and with no real world against which to examine the empty gesture.
And the daddy. Hmm. Aside from the question of his suitability for human husbandry, why should I watch this loser do anything for two hours? He is shallow, sophomoric, rude, unmotivated, uncultivated, and a bore. Granted, there are a few scattered minutes of mildly inspired "Animal House" hijinks with his slacker housemates, but these only serve to make his transition to guy-with-pretensions-to-the-middle-class even less believable, and less welcome. I don't mind spending time with idiots, provided they're amusing. John Belushi in "Animal House," Will Farrell in "Old School," Jeremy Piven in "Very Bad Things," are worth hanging out with because they are presented as reprehensible, and more importantly, because these actors had the script and the charisma to make watching them fun. This movie is a celebration of the kind of stupidity booed in "Idiocracy," another film which failed to rise to its premise.
So ultimately, the performers are not the problem here. Kirsten Wiig and Leslie Mann are particularly good. But the whole movie looks like Apatow had something better to do. His plotting and organization bear the hallmarks of chronic short-term memory loss.
Maybe he should make a movie about Alzheimer's. He'd probably call it "Stoned Age."