Ben Stone (Seth Rogan) is your regular free-loading stoner. Between endless romances with his bong and some fantasizing about topless scenes in movies (his “job” is an internet upstart where he and his roommates catalog all of the scenes containing female nudity), he’s the farthest thing from ready for a real relationship. He lives with a group of guys who are even more eccentric than he—Jason (Jason Segel), Jay (Jay Baruchel), Jonah (Jonah Hill), and Martin (Martin Starr). These guys are twenty-something-year-old kids, devoid of any sense of maturity and responsibility and with very little regard for social norms. And they’re perfectly happy about it; nothing should stand in their way.
Enter Alison Scott (Katherine Heigl): a drop-dead gorgeous, ambitious young blonde who’s just now getting her break as an E! television anchor. While celebrating her promotion with her sister, Debbie (Leslie Mann), she bumps into Ben at a night club, where in some remarkable feat of planetary alignment he comes off as sort of cool. Debbie has to return home to her husband, Pete (Paul Rudd), to tend to other matters, and so Ben and Alison are left to somehow hit it off—and subsequently get it on.
To make a long story short, thanks to what might qualify as a minor miscommunication, they end up with a major problem: Alison’s pregnant! She doesn’t realize it, of course, until weeks after they’ve broken up, when she experiences some repeated morning sickness while interviewing James Franco. She and her sister then spend a lovely afternoon peeing on sticks until there is no shred of doubt remaining. She reluctantly reconvenes with Ben and the two begin a partnership for which neither of them was prepared—especially Ben.
Sexual Impropriety Has Never Been So Funny
Knocked Up carries us through the whole process: the mistake, the discovery, the attempts to work out the relationship for the sake of the child… it’s a harrowing experience for anyone who’s ever experienced anything remotely similar in their own life, but astonishingly, it’s tons of fun. Apatow masterfully balances the tension with comedy so that the gravity of the experience never weighs on the viewer uncomfortably for too long. That isn’t to say that parts of the film aren’t uncomfortable; there are some truly frightening experiences here, but all of them are softened with a tinge of humor to ensure the movie remains squarely within its boundaries. And many times that tinge of humor is allowed to build into full-blown hilarity, a sensation with which Apatow is well-acquainted. The writer/director’s typical shade of uncommon vulgarity also applies to Knocked Up, but it’s done in such a way as to seem natural and almost required. Plenty of profanity and immature humor abounds, but many of us can relate to this situation in our own lives with our own friends. In good company, the film does a wonderful job of taking us along the rollercoaster ride of such traumatic experiences: tension and chaos is always followed by sweet cathartic release that always manages to make us laugh.
Seth Rogan, meanwhile, is perfect for the role, just as he was in The 40 Year Old Virgin (typecast, you mutter? Apatow even uses the actors’ first names as that of their characters). His roommates are hilariously stupid and provide excellent comic relief throughout an already very funny script. And Katherine plays her part naturally and with appropriate emotion—even as she prods Ben to abandon his childish, irresponsible lifestyle, she’s every man’s woman, with her hormonal pandemonium and drippy estrogenic emotion hiding behind her resolve. In fact, the entire cast in general is fantastic; as Ben and Alison work through their troubles together and desperately seek to iron things out, they provoke similar transformations in Alison’s sister, Debbie, and her husband. Debbie and Pete’s relationship matures almost as dramatically as Ben and Alison’s throughout the film, and it’s this character evolution that really makes the film. I won’t spoil the movie for you by revealing how everything ends up, but let’s just say that the journey itself is wonderfully enjoyable.
Extras
While I didn’t watch the theatrical cut a second time, this unrated version of the film didn’t strike me as all that meatier than the original. It doesn’t include much that I don’t recall from the theatrical cut, apart from a few extended scenes and a long (yet humorous) sequence where Ben and Debbie’s husband Pete attend Cirque du Soleil while under the influence of mushrooms.
However, one aspect in which this disc certainly does not lack is extras. There are almost two dozen of them total, although all of them are presented merely in disappointing standard def. Here’s a quick list of what you get:
Extras
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U-Control – Like the Blu-ray release of The 40 Year Old Virgin, Knocked Up also features a U-Control track (for everyone with players v1.1 and up) that includes video commentaries and interviews, along with some other interesting and amusing tidbits. This is undoubtedly the coolest of all the included extras.
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Feature Commentary with Writer/Director Judd Apatow, Executive Producer/Star Seth Rogen and Actor Bill Hader – I didn’t get a chance to listen to the entire commentary, but from what I’ve heard (around half the film), this is right in line with the quality of the commentary track on The 40 Year Old Virgin. Apatow and cast really meld in these commentaries; they’re pleasantly candid and completely unserious, but simultaneously enlightening.
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Deleted Scenes – There’s over a dozen deleted scenes here, and while most of them are only mildly entertaining (a couple of them are actually almost identical—one of them is merely an extended version of another deleted scene), they’re still worth a watch.
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Extended/Alternate Scenes – These are pretty good as well; probably even better than the Deleted Scenes collection, in fact.
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Line-O-Rama – Apatow’s improvisational approach to filmmaking is showcased again in Knocked Up’s equivalent feature to that which we saw in The 40 Year Old Virgin. The cast spits out line after line of profane randomness, and it’s frequently hilarious to hear them ad-libbing their way through the scenes. This sort of openness in screenplay allows for a much more authentic feel to a film’s dialogue.
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Beard-O-Rama – An extension of the above concept, this feature is a collection of rapid-fire clips of the cast ribbing Martin’s beard, and it’s very funny (I personally enjoyed it when he was referred to as the “shoe bomber Richard Reid”).
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Gag Reel – Short but very funny.
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Kids on the Loose – The child actors in the film have a little fun of their own. This is honestly pretty ho-hum.
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Finding Ben Stone – A hilariously fake half-hour-long featurette supposedly exploring the many different candidates for Seth Rogan’s position in the film. Among others, we get to see Orlando Bloom and James Franco filling his spot as scenes from the film are replicated with them in Seth’s place. Absolutely worth a viewing.
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Directing the Director – Continuing the trend of satirical special features on this set, Apatow and crew have put together here a surprisingly convincing story about Universal having to appoint a second director to reign in his antics on the set. It’s hilarious and probably even more so if you aren’t initially conscious of the joke—perhaps I shouldn’t have spoiled it? Nah, you’ll love it nonetheless.
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Gummy: The 6th Roommate – Again, a satirical piece about how David Krumholtz was once set to play another roommate of Seth’s.
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Roller Coaster Doc – Wouldn’t you know it, Jay Baruchel is positively terrified of roller coasters. I recall when I once shared his fears in the sixth grade—but I was lucky enough to break mine. Here we witness his struggles in filming and how Apatow attempted to desensitize him.
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Kuni Files – Ken Jeong, better known as the maltempered gynecologist from the film, talks a bit about his role in the movie.
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Kuni Gone Wild – Here we see Ken Jeong going postal for five minutes whilst explaining to Alison the process of birth. It’s utterly hilarious and quite obviously unplanned.
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Topless Scenes – Sure, you’re excited about this one. Let me just warn you that you should not base your purchase of the Blu-ray on the promise of this feature.
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Stripper Confidential – A two-minute exploration of the filming of the stripper scene, where we see a little extra footage (remember, this isn’t HD) and receive a bit of a confessional from Apatow regarding how shaky he was about filming nudity on the set of The 40 Year Old Virgin (but he’s a natural now!).
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First Sex on Camera – Seth Rogan talks about how hard it is not to get hard while doing a sex scene with Katherine Heigl. Although he doesn’t explicitly say so, I’m certain that he did; wouldn’t you? Jonah Hill also discusses his sex scene, which unfortunately for him didn’t even make the cut.
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Video Diaries – Pretty cool stuff here. Apatow takes a few moments every so often during filming to update us on the status of his creation at that point in time. This all amounts to around half an hour of footage and it provides a great behind-the-scenes look at production.
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Raw Footage – A couple of scenes in unedited form, complete with cuts and retakes.
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Katherine Heigl Audition – See how the actress earned her position in the film.
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Loudon Wainwright III – Scoring Session – A brief documentary about Loudon Wainwright III’s work on composition of the music for the film.
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Loudon Wainwright III – Live at McCabe’s – A few song performances, live from Santa Monica.