A few months long time ago, when this movie came out, pretty much everyone was telling me how fucking hilarious it was. Even the more feminist-leaning ones were apologetically liking it. “Hilarious!” they told me. I finally got my Netflix up and going again, and it showed up last week a while ago, and I watched it and wrote this entry, and then promptly forgot to post it.
I… was not really impressed.
To backtrack for a moment, there is a trope, most often found in half-hour sitcoms, but can be seen in many other places. It is the Hot Wife Married to Fugly Loser Dude. In SitcomLand, all the women are HOTT, and they always marry fugly-ass losers who can’t wipe their own ass without help. For (hopefully) obvious reasons, I hate this trope with the passion of a thousand burning suns.
Knocked Up has exactly this trope, and I just can’t get past it. Katherine Heigle is gorgeous. Her character is in the entertainment business, and is in front of the camera. She is HOTT. Not only is she hot, but she is apparently (at least) moderately intelligent and has a career on the upswing. The dude who is played by one of those frat-boy comedy actors whose name I can’t be bothered to remember is not hot. He isn’t completely fug, but he’s definitely not even in the same league as her. Add on to that the fact that he is a skeezy-ass loser with no income, and no ambition beyond building a completely revolting website devoted to nudity in film, I completely FAIL to buy the premise that a) she would sleep with him once, no matter how drunk, and b) that she would continue to associate with him once the pregnancy was discovered and she found out what a loser he was.
Add that COMPLETELY IRRITATING AND ENRAGING trope to the movie’s already repugnant handling pregnancy and the issues surrounding an accidental pregnancy, and Knocked Up is definitely not going in my list of classics any time soon.
According to the remains of this extra-old entry, there were some things that I thought the movie did well (perhaps the montage where Fugly Loser Dude halfway gets his act together), but I can’t remember what they were for the life of me, so I’m going to leave it at that.
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