illicit diversions

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.

The Watch It Now thing from Netflix is actually pretty cool. You can watch those crappy movies and TV shows that don’t really seem worth the several day wait for the disc to be mailed to you, and you can see the things you actually care about in DVD quality with the regular mail service.

That said, the first thing I watched that way was kind of a dud.

The sad thing is, this movie has all the hallmarks of a story I could really like. Ridiculous plot? Check. Angsty misunderstanding? Check. Lies, more lies, and selfish deceit? By the metric fuckton. So, I will completely admit, I was primed to love this stupid piece of shit movie. Except then it all went to hell in a sexist hand basket. (Are we actually surprised? No, but a girl can dream.)

I actually kind of liked the first half of the movie. Ridiculousness, silly scenes, overblown conniving – exactly my cup of tea. It was how everything was tied up at the end that completely ruined it for me.

1) Hypocrisy. Okay, so yes, everyone does it. But I expect a little more from my fictional characters. She is upset because he was doing it on a bet that will determine his career trajectory? When she was doing it all for an article? When all is said and done, those who live in glass houses shouldn’t be throwing stones around that casually. Both of them get a giant FAIL here.

2) Him. They did a pretty good job of showing what she saw in him, but what did he see in her? The entire movie, we’re shown him time after time gritting his teeth and trying to hang on to her, all for the sake of a bet that will bolster his career. We get a little bit of what he’s feeling during the visit home, but I’m not convinced enough for it to counteract everything that has come before. So his mad dash to get her back when he thinks she really did love him didn’t do it for me. Plus, it’d be cool to see him liking something else about her besides her love of basketball and ability to use his relatives to cheat at cards.

Which brings us to the last and most egregious sin committed by this movie.

3) The Taxi Scene. This is me wearing my radical feminist hat again, but this scene completely ruined the movie for me. Instead of “Don’t go to a job interview in DC because I am here and not there”, the correct answer was for him to kiss her sweetly, wish her luck, and with a lusty look in his eye, tell her to hurry back. Later, they could discuss her applying for jobs in the city, or a long distance relationship (now that he’s making the even bigger bucks with his ‘awesome’ new add campaign, he can probably afford it), or talk of him finding a job there. None of this shutting down her career bullshit. That completely pissed me off, and ultimately makes this movie a complete FAIL.