By OpalCat

tags: comedy, drama, movie review

Rated:
Director: Judd Apatow
Starring: Seth Rogen, Katherine Heigl, Paul Rudd, Leslie Mann…
Summary: For fun loving party animal Ben Stone, the last thing he ever expected was for his one night stand to show up on his doorstep eight weeks later to tell him she’s pregnant…
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Review: This movie wasn’t what I was expecting. I figured it would be rather in your face, and it was. I figured it would be funny, and it was. But I wasn’t expecting it to be so realistic in so many ways, or so …dark? It wasn’t dark in the sense of a horror movie or anything, but a lot of the relationship issues were just dead-on accurate. Conversations and arguments that ended badly and were totally believable, people hurting each other emotionally, that kind of thing.

It was well done, certainly. And it was fun to watch for the most part. Some of it was almost uncanny in its ability to portray, for example, how a woman can make total sense in her arguments and yet at the same time sound completely loony, or how a man can make a completely valid point that you agree with, and still come across as an ass. It was very good at showing the “differences between the sexes” and why they don’t understand each other. There was a good amount of fairly juvenile sex humor, but it was all delivered by a group of guys who were portrayed as being extremely juvenile, so it worked. There are a lot of movies that portray black-hat/white-hat characters, where you know who you like and who you don’t, but this isn’t one of them. You like and dislike all of the characters in turn, and sometimes simultaneously. You forehead-smack at their mistakes, while at the same time sympathizing with them for not knowing any better. You can see their motivations even when you disagree with their actions. It’s a far more complex film than I expected to see.

I’d recommend the movie for sure, but I felt a little blindsided by parts of it. I think I would rather have known a little more what to expect going in. A lot of the childbirth stuff was all too familiar, as well—though I’m not complaining. It was better done than most births in movies I’ve seen in the past. Not for the faint of heart, those scenes.

— 07:42:14 PM
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