Knocked Up/The 40 Year-Old Virgin Seth Rogen 2007 DVD Top-quality

Double bill of relationship comedy. In ‘Knocked Up’ (2007), slacker Ben (Seth Rogen) and up-and-coming career girl Alison (Katherine Heigl) meet at a bar and end up having a one night stand. Eight weeks later, Ben is shocked when Alison asks to meet up with him and reveals that she is pregnant. Despite having little in common, the two decide that they have to at least try to make some kind of relationship work for the baby’s sake. In ‘The 40 Year Old Virgin’ (2005), Andy Stitzer (Steve Carell) is a 40-year-old geek who works in an electronics store and seems content with his life and with his collection of comic books and action figures. But when his co-workers find out that Andy is still a virgin, they decide to set him up with a woman so he can finally have sex. After some horrendous dates, Andy meets single-mother Trish (Catherine Keener), a woman who genuinely seems to like him and who has just come out of a destructive relationship. But what Andy’s friends don’t know is that Trish isn’t quite ready for a physical relationship with him yet, and that he’s going to have to wait a bit longer before he can lose his virginity.
Knocked Up
In a year that otherwise struggled to deliver where comedies were concerned, Knocked Up proved to be a very welcome treasure trove of laughs. Its from Judd Apatow, the man behind The 40 Year Old Virgin and the excellent TV show Freaks and Geeks, and sits easily as an equal to both. Its also a long-awaited showcase for the talents of Seth Rogen, who proves with some conviction that he can headline a movie.
The premise of Knocked Up is simple. Seth Rogen and Katherine Heigl share, for differing reasons, a one-night stand, and several weeks later, the latter discovers shes pregnant. Given that Rogens character has been jobless for years, and that Heigl is trying to build a TV career, the two dont prove to be a logical match, yet as the pregnancy progresses, they try valiantly to get to know one another.
The narrative itself is quite straightforward, but its the execution and characters that lift it significantly. Apatow knows how to direct comedy, and with a script peppered with plenty of guffaw-out-loud moments and situations, he wrings very hearty laughs from the material. Plus, while its Rogen and Heigl who power the film, the supporting cast is simply superb, particularly the collection of people that Rogens character surrounds himself with. Its perhaps guilty of running ten minutes too long, and theres little to surprise in the story itself, yet Knocked Up is nonetheless a terrific, earthy and grounded comedy, with so much to enjoy. Its hard to single out individual moments, and instead it simply seems more appropriate to declare Knocked Up as one of the best, and most rewatchable, comedies of the last few years. Dont miss it.–Simon Brew
The 40 Year Old Virgin
Cult comic actor Steve Carell–long adored for his supporting work on The Daily Show and in movies like Bruce Almighty and Anchorman–leaps into leading man status with The 40 Year-Old Virgin. There’s no point describing the plot; it’s about how a 40 year-old virgin named Andy (Carell) finally finds true love and gets laid. Along the way, there are very funny scenes involving being coached by his friends, speed dating, being propositioned by his female manager, and getting his chest waxed. Carell finds both humour and humanity in Andy, and the supporting cast includes some standout comic work from Paul Rudd (Clueless, The Shape of Things) and Jane Lynch (Best in Show, A Mighty Wind), as well as an unusually straight performance from Catherine Keener (Lovely & Amazing, Being John Malkovich). And yet… something about the movie misses the mark. It skirts around the topic of male sexual anxiety, mining it for easy jokes, but never really digs into anything that would make the men in the audience actually squirm–and it’s a lot less funny as a result. Nonetheless, there are many great bits, and Carell deserves the chance to shine. –Bret FetzerSee all