Here's a maybe unpopular opinion: We watched Knocked Up when it came out on DVD a few weeks ago and found it painfully, painfully unfunny—not really its politics, though those also bugged me a bit, but just the film itself. Joe Queenan (via MeFi) gets close to the reason why here but he doesn't quite make it:
There is, of course, another way of looking at this subject: that the new genre of romantic comedies are not really upbeat, coming-of-age motion pictures about young male schmucks who are saved by the love of a good woman, but heart-rending tragedies about beautiful young women who are doomed to spend the rest of their lives with juvenile, not especially good-looking dorks.Replace the fixation on hot/not-hot with a more holistic notion of general human potential and that's pretty much where we stood with Knocked Up: for someone with so many choices to wind up stapled to such a go-nowhere loser with almost no redeeming qualities in pursuit of some entirely uncritical notion of what a "family" should be struck us as pretty close to deeply tragic, not to mention sentimentalist kitsch.
Okay, so maybe it is about the politics. Now I'm wondering if I should even bother giving Superbad a try, or for that matter finally bite the bullet and rent Freaks and Geeks, which I've been meaning to do for years.
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