Movie Review: Knocked Up

Knocked Up is the highly entertaining story of two horribly mismatched people who try to make a relationship work for the sake of their unborn child. Katherine Heigl is Alison, an entertainment journalist whose career is on the rise. Seth Rogan is Ben, a loveable loser.

Things are going well for Alison Scott. She gets a promotion at work, and she and her sister Debbie (Leslie Mann) go out to celebrate. They go out to a club where she meets Ben Stone, a likeable enough guy who is way out of his league with her. She's an entertainment journalist with E! who is going to be on camera; he is a--well--he's living off a rapidly dwindling settlement he got for an injury in high school. Not that he doesn't have career ambitions. He and some friends are planning to launch a website that lets people know how far into a movie they have to get before they can see nudity. So, for example, if someone really likes, say, Meg Ryan, this site will tell you which movies show her partially or completely nude and where those parts of the movie are (say, 39 minutes into the movie or whatever). Classy.

Alison and Ben get together for one night. In the morning, she realizes that he is not her type of person at all. For one thing, he can't quite believe she never smokes pot at all. He smokes it a lot. She isn't particularly impressed with his career plans. And so they part ways. But a few weeks she realizes--after some sudden and embarrassing vomiting episodes followed by dozens of pregnancy tests--that she is pregnant. She calls Ben right away, and he is of course stunned by the news.

Ben and Alison decide to get to know each other and maybe develop a relationship, given the circumstances. Alison doesn't get a whole lot of support in this. Her mother (Joanna Kerns) urges her to get rid of the baby. Her sister Debbie expresses serious (and not entirely unfounded) doubts about Ben. Okay, so Debbie's criticism of Ben's looks (overweight and looks ten years older than he is) is a little shallow, but one could hardly blame her for being concerned when she sees Ben playing fetch with her kids, as if they were dogs. And of course, Alison has a job in the public eye, a job where women are expected to be 20 pounds underweight, so she has the stress of trying to hide her pregnancy from everyone at work for as long as possible.

As for Ben's friends, most of the time they are probably too stoned to have much of an opinion, but they do express concerns about his ability to be a good dad. Let's just say it doesn't fit with their image of him.

Debbie's own rather unstable marriage isn't exactly a reassuring example of what Alison and Ben might come to expect if they stay together. Debbie is convinced that her husband, Pete (Paul Rudd) is cheating on her, and Pete describes marriage as being like the TV show "Everybody Loves Raymond", only it's not funny and it lasts forever.

In the end, though, this is a funny and touching movie. For the most part it's a good date movie, but if your date is someone you're really serious about, hopefully they won't think about Pete's assessment of marriage too hard.