Product Description

The writer and director of The 40-year-old Virgin delivers another a hilarious hit comedy!

They say that opposites attract. Well, for slacker Ben (Seth Rogen) and career girl Alison (Katherine Heigl), that's certainly the case - at least for one intoxicated evening. Two months and several pregnancy tests later, Ben and Alison go through a hysterically funny, anxious and heartwarming journey that leads to huge laughs in the most outrageous comedy of the year!

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1530 in DVD
• Brand: HEIGL,KATHERINE
• Released on: 2007-09-25
• Rating: R (Restricted)
• Aspect ratio: 1.85:1
• Formats: AC-3, Color, Dolby, Dubbed, DVD-Video, Subtitled, Widescreen, NTSC
• Original language: English
• Subtitled in: English, French, Spanish
• Dubbed in: French, Spanish
• Number of discs: 1
• Dimensions: 1.00 pounds
• Running time: 133 minutes

Amazon.com

Unwanted pregnancy might sound like a risky subject for slapstick comedy, but Knocked Up is from writer-director Judd Apatow--so we are in the hands of a man who likes to push things. And like Apatow's predecessor, The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Knocked Up is a shaggy crowd-pleaser, a comedy strewn with vulgarity but with a sweet heart at its center. A one-night stand between the utterly mismatched Ben (Seth Rogen, his first starring role) and Alison (Katherine Heigl) results in said pregnancy, and the two people reunite for mutual support--even though they barely know each other. Ben's a slob who lives with four other guys, all of whom share the same stunted approach to maturity; Alison is a new on-air personality at the E! channel. That these two eventually develop a shared understanding and affection is perhaps the movie's biggest stretch (some of the male-humor jokes amongst the guys are idiotic enough to test anybody's hope of civilizing them).

Rogen and Heigl don't really jump off the screen, but, to be fair, the movie frequently needs them to play straight while the supporting cast cuts up. Virgin vets Leslie Mann and Paul Rudd are around to supply some humor, as Alison's sister and brother-in-law, and the four idiots who live with Ben (Jay Baruchel, Jonah Hill, Jason Siegel, and Martin Starr) are in their own zone of sophomoric bad taste. Still, by 40-Year-Old Virgin standards, this movie doesn't explode, and it sometimes feels ramshackle to the point of not being thought out. Apatow's indulgence of actors creates some fine moments (Paul Rudd seems to have most of them), but it can also make a movie feel flabby, and this one is overlong by the length of a belly. --Robert Horton

Customer Reviews

Mildly entertaining at best
I don't honestly get the appeal of this movie. I'd heard a lot of good buzz about it while it was in the theaters, but in truth, I watched about 20 minutes of it and gave up throwing good minutes-of-my-life after bad.

Part of it is that Katherine Heigl's recent interviews on this movie and on Grey's Anatomy have left me with little respect for her, making it kind of hard to listen to her shrillness.

The general plot of the movie isn't believable (since when does a successful woman decide to date the high school drop out, even if she does get pregnant by him?) and believability is forgivable if the comedic potential is realized, but here it is not, which simply leaves me feeling like it's trying to be absurd but somehow failing.

A Pathetic Sign of the Times
The message Hollywood appears to be sending burgeoning cradle to
grave twenty-something consumers in this crude, unintelligent,
pathetic film is "Go ahead! Be irresponsible! Show a complete and
utter lack of common sense! Have no self-respect and get pregnant
out of wedlock with the next drunken rube who comes along! Why?
Because everybody loves babies!"

This film is as offensive and unsettling as movies can get. There's
absolutely no resonance to the film....no emotional core to help
even justify the ludicrous relationship between these two
characters and what transpires. The film's bottom line is
sometimes (often?) white, middle class twenty-somethings get
drunk, and babies are born....and sometimes (almost never?)
the egg donor and the sperm donor end up staying together
against all odds and the child is subsequently raised in a
loving, healthy family environment. Needless to say, the
f-bombs tossed around in the movie are beyond overkill, as
are the adolescent antics of the male lead and his
neanderthal roommates. Simply put, it's a horrible film.

Still, the overwhelming sucess of this movie among young adults
(I use the term "adults" loosely) and the film's beyond misguided
attempt at providing a "heartwarming" love story under the guise
of "comedy" holds up a very real mirror to the American cultural
obsession with motherhood, pregnancy and childbirth on the one
hand and Hollywood's stop-at-nothing attitude toward harnessing
the basest aspects of American youth culture in order to make a
buck.

Katherine Heigl was right when she claimed the subject matter of
Knocked Up was offensive to women. The title says it all. If only
the beautiful and talented Ms. Heigl had steered clear of the movie
altogether and directed her talents to a more worthy endeavor. I'm
sure she would be the first to agree.

Crude is right
I have to agree with the "Just Plain Crude" review. If you took out all the profanity, 95% of the dialogue would disappear. The sex scenes made it embarrassing to watch, even though it was just my husband and I viewing it. We're in our early 40's and are probably too old for this movie but we wonder if this is the way most 20 somethings communicate today. It was quite offensive, to say the least.
That being said, there were some moments when I admired Ben and Alison's attempts at working out their relationship, highly improbable though that was, and accepting responsibility for the new life they created in drunken stupidity. The scene where Ben talks to the obnoxious stand-in obstetrician on Alison's behalf, is almost touching. But when he reams out her regular doctor on the phone, his whole tirade can be bleeped out. This movie has an Adam Sandler quality about it. Just when a serious moment arises, it's blown out of the water by something weird, obscene or vulgar.
Had it not been for the overall crude nature of this movie, the basic story of a young couple dealing with a life changing event may have worked. But "Knocked Up" handles it badly. I wish I hadn't wasted my time watching it.