Agent 99 - Online story telling

In a rare moment we caught an actual new release and went to see 'Knocked up'.

We found it amusing, wry, affectionate. We expected to find it really funny. And since this is being sold as 'the perfect comedy' then that means our expectations were not met at all. As Steph said it fell a long way short of 'Meet the Parents' the best adult comedy about familys over th last few years. Nor did it have the gut-twisting observational deftness of Little Miss Sunshine.

So why did it not pack the punch it was meant to?

Comedy comes from drama pushed to extremes, and that means that most decent comedies have an excellent underlying structure. And that structure is based - of course - on risk and whats to lose. Comedies often have a lot more at stake than dramas and this is because we accept - and expect - that they will blow things out of proportion. The extremism becomes funny; in a drama you just strain credibility.

So what was at stake for the protagonist in Knocked Up? Not much. He starts off as a loser, discovers he's going to become a dad, accepts that fairly quickly, gets dumped by her, figures out he needs to be a bit responsible and then gets the girl (and the baby, cute). There's not much to lose: Even when he has lost the girl he goes and gets a job and an aprtment of his own, thus actually maintaining some pretty good momentum on the personal development front. There is certainly absolutely no possiblity that he will actually lose the girl, they don't even really bother to posit this down and negative condition for the protagonist in any believeable form.

The only thing that he is nominally at risk of losing is his buddies and self image as a, well, jerk. To compare with Meet the Parents, Gaylord Fokker has a lot more to lose - basic credibility and repsect for being a good guy plus the change to marry his sweetheart. Ok, so it's not world domination and destruction, but the personal investment of Gaylord into the movie, his own private battle to be recognised for being a good guy and losing his cool, well it's fundemental. Another thing that Parents has that Knocked up doesn't is a GREAT antagonist. Who's the antagonist in Knocked up? There is the object of his affection, but there is no nemisis, no pressure other than what he feels and does.

And while I am at it - bong jokes?!?! Do teenage boys find these funny? I guess as a teenage boy I watched Cheech and Chong and found them funny, but that is a LONG time ago - do kids care about dope at all these days? It just seemed irrelevant.

Well, all in all it's all not enough to wring the laughs. It IS enough to pass the time very pleasantly but I thought we were going to be in top 5% here and, even though there is an awful lot to like in this movie, we are really quite a way down from a classic here. Having said that if Superbad has a decent editor who can give it some tension, that will be worth checking out...

I have higher hopes for Eagle versus Shark and Black Sheep.