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Knocked Up - Preview & US reaction

Knocked Up

Preview by Jack Foley

THE latest comedy from the creators of The 40-Year-Old Virgin took second spot at the US box office at the weekend (June 1 to 3, 2007), with better-than-expected sales.

Knocked Up opened with $29.3 million, equivalent to its production budget, marking another major comedic success for its star and writer, Seth Rogen.

The film’s distributor, Universal Pictures, had hoped the comedy would open in the same $21 million range as director Judd Apatow’s previous film, 2005’s The 40-Year-Old Virgin. But its success echoes the positive reviews the comedy generated, which were among the best of the year for a mainstream movie.

The film finds Grey’s Anatomy co-star Katherine Heigl as an entertainment journalist who winds up pregnant following a drunken one-night-stand with slacker Ben Stone, played by Seth Rogen.

Faced with the prospect of going it alone or getting to know the baby’s father, Allison decides to give the lovable doof a chance – which poses all manner of problems for both her sanity and her career.

Of the glowing reviews, Entertainment Weekly led the way, awarding it an A and writing: “Knocked Up is the very opposite of a storybook romance, and also the very model of a great comedy for our values-driven time…”

It adds: “This comedy is such a blast of fresh air.”

The New York Times, meanwhile, opined: “It may be a bit, um, premature to say so, but Judd Apatow’s Knocked Up strikes me as an instant classic, a comedy that captures the sexual confusion and moral ambivalence of our moment.”

And Time Magazine wrote: “It’s hard enough to find comedies like this at any time, so it’s a small and welcome miracle to come upon one in the midst of a typical movie summer, richer than ever in over-budgeted, underwhelming inanities.”

The Chicago Sun-Times felt that “Knocked Up is half goofball guy-movie and half sentimental chick-flick, and it works on both levels, even if it does overstay its welcome.”

While Variety declared: “Knocked Up is uproarious. Line for line, minute to minute, writer-director Judd Apatow’s latest effort is more explosively funny, more frequently, than nearly any other major studio release in recent memory.”

And Hollywood Reporter rounds off this overview by stating: “Apatow’s gleefully raunchy movies are, in an odd and charming way, extremely family-friendly.”

Knocked Up opens in UK cinemas on August 24, 2007. Watch the trailer