Word: maling
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...Rogen's Ben Stone, he lives with a bunch of dopers so louche they make him seem almost normal. Yes, Ben's friends are descendants of Cheech & Chong and Bill & Ted; but they go back even further, to the all-male enclave inhabited by Gary Cooper and his professorial pals in the 1941 Ball of Fire. Both groups were involved in compiling a reference work: an encyclopedia from the Ball of Fire scholars and, from Ben's housemates, a scheme for a website that will itemize the nude scenes of movie actresses. This is an idea so perfect...
...That sounds fairly mature. And in fact it's more mature than the movie, which, whatever its ostensible message of love between two improbable strangers, is a celebration of male camaraderie, and how guys need to do their guy stuff. That too is a theme with an honorable movie history: in the snappy bravado of heroes in Howard Hawks westerns, the desperate friendship in war-movie foxholes, the sass and sarcasm exchanged by slobby Oscar and his poker pals in The Odd Couple. It exists in real life, too, of course, in less appealing ways than Knocked Up lets...
...kind of verbal bowling tournament - is as old as the Friars Club, as familiar as The Man Show (actually a favorite of mine, in its early Comedy Central years), as intense and obscene as The Aristocrats. It's also the ribald companionship of the sitcom writing room, a basically male preserve where the scribes often engage in sexually explicit jokes about the show's cast, as an assistant copies it all down. (In 1999 one such assistant, Amaani Lyle of the Friends staff, brought a sexual discrimination suit against the writers for burning her ears with their X-rated gags...
...Ending the story there would make Knocked Up not only consistent with the male-male romances that stock so many Hollywood movies (check my reviews of 300, Blades of Glory and Spider-Man 3 for extensive notes on this trend) but a more honest parable. Instead, in the middle of their stoned bliss, the guys decide to go back home: Pete to his loveless marriage, Ben to the foxy lady who somehow wants him to be the father of their child. Comic birth scene and declarations of love ensue...
...These kinds of animals collaborate all the time," says the University of Pennsylvania's Sue McDonnell, also an animal behaviorist and vet. "The larger herd is broken down into smaller harems, with a domanant male and several females and their babies. If a youngster is threatened, both the harem males and bachelor males-which usually fight with one another-will get together to try to rescue it." You don't even have to travel to Africa to see such herbivorous first-responders at work. McDonnell specializes in studying wild horses and has occasionally seen the rough-sometimes lethal-treatment feral...