Judd Apatow knows that in casting his real life wife and children in his latest film, the seriocomic Knocked Up spin-off/sequel This Is 40, he's inadvertently invited the world to peek into his own life, marriage, issues, and neuroses. Still, despite the many parallels one might draw between Paul Rudd's Pete (now a struggling indie record label owner) and Leslie Mann's Debbie (whose own small business and marital woes are nothing compared to impending big 4-0), Apatow insists most of This is 40 is fictionalized. Okay, much of it. Well, he doesn't escape to the bathroom to play games on his iPad like Pete does. "I’m more about reading the Huffington Post," Apatow joked.
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Movieline would like to welcome Pete Hammond to the pages of this site with a new column that we're calling Hammond on Film. If you love movies, then you're probably familiar with Pete's byline. He's the Awards columnist for our sister site, Deadline Hollywood, as well as a veteran movie critic who has written more than 600 reviews for the best-selling Leonard Maltin’s Movie Guide and, most recently, was the film critic for Boxoffice Magazine and Boxoffice.com. He has also reviewed features for CNN. For his first column, Pete takes a close look at Judd Apatow's This Is 40, which opens Dec. 21.
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Judd Apatow has conquered comedy. Will Broadway be next? In an interview with GQ magazine that appears in the January issue, the This Is 40 director tells writer Amy Wallace that he's writing his first play. And it may not be funny. more »
This is 40 ends with a title card saying that it's "Based on characters created by Judd Apatow." While this is true — the film's about Debbie (Leslie Mann) and Pete (Paul Rudd), who were supporting figures in Apatow's 2007 hit Knocked Up — it also feels like it might be more accurate for it to declare "Based on Judd Apatow." It doesn't just star his wife Mann, it features their daughters Maude and Iris as her children, and it's not hard to read Rudd's character as an Apatow proxy who's struggling through the world of music instead of, these days, riding high in comedy.
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Considering its relatively mundane subject matter -- Paul Rudd and Leslie Mann's Knocked Up characters, Pete and Debbie, go into mid-life crisis mode when age 40 approaches -- there's a deceptive amount of classic signatures in Judd Apatow's This is 40. Yes, I'm talking about dick jokes. And boners and nipples and vagina tree rings and whatever it is that Rudd is gazing at through a mirror without his pants on. In other words: Comedy gold! Right?
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