Christian Lorentzen thinks Judd Apatow movies suck (via Zoe Pollock):
It is hard to read encomiums to Apatow without the sense that his champions are desperate to bear witness to a comic filmmaker who is both popular and worthy of their attention during an age of dreck. They strain to wring relevance out of Apatow's pro-family message. (Who in America is against families and children?) They strain to argue for his place in a tradition. They use him as a cudgel against flawed filmmakers who are both smarter and more ambitious than he is. All the while they miss the simple moving force behind the gratuitous cameos, the accumulating in-jokes, the repeated casting of the director's wife, children, and friends, and the constant carping about aging in Apatow's films; they miss all the vanity. He is allowed this vanity because he delivers a message Americans crave to hear. As long as you behave yourself, take on a modicum of responsibility, and wear the yoke of commitment, it is entirely acceptable—even preferable and profitable—to be stupid.
I'm broadly sympathetic to many of Lorentzen's observations, but I don't think his criticism of the Apatow canon grapples with the most consistent theme in all of his films, which is that in American culture, heterosexual men have almost no means to express mutual feelings of platonic intimacy without seeming all super-gay. At least for me, this is what often leads to his funniest moments -- like when Jonah Hill and Michael Cera wake up next to each other at the end of Superbad. The whole scene takes on the awkwardness of a conversation that takes place the night after two exes somehow end up sleeping with each other again after a bitter breakup. Apatow movies always cleverly acknowledge the extent to which American masculinity is a performance, and how our internalized obligation to perform it makes us do really stupid things.
