I went to the movies last night with my cousins instead of watching the game. We had a bite to eat after we saw Knocked Up, a surprisingly good movie, and I called Em at home to get a score. The game was tied, 4-4. By the time I reached the Bronx, I ran into some fans coming home from the game and got the highlights of the Yankees' rousing, extra-inning, come-from-behind, 5-4 win. That makes it four straight for the Bombers with Roger Clemens on the hill this afternoon--a muggy, overcast day in New York.

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The great film director John Huston once said that great screen acting is more a matter of quality than talent. What he meant was that the camera just takes to some people, who have a quality on film that they wouldn't necessarily have on the stage. Sometimes the same can be said about directors. Judd Apatow, the writer and director of Knocked Up, does not have a real visual style, but he's got true affection for his characters, and that is a winning quality that will take him far. (Jonathan Demme had more of a funky style in his early movies, but some of the same feeling.)

Apatow, who prodcued The Ben Stiller Show in the early nineties and later was a writer for The Larry Sanders Show, was the creative force behind the short-lived cult TV show, Freaks and Geeks. What impressed me most about Freaks and Geeks was how much the filmmakers genuinely liked the characters they created. The show wasn't just flip, or ironic and clever; there was some emotional truthfulness to it as well.

I didn't think Apatow was able to bring the same feeling to his first movie, The 40-Year Old Virgin, a broad, often disappointing comedy. (The funny thing about it though is that while I didn't like the movie too much the first time I saw it, I later found myself unable to turn away from it when it was on cable--it grew on me.) But he does manage to bring a real warmth to his second movie, Knocked Up. It's as if his all of his talents have finally jelled. The movie is all of a piece and it is very appealing.

Apatow doesn't judge his characters, and though the story is relatively formulaic, he resits some easy cliches. For instance, there is a scene with the leading ladies' mother, and you can just see this mother turning into a cartoon heavy, but she doesn't factor into the narrative at all. Then there is a great scene where Paul Rudd and his wife have an fight in a driveway. What makes it so compelling is that you can see where each character is coming from and why they are not understanding each other--in that sense it reminded me of the fight that Daniel Stern and Ellen Barkin have about records in Diner.

Knocked Up penetrates the surface of the light comedy genere, but it is not perfect. Not all of the jokes work--though most of them do--and there are a host of things that you can pick at as far as credibility goes; the New York Times critic, A.O. Scott called it "improbably persuasive." But it is an exceedingly likable movie, and I wasn't bothered by what it wasn't--it exceeded my expectations throughout. If anything, I found myself picking out the flaws only because of a desire to want something that is very good be truly great.

I laughed a lot, and so did the rest of the audience (I was smiling before the title credits when I heard the opening bars to "Shimmy Shimmy Ya"). In fact, there were three or four times when the crowd was laughing so much that I missed hearing dialogue. The acting was very good--the two kids in the movie, Apatow's real-life daughers, have small parts but are terrific, and completely unaffected. Who knew that Seth Rogan would be able to carry off a leading role? And give Apatow credit for understanding women and writing good female roles.

I missed out on the reviews for this one when it came out, but apparently it has gotten good notices. I like what Scott wrote in the Times:

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 without straining, pandering or preaching. Like "The 40-Year-Old Virgin," Mr. Apatow's earlier film, it attaches dirty humor to a basically upright premise. While this movie's barrage of gynecology-inspired jokes would have driven the prudes at the old Hays Office mad, its story, about a young man trying to do what used to be the very definition of the Right Thing, might equally have brought a smile of approval to the lips of the starchiest old-Hollywood censor.

The wonder of "Knocked Up" is that it never scolds or sneers. It is sharp but not mean, sweet but not soft, and for all its rowdy obscenity it rarely feels coarse or crude. What it does feel is honest: about love, about sex, and above all about the built-in discrepancies between what men and women expect from each other and what they are likely to get. Starting, as he did in "Virgin," from a default position of anti-romantic cynicism, Mr. Apatow finds an unlikely route back into romance, a road that passes through failure and humiliation on its meandering way toward comic bliss.

I think it is worth forking over ten bucks to see. It sure made me feel good.