Now honestly, Seth Rogen isn't really that bad looking

Judd Apatow's latest film Knocked Up is concerned with a young man, played by Seth Rogen, and a young woman, played by Katherine Heigl, who inadvertantly create the greatest miracle of all (life) when Seth's character fails to enscabbard his sword in a fit of drunken passion.

Seth Rogen is not a beautiful man. Indeed, the especially ungenerous among you might even call him unattractive. To be sure, he is not in the same league as, say, Rock Hudson or Ramon Navarro. The movie's posters play this up. To wit:

Even so, I would argue that Rogen's slightly disheveled appearance and his bemused expression, as much as his objective physical attractiveness, combine to create the humor in the question "What if this guy got you pregnant?"

In reading the critical response to Knocked Up, I've come across an interesting thing. While the movie is almost universally praised, Mr. Rogen is treated, not merely as the less attractive of the fictional couple, but as something of an ogre, the beast to Katerine Heigl's beauty, to borrow a tired analogy. For example, Carina Chocano of the Los Angeles Times opines:

Is this what it's come to for the youth of today? The result of all Facebook and no face-to-face? Because there once was a time, long ago, when to get these two together, you'd have had to maroon them on the Blue Lagoon.

The hopelessly out of touch reference to Facebook aside (if anything, that website's picture functionalities invite even more nitpicking of appearance than ever before), Ms. Chocano's comments are clearly unfair, and intended to hurt. And really, the Blue Lagoon? That reference makes no sense because both Brooke Shields and Christopher Atkins were of roughly equal hotness; they probably would have hooked up in real life. A much better comparison would have been to 2000's Cast Away, in which an isolated and psychotic Tom Hanks becomes convinced that he is the last man on earth and thus is forced to make love to a Wilson, a volleyball, in order to repopulate the earth with human/volleyball superhybrids.

Similarly, Slate's Dana Stevens comments

"What motivates Alison Scott (Katherine Heigl of Grey's Anatomy), a successful, self-possessed, and officially hot reporter for the E! network, to have drunken sex with Ben Stone (Seth Rogen), an unemployed schlub who lives in the Valley with four Neanderthal buddies (Martin Starr, Jason Segel, Jay Baruchel, and Jonah Hill)? Don't get me wrong, I love funny Jewish guys with curly hair and low self-esteem(hi, sweetie!), but this is not a sociologically credible hookup...it's impossible not to take this mismatch as a sheer plot contrivance, a male fantasy a la According to Jim.

I expect that when Dana Stevens came home after writing this review, her fat face had a bone crunching collision with Mr. Mordechai "Macabee" Steven's fist.

Not sociologically credible? I'll show you not sociologically credible, you two-bit whore:

Salman Rushdie was recently sued for divorce, but my understanding is that his penis was so massive that it caused Mrs. Rushdie considerable discomfort during the physical act of making love.

A mismatched couple? Inconceivable! That's a gross violation of the rules of good relationship movies, in which the partners are always perfectly suited for one another and there's no room for humor or drama at all. A plot contrivance providing the impetus for a movie's story? Unheard of! For other examples of this, see every movie ever made.

I don't know what According to Jim is but...hang on I'm looking it up.

Okay, first of all, I don't know why the first fictional example of the schlub/beauty pairing Dana could think of was an ABC sitcom starring Jim Belushi. Has anyone ever seen this show ever? Has anyone even heard of it? Does Dana Stevens watch this show in earnest, cuddled up next to her whipped "low self-esteem" boytoy? How did her brain even think of making this comparison?

Secondly, the comparison falls apart when you consider that Courtney Thorne-Smith, the ostensible beauty to Belushi's beast, is actually a soul-devouring Gorgonlike creature of some kind:


The lowest blow of all comes from The New Yorker's David Denby who writes:

Heigl has golden skin, blond hair, a great laugh. She’s so attractive a person that, at the beginning of the movie, you wince every time Rogen touches her.

Wow. Ouch. One wonders what Mssr. Denby must look like, if he is such a connoisseur of beautiful women that he cannot stand to see them sullied by the unclean touch of such inferior physical specimens as Mr. Rogen.

Oh wait, I forgot. The wonder of the Internet allows me to summon up photographs of people and mock them at will.


Hmm. All I can conclude is that unless Mrs. Denby is, in fact, an actual, literal cow or at least some form of Ungulate, Mr. Denby himself must shudder (in disgust) every time he touches her. Because boy howdy, that pig ain't winning any prizes.

In summary, Seth Rogen isn't really that bad looking. If Knocked Up features the most implausible movie couple critics see this year, they should consider themselves lucky.