Apatow: The King Of Spin?

A slightly misleading title to this post. By spin, I do not mean adjusting the truth for his own means, what I mean is, is he the king of taking an old concept and re-inventing it for new audiences.

Superbad for example, on paper looks like another all American coming of age teen comedy, much like American Pie and other clones that were spawned around that era. But what happened was a hysterically funny movie that in places was a painfully accurate portrayal of being a teenage boy who is:

a) inept with the opposite sex
b) too young to buy alocohol to make up for this ineptness
and
c) leaving for university soon and has no idea how to deal with the changes this will bring.


I feel that the answer is that while American Pie was a funny film, the charaters were walking cliches, we had the over enthusiastic sexual deviant (Stifler), the geek (Finch), the naive fool (Jim), the sensitive jock (Oz) and the sensible one (Kevin). And in the case of this film, it worked.

With Superbad, there were elements of the characters being real people, with real problems, real paranoias and real feelings. At that age, I knew people who were like the three main guys in the film and I could also spot elements of myself in them. This seems to be the success of the films that Judd Apatow chooses to get involved with. On paper all of them look like gross-out comedies, and in a way they are, but they are so much more than this.

40 Year Old Virgin had its fair share of sick moments, but it was also beautifully touching and dealt with genuine feelings. As a teenage virgin I felt that I had problems, god knows how much more those feelings would deepen as time goes by.

Knocked Up again presents the comedy side of a situation that could be deemed tragic.

Forgetting Sarah Marshall again brings back those feelings of bumping into an ex that dumped you. Its bad enough dealing with the strange silence that happens when bumping into them in your local supermarket, but having to spend a vacation, on a small island with them must be close to hell. Thats even before you throw in the fact that they are there with their new partner!

So, Judd Apatow, could very well be the king of putting an original spin on standard projects, and all he needs to do is to continue making sure that characters are flawed human beings, because after all, thats what every single one of us is.