Explicit, Silly and (Yes) Hilarious

 As a big-time director, Judd Apatow burst on the scene in 2005 with the quirky and often outrageously funny “The 40-Year-Old Virgin.â€�  Opening last week with suitable hype — including a cover profile of Apatow in The New York Times Sunday Magazine — was his follow-up feature, “Knocked Up.â€�  

   The inevitable question: Does it measure up to his initial triumph?

   My answer is: almost.

   Apatow shows no signs of a sophomore slump here, though he layers the flick with plenty of sophomoric humor.  “Knocked Upâ€� is one giant bowl of spaghetti flung at the wall. The good news is that a lot of it sticks.

   The two things that made “Virginâ€� so refreshingly silly were its willingness to break with all kind of niceties and conventions, and to indulge in wildly explicit sex talk.  You never quite knew where Steve Carrell’s repressed protagonist would end up, but the scenes of him being lectured to by his co-workers about sex were frequently hilarious.

   Apatow smartly returns to his strengths in “Knocked Up,â€� with enough raunchy dialogue to keep the audience in stitches, though now he adds love, marriage, pregnancy, pothead culture, “American Idolâ€� host Ryan Seacrest, and a lot more into the mix.  

   The story line, which is somewhat less inventive than that of “Virgin,â€� involves an aspiring TV reporter named Alison (Katherine Heigl, of the popular TV series “Grey’s Anatomyâ€�) who has a one-night stand with the perpetually stoned Ben (Seth Rogen, a “Virginâ€� co-star), with predictable results. The mismatched duo has nine months — slightly more than two hours in movie time — to figure out what to do about the unexpected fruit of their loins, as well as their own relationship.

  Also on hand are Alison’s sister Debbie, her husband, Pete (Apatow favorites Leslie Mann and Paul Rudd), their young girls Charlotte and Sadie (Apatow’s real-life daughters, Iris and Maude) and Ben’s assorted housemates, whose sole ambition, if you can call it that, is to create a Web site that catalogues celebrity naked scenes in every movie ever made.  

   What these guys live on, besides pot, heaven only knows.

    Oh yes, there’s also an even more mixed bag of OB-GYNs who could well have the same impact on expectant moms as a certain great white shark had on beachgoers.

  Apatow gets fine performances out of nearly everyone. Heigl, whose “Grey’sâ€� character has become notorious for shedding copious tears, shows a decent comic range and still manages to squeeze out a few well-timed teardrops. I’m not a big fan of Rogen here, who plays his part as written – 100 percent man-child.

  The real gems are Mann and Rudd, as spouses who feel locked in a loveless marriage more than they really are, while also dealing with unnaturally precocious kids.  (In Apatow’s hands, it’s a lot funnier than it sounds.)  Mann, whose mischievous expression is a cross between the late, great Madeline Kahn and local artisan Karen Allen, kills with a simple reaction shot.  Rudd brilliantly conveys latent mania lurking beneath a calm exterior.

  Only Harold Ramis, as Ben’s father, is wasted; he looks bored as he dispenses bland bromides about being one’s own man, blah blah.

  It’s not a perfect movie. The spaghetti approach results in a film that is half an hour too long, with several dry spells lacking humorous spark, and it often veers perilously close to conventional mawkishness and predictability.

  But I don’t think I’ll soon see another movie with a post-coital shot of a curvaceous derrière that, on closer inspection, is the hairy rump of the movie’s unattractive hero.  Hee hee.

   “Knocked Upâ€� is rated R for sexual content, drug use and language (copious quantities of each).  It is playing at the Cineroms in Winsted and Torrington and the Triplex in Great Barrington.