Knocked Up" height=425 width=300 align=right hspace=10 vspace=8 border=1>By Mike McPadden
Knocked Up (2006), writer-director Judd Apatow's follow-up to his smash The 40-Year-Old Virgin (2005), is the hottest comedy of the summer. It stars Seth Rogen, Katherine Heigl (Picture: 1), and-you won't believe your eyes, but there it is -MrSkin.com, the world's number one resource for celebrating nudity in film.
"In the past, it's always been me watching stars expose themselves on screen," says Mr. Skin. "Now Knocked Up has exposed me!"
In Knocked Up, Seth Rogen plays Ben Stone, a wannabe Internet entrepreneur who, along with his goofball buddies (Jonah Hill, Jason Segel, Martin Starr, and Jay Baruchel), dreams of creating a website that reviews Hollywood nude scenes. His plan is complicated when he's introduced to MrSkin.com-yes, the real MrSkin.com.
The first half of Knocked Up chronicles not only arrested adolescent Ben accidentally impregnating the gorgeous, thoroughly grown-up Alison Scott (Katherine Heigl), it also documents the evolution of the movie-nudity website from mammary jokes to mammoth interactive database.
Utilizing skin scenes from Carrie (1976) (Picture: 1 - 2) and Wild Things (1998) (Picture: 1), Ben and his buds take note of the exact time when flesh appears in a given flick and even come up with inventive anatomical terms such as "chesticles."
Somehow this ambitious-but-clueless crew has never come across MrSkin.com.
Then, about fifty-five minutes into Knocked Up, audiences will be greeted by a handsome face that, if you look up at the top left side of your computer screen now, should be very familiar to anyone reading this article.
"I and the entire staff of MrSkin.com are thrilled to be a part of Knocked Up," Mr. Skin says. "Not only is it hilarious and heartwarming, but at the one-hour-twenty-nine-minute mark, Nautica Thorn and Stormy Daniels (Picture: 1) bust their knockers out!"
So how did the number-one comedy of 2007 come to embrace the world's number-one outlet for movie and TV nudity reviews?
As Hollywood's newly minted romantic leading man Seth Rogen explains: "Originally in the movie, there was no Mr. Skin. I can't remember how it actually played out, but the movie originally took place in a universe where Mr. Skin did not exist, and then it just started to really amuse us-the notion that Mr. Skin did exist and we just hadn't heard of it. It just made us laugh a lot as we were writing, so that's kind of where that came from. Yeah, definitely, the idea for our webpage came from Mr. Skin."
So was Rogen a fan of MrSkin.com before making Knocked Up?
"No!" Seth insists with a cocked eyebrow. Then, after his hearty trademark guffaw, he adds: "Yes, of course I was!"
Jonah Hill, Jay Baruchel, and Martin Starr all beam with enthusiasm when MrSkin.com gets brought up. Martin says that, before filming, he "definitely knew about it," while Jonah maintains that he wasn't familiar with the site, but "I still have a password that Universal doesn't know they're paying for!"
States Jay bluntly: "That's an invaluable resource. There's Wikipedia and there's Mr. Skin."
Knocked Up is a unique, original, instant (and skinstant) classic in its own right, yet it also hails from a rich tradition of movie sex comedies.
When asked which raunchy R-rated farces most deeply impacted him, Seth Rogen beams: "Porky's (Picture: 1 - 2)-the highest grossing Canadian film of all time! Porky's was one of those films, when they played it in Canada, that I would tape bits of it-the nude scenes-and compile them. So I've seen the nine minutes of Porky's where people are naked a thousand times over and over. The rest I've recently caught up on, but that introduced me to adulthood-Porky's."
"Bachelor Party (Picture: 1) is a movie I always liked," Rogen adds. "It's pretty dirty, for a Tom Hanks movie especially. That one always kind of shocked me. Kevin Smith was an inspiration language-wise, I would say. His movies were some of the first movies that I saw people just cursing up a storm, and that was very amusing to me [laughs], so I think we took a nod from that, definitely when it comes to sexual language anyway."
Jay Baruchel has his own memories of his north-of-the-border skin-on-screen indoctrination. "In Montreal, there's softcore porn on TV every night at eleven," Jay explains. "It's called Blue Night. They just show these horrible, dumb-as-dirt softcore Red Shoe Diaries-esque (Picture: 1) things all the time. So it would probably be one of those, with David Duchovny introducing a sordid tale of sex and intrigue. Then somebody left a porno mag at the playground where we hung out, and I went from, like, zero to hardcore. It led to some horrible questions that I asked my mother-things involving porno slang terms and what they mean."
Jonah Hill has his favorites too: "I'd say, all the '80s ones, the Harold Ramis kind of stuff. Those '80s comedies were, for me, probably the first time I saw parts of the female anatomy, and that was kind of interesting. Just talking about sex was always more interesting to me than actually seeing it . . . hilarity came from guys who were uninformed about the ways of women talking about sex. Animal House (Picture: 1) is a pretty high benchmark for sex comedy."
For all its erupting testosterone and lowdown humor, Knocked Up is also a deeply felt story about male-female relationships that, while always hilarious, doesn't shy away from uncomfortable truths or cheat when it comes to naked emotion.
Still, boys will be boys. Of her male co-stars, Leslie Mann (Picture: 1)-who plays the uptight housewife sister of Heigl's character-notes with a grin: "During the end of the movie, at the hospital scene, I was just left with the boys and I was so disgusted. All they talk about is porn sites for real. The way they talk in the movie-that's how they talk. They just love to talk about dirty, dirty stuff. You just don't hear-well, I never hear about this!"
The real-life Mrs. Judd Apatow good-naturedly continues: "Being around all these guys, for some reason they felt very loose and comfortable with me, or they forgot that I was there and they would talk like they normally talk, and it was really disgusting. I couldn't wait to get out of there! [Laughs]. Dirty, dirty boys!"
And you shouldn't wait to get to a theater and see Knocked Up. Now.
