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" Published in the January 2013 issue There was a time when I kind of had Judd Apatow figured as a sort of inventive soothsayer for a generation of vaguely crass, amusingly good-hearted, foulmouthed schleps, aimless but cinched to one another around the problems that come with being natively smart but unaccomplished, a little fat but decent in nature, or very horny but dinged up by too much porn. The result, great movies: Superbad, Knocked Up, The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Anchorman, and more. Apatow-written, or Apatow-produced, or Apatow-launched. The best of them feature dopey boy protagonists, who cipher their dilemmas in boys-only circles meshed together by codes of adolescence. They survive said struggles by breaking away to stand on their own, if only a little. And I always liked the men Apatow revealed inside these boys, appreciated his willingness to leave them as imperfect, maybe unfixable, incomplete but still worthy of love. To his credit, he pulled the same trick for women in Bridesmaids. And I don&amp;#039;t judge these guys. I sympathize. Probably like every man with 13 bucks and a ride to the Cineplex, I always felt that Apatow was writing about me, as if in truth I were some quick-witted, underachieving doper living in Encino, a guy whose loyalty to his best friend verges on an unstated gay love. And while at times you could have called me aimless, fat, a little clueless, even a little gay, I would have to admit that I am nothing like any of these guys. Such is the happy lie involved with loving Apatow movies. The characters Apatow creates, either through writing or production, are nothing like most of us. They aren&amp;#039;t the least bit like me, except in small fashions, like they too say the word cock too often. The best Apatow characters are simply and purely young. Young as in unself-conscious, undeveloped, deficit-ridden, forgivable. It&amp;#039;s not about age. Steve Carell is 40 years a boy, 40 years the Virgin, when that movie opens. And how old was Ron Burgundy? Does it matter? Didn&amp;#039;t he love every aspect of his life going into the act one complication the way a nine-year-old does the first day of summer? Boys, all boys, love their bikes, their dogs, their trampolines, their Xboxes, their action figures, their first girlfriends, and later, hopefully, their pot, their vaporizers, their porn, their seedy clubhouse apartments. Here you have the Apatow laundry list of eccentricity. Boys too are, without exception, unapologetic about what they love. That&amp;#039;s where Apatow&amp;#039;s protagonists begin, a bit \u2014 excuse the expression \u2014 retarded by the delightfully crippling passions of boyness. With the release of This Is 40, it&amp;#039;s clear Apatow is taking on the precious and age-old issues of being, or becoming, middle-aged, as he did in the dark and less successful Funny People. We have to trust that he won&amp;#039;t forget the extreme pleasure we take in laughing at the lovable incompleteness of the young and the scattershot transformations he has shown us along the way. Apatow never makes this into dark stuff, into some quirky self-made neurotic imprisonment that dooms those who won&amp;#039;t change. Change is always the point, and his characters grow, in clumsy steps \u2014 changing, when pushed, their clothes, their manners, their habits, because they come to see they must. They grow in ways that are unpredictable though completely expected, uncloying but unrelentingly sentimental. The progress of their growth, stunted by complications and exaggeration, is what we come for. It makes Apatow the foulmouthed Frank Capra of our times, and it allows us to see ourselves in the schmuck kid from Encino. Growth is good, and in Apatow&amp;#039;s hands it is the promise we see in these boy-men. Same stuff we hope for in ourselves.  "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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