At the Movies

Rogen is all pumped up

september 26 - October 2
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Gulf Weekly Rogen is all    pumped up

The king of the summer box office 2007 arrives unaccompanied and draws no crowd as he settles into a booth in a West Hollywood coffee shop.

Unlike many past holders of his title, he’s not swooningly handsome, blue-eyed or flaxen-haired.

 

He’s about six feet tall, big and burly, with red, slightly frizzy hair and a very infectious, dirty gurgle of a laugh, which will be heard often over the next hour or so, along with a blizzard of profanity and one-liners.

 

Hard to believe, but Seth Rogen starred in two hugely successful comedies this summer that may have shifted the centre of gravity of American comedy: Knocked Up and Superbad, released a few weeks ago and still roosting high in the US charts.

 

Rogen, his childhood friend and writing partner Evan Goldberg, and their director/friend/mentor Judd Apatow (The 40 Year Old Virgin) have book-ended the summer season with two marvelously fresh, yet surprisingly wise and sweet-natured comedies about losers, sex, marriage, the Darwinian principles of high school and  shooting up cop cars.

 

Somewhere in the upper echelons of the Hollywood comedy scene, an older generation is nervously looking far below itself and seeing its own replacements.

 

Rogen is just back from a press tour on which he and his friends were treated like rock stars, thanks to the two movies’ near simultaneous release in overseas markets.

He also encountered one of his American comedy forebears. “I saw Woody Allen in Paris, being followed by like, two dozen paparazzi. And it’s weird seeing a really old man being followed by paparazzi. You always expect to see Lindsay Lohan, but this was like your grandpa walking down the street. He looks like a little old man – one gust could do him in. He’s frail as frail can be!”

 

Allen is shuffling off the stage just as Rogen moves front and centre. Although we roll our eyes at the stale and repetitive nature of most of Allen’s recent work, we also marvel at the notion of the 15-year-old Allen as a boy-genius lead joke writer on Sid Caeser’s Your Show of Shows back in 1950.

 

Rogen got almost as early a start in comedy as Allen, having been spotted in 1998 – aged 16 and as beefy as Allen is weedy – at an open casting call in his native Vancouver, and soon after finding himself cast by producer Judd Apatow in the fondly remembered TV high school drama series Freaks and Geeks.

 

It was cruelly cancelled after a single season but introduced him, and us, to the informal family of misshapen jokesters, comedians, writers and friends who are currently set to assume the mantle of the coming generation in Hollywood comedy.

In the intervening years, he subsisted on the usual acting gruel of low-rank comedy figures, until Knocked Up shot him into the stratosphere a few months ago, and Superbad sealed the deal.

 

He’s also an accomplished writer – as the Superbad script attests – and he did a stint as a joke-writer for HBO’s Da Ali G Show. (Of working with Sacha Baron Cohen, he says: “We’d just write or dream up these 30 or 40 awful questions for him to ask and he’d take off to film it, leaving us horrified and thinking, ‘You’re actually gonna do that?’ People think he’s a lot more heady than he is, he’s just a guy who wants to make fun. I find him oddly easy to hang out with.”)

 

Superbad also has something of an outsider’s sense of place.

Rogen and Goldberg wrote the first draft of the script when they were both in high school, and polished it to a high sheen over the next 12 years. It stemmed from never recognising themselves in high-school movies or TV shows, and from a desire to get things right that those shows had got sadly wrong.

 

For their comedy about two graduating virgins – one angry and fat, based on Rogen and played by Jonah Hill, and the other slight and sweet, based on Goldberg and played by Arrested Development’s Michael Cera – the writers were interested in “how the characters relate to each other, not even emotionally, just casually”.

 

Indeed, one of the most shocking things about Superbad is how edgy, accurate and tender-hearted it is on the fragile nature of teenage male friendship, riven as it is with homoerotic ambiguity and the fear of separation.

 

Rogen now has five movies in the pipeline, some of them leftover voicework he snagged before this summer turned his life upside-down, but also another, Pineapple Express, based on a Rogen-Goldberg script and directed by ... “Why, indie darling David Gordon Green, of course!” laughs Rogen.

 

As a teaser, Rogen leaves me with one nugget: “I guess what Judd Apatow is to me, is what Terrence Malick is to David Gordon Green. They’re just good friends. And David said to me the other day, ‘Guess what Terrence Malick’s favourite movie of the last 10 years is?’” What? “Zoolander! He knows every word, watches it every week. Which just goes to show, you never can predict these things.”

 

And Rogen shakes hands, says goodbye, swivels on his heel, and walks out into the ever-brightening limelight.







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