DOWN (Dining Out With Nerds) report: Knocked Up

Dinner at Acapulco’s was 8 people (I think). They already had a large party at our usual long table, so we were stuck in a booth with two adjoined tables, in back. The booth was so small I decided not to court claustrophobia and sat at one of the tables (sorry Nate and Elizabeth). Matt felt their diet Pepsi was decent (bad diet Pepsi seems to be too common at Framingham restaurants). After bringing us the usual several refills, the waitress just brought us a pitcher, which some wit called “Harry Potter juice.” Some other wit asked if that meant “juice owned by Harry Potter, produced by Harry Potter, made from Harry Potter”, or what. Diet Pepsi lost some attraction at that point.

The main contenders for Movie were Bug, Mr. Brooks, and Knocked Up. (We also had our choice of III movies: Shrek, Pirates, or Spiderman, all of which most of us had already seen.) Between people who never go to the movie, people who didn’t want to see any of the above, and people who have just been promoted to Manager and were all tired out, three of us saw Knocked Up. Two or three others saw Mr. Brooks, and us other three might have except Lynda really needed something funny.

I thought this movie was amusing, perhaps even more so than The 40-Year-Old Virgin. (Disclaimer: I’m the anti-Mikey. I like almost everything.) Lots of jokes. “He’s playing fetch with my kids!” Lynda didn’t think the movie was funny enough after the rave reviews it got. Watch out for serious “how relationships go bad” stuff — these were a major theme of the movie, and it looked unpleasantly realistic to me. Matt would have seriously hated this movie. The female lead (“Alison”, Katherine Heigl) is also on Grey’s Anatomy, which I rarely watch, which explains why she looked sort-of familiar to me. Anyway, I mostly liked this movie.

Oddly, this movie had more breasts than anything we’ve seen recently that I can remember. This is partly due to the two male leads taking a stress-relief trip to Las Vegas and getting lap dances. It’s more due to Ben’s (Seth Rogen) buddies and their money-making scheme to launch a web site dedicated to nude scenes by famous actresses, for example the swimming-pool scene in Wild Things. I don’t know how they missed Erika Eleniak jumping out of a fake cake exactly 45 minutes into Under Siege; perhaps this movie couldn’t get the rights to that movie.