Butler's Cinema Scene

“THIS IS 40” My rating: C- (Opens wide on Dec. 21)

134 minutes | MPAA rating: R

Being funny has never been a problem for Judd Apatow. And let’s be honest —  there are some good laughs in his latest, “This is 40.”

The problem is Apatow’s  increasing incompetence as an overall filmmaker.  His movies are obscenely long, slowly paced, meandering, and poorly laid out. I won’t say they have no point, only that they so quickly run out of dramatic steam and narrative focus that they seem to have no point.

“This is 40” follows Pete (KC native Paul Rudd) and his wife Debbie (Leslie Mann, Apatow’s Missus), two supporting characters from “Knocked Up,”

They live in an upscale LA neighborhood with their two daughters (Iris and Maude Apatow, the director’s kids). Debbie runs a boutique. Pete has started his own independent record label.

And like a lot of folks who hit 40 years of age, they’re getting jumpy.

“40” seems a sincere effort by Apatow to examine some of the things, good and bad, that happen to a couple when the seven-year itch kicks in.

Their sexual drive goes into reverse. They worry about paying the mortgage (Pete’s recording business is tanking, thanks to his decision to throw everything he has into reviving the career of ‘80s Brit rocker Graham Parker). They wonder what might have been.

John Lithgow, Albert Brooks

Some of this is played for laughs. There is, for example, Apatow’s dissection of the bathroom habits of middle-aged males. Ladies, best you learn this stuff before settling down with a guy.

And there’s some pretty dark material here, as when Pete admits to a buddy that he fantasizes that Debbie will die (quickly and painlessly, of course) so that he can play the field. (The irony being that Pete wouldn’t remember how to play the field if he got the chance.)

Rudd and Mann are likeable and charistmatic performers. But Apatow dilutes Pete and Debbie’s story with too many diversions (including a dud involving Megan Fox as the hottie working in Debbie’s boutique) and too many characters, most of which serve no good purpose.

We’re talking Albert Brooks as Pete’s money-mooching father, who has only recently started his own second family; John Lithgow as Debbie’s remote dad, who has never seen his grandchildren; Melissa McCarthy as the combative mother of a boy who has picked on Pete and Debbie’s oldest;  a bunch of professional hockey players (Ian Laperriere, James F. Van Riemsdyk) as themselves, and various slumming rockers (Parker, Ryan Adams, Billie Joe Armstrong)  who serve no good purpose.

And, perhaps most irritating of all, Apatow introduces all sorts of marriage-imperiling plot points which are never resolved.

| Robert W. Butler