David Denby deconstructs Knocked Up and the entire sub-genre he calls slacker-striver romance. He considers American culture over the decades and how relationships between the sexes were depicted on screen during those different periods.

Apatow has a genius for candor that goes way beyond dirty talk-that’s why “Knocked Up” is a cultural event. But I wonder if Apatow, like his fumy youths, shouldn’t move on. It seems strange to complain of repetition when a director does something particularly well, and Apatow does the infantilism of the male bond better than anyone, but I’d be quite happy if I never saw another bong-gurgling slacker or male pack again. The society that produced the Katharine Hepburn and Carole Lombard movies has vanished; manners, in the sense of elegance, have disappeared. But manners as spiritual style are more important than ever, and Apatow has demonstrated that he knows this as well as anyone. So how can he not know that the key to making a great romantic comedy is to create heroines equal in wit to men? They don’t have to dress for dinner, but they should challenge the men intellectually and spiritually, rather than simply offering their bodies as a way of dragging the clods out of their adolescent stupor.

Bitchy review of Rosie in Fiddler

Here are instructions for transforming yourself into a Jewish matriarch in provincial Russia in 1905, inspired by Rosie O’Donnell’s performance in “Fiddler on the Roof” at the Minskoff Theater. Feel free to try this at home.

1. Plant yourself on the floor as if you were an oak.
2. Puff out your chest.
3. Place the palm of your left hand on the back of your left hip.

And, voilÔø?!, you have instant Golde, the wife of Tevye, the philosopher-milkman in the musical adaptation of Sholom Aleichem’s stories of shtetl life in the twilight of imperial Russia. Just strike that commanding maternal pose and all other essential elements of character will soon arrive naturally. It might help if you prayed a little, too.

That would seem to be Ms. O’Donnell’s approach to a role previously played by Randy Graff and Andrea Martin in David Leveaux’s elegant but empty revival of this much-loved show by Joseph Stein, Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick. Alas, a pose and a prayer prove to be not quite enough to allow Ms. O’Donnell – the comedian, television personality, theatrical producer, sometime actress and confessional blogger – to make us believe that she is someone other than who she so famously is.

Her accent trots the globe, through countries real and imagined. It is variously Irish, Yiddish, Long Island-ish and, for big dramatic moments, crisp and round in the style of introduction-to-theater students. Her relationship with the notes and keys of a song is similarly fluid.

In the scene where Tevye (Harvey Fierstein) frightens his wife by describing an ominous dream, Ms. O’Donnell puts her hands to her pinchable cheeks and emanates a series of high-pitched o’s, bringing to mind a distressed dolphin. Whether center stage or on the sidelines, she can be relied upon to react with italicized gestures and facial expressions to what everyone else is saying.

Ms. O’Donnell, who has previously appeared on Broadway as a tough teenager in “Grease” and the Cat in the Hat in “Seussical,” executes all this with a cheerful confidence that is unfortunately not infectious. A stalwart promoter of Broadway when she was a television talk show host, Ms. O’Donnell does seem to be enjoying herself.

But as is usual with her stage performances, she suggests a jill-of-all-trades who thought she might as well try her hand at acting, too. The overall impression brings to mind what might happen if the lead in a high school production fell ill and the director turned to the most popular and reliable girl in the senior class (who is already the captain of the field hockey team, the debating society and the pep club) to fill in.

full NYT review

First-time director Bo Welch has put together a vulgar, uninspired lump of poisoned eye candy that Universal has the temerity to call ‘Dr. Seuss’ The Cat in the Hat.’ It is nothing of the kind, despite voice-over narration that occasionally tries to imitate the cadences of Seussian verse and sets that sporadically evoke Seuss’s antic draftsmanship. The Cat is impersonated by Mike Myers, in heavy white makeup and scruffy black fur, speaking in a voice somewhere between Bert Lahr doing the Cowardly Lion and a third-rate Borscht Belt comedian telling toilet jokes.