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I f you want your nine-months' pregnant wife to burst into uncontrollable tears, by all means, take her to see Knocked Up, the new film from writer/director Judd Apatow.

I mean, it’s not like we didn’t know what to expect from the movie. We’d both seen the trailer and the commercials and all the glowing reviews, and we thought it was a pretty appropriate movie to see as we entered the 38th week. It was very funny and we enjoyed it, but we were both left a little out of sorts as the closing credits rolled.

I was a little disappointed by the film’s thematic and structural similarities to Apatow’s previous movie, The 40 Year Old Virgin, while my wife reacted to the graphic nature of the birth scene and how she could expect something like that in a matter of days.

Seth Rogen stars as Ben, a pudgy pot-smoking man of leisure looking to capitalize on Internet porn with his friends and fellow THC-enthusiasts. Right off the bat this movie seems to be tailored right for my demographic. Alison, played by Katherine Heigl, is a beautiful young TV producer just breaking into the business. They meet cute at a club, and fuelled by booze, tumble into the sack. When Alison finds herself pregnant, the odd couple has to decide on their future together.

Rogen is endearingly goofy, and the film is consistently funny, but overall, it suffers from the same problem I had with Virgin. In both cases, the viewer is asked to identify with a social outcast -- Steve Carell’s action-figure collecting nerd or Rogen’s teddy bear pot-head -- and to accept their lifestyles as acceptable. And in both cases, once the viewer accepts that, the movie logic dictates that the main characters then must strip away everything unique about their individual personalities in order to win the love of a woman.

I find this especially curious, since Apatow was responsible for the short-lived TV show Freaks and Geeks, which lovingly depicted the fight between the nerds and the norms. I guess it’s true that Hollywood really does destroy your soul.

The other problem I had was the sitcom-like nature of the plot. There is no way in this world that hot young blond would try to form a relationship with a character like Ben, regardless of the baby on the way. This is total fantasy, straight out of According to Jim or The King of Queens or any other fat slob/hot wife show. There’s suspension of disbelief and there is out and out absurdity.

That being said, I certainly identified with Ben’s unsteady steps toward fatherhood, and by the end of the movie I did get choked up during the rather intense and graphic birth scene. In fact, the entire audience audibly gasped at the quite realistic depiction of the baby crowning. I’m sure the teenagers who snuck into the theatre after seeing Shrek the Third didn’t count on witnessing the miracle of birth.

In the end, Knocked Up is worth seeing, even though I don’t think it’s the instant classic like a lot of reviews have called it. If it’s early in your pregnancy you should really enjoy it, but if you’re nearing the end of your term, you might want to wait until it’s on DVD and your baby is already here. That way, the reason why your wife is crying is that the baby won’t sleep more than 20 minutes or you did something wrong. Again.