Today in trade news, it sounds like Bat Mitsvah DJ Paul Rudd is finally catching a break.  Good for him, such a nice boy.

Universal Pictures has signed Paul Rudd and Leslie Mann to star in the Untitled Judd Apatow Project.
featuring an original story with characters created by Rudd and Mann in Knocked Up.
Apatow is writing, directing and producing the June 1, 2012 release, produced by Barry Mendel and Clayton Townsend. [ComingSoon]

So basically, a Knocked Up sequel/spinoff focusing on the Paul Rudd/Leslie Mann relationship.  I’m a Judd Apatow nuthugger from way back, so you throw in Paul Rudd to boot, and I’ll be the first one in line for a ticket, all dressed up like a cholo on Easter.  Hopefully there’s even a part in it for Katherine Heigl, as Leslie Mann’s totally-not-shrewish younger sister who drives well and loves math.

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Christ, I should be working at the Enquirer with these headlines.  Anyway, we all remember when Katherine Heigl whined because Knocked Up was sexist, right?  Good.  Well Seth Rogen and Judd Apatow recently went on Howard Stern, who naturally asked them about her.  They responded by saying the obvious things, but it was still cool because Katherine Heigl is a bitch.

Rogen says he doesn’t see how Heigl’s new comedy, The Ugly Truth, makes women look even better. “That [movie] looks like it really puts women on a pedestal in a beautiful way,” he quipped.
Added Apatow, “I hear there’s a scene where she’s wearing … Underwear …with a vibrator in it, so I’d have to see if that was uplifting for women.”
Even more baffling, said Apatow, “We never had a ‘fight’” with Heigl while filming. “Seth always says, it doesn’t make any sense – she improvised half her s***,” Apatow said. [USWeekly]

And then Rogen was all, “Yeah dude, it’s like she doesn’t even have a BRAIN!” and I looked over and he was totally holding his nuts so it looked like a brain.  So hilarious, bro, you should’ve been there.

Judd Apatow recently filmed an episode of Inside the Actor’s Studio that airs tonight, in which he shows up looking all clean cut like a 6th grader on picture day while James Lipton is his usual eccentric, sycophantic self.  In this clip, Apatow reveals that the scene in Knocked Up where Katherine Heigl kicks Seth Rogen out of the car on the way to the gynecologist was actually autobiographical.

APATOW: One thing I thought would be fun would be to sort of capture the intensity of some of these moments between couples. And just how heated it gets.  I think at the time I was realizing just how frustrating I was to be around.

LESLIE MANN (Apatow’s wife): I did throw him out of the car on the way to the gynecologist.

APATOW: And that is a complicated moment, because I have no money, and I’m five miles from the gynecologist…

MANN: How did you do that?

APATOW: I took a cab.

MANN:  How did you pay?

APATOW: I blew the guy.

Apatow and Mann go all Abbot and Costello at the end there, but you can tell they were super pissed at each other at the time.  That’s rough.  I’ve never had to hitchhike five miles to the gynecologist, but I have been kicked out of the examination room for making foghorn sounds.  And impersonating a doctor.

^{WATCH THE MATTHEW FOX INTERVIEW AFTER THE JUMP} 

I didn’t remember this, but apparently in Knocked Up there’s a part where Katherine Heigl is supposed to go interview Matthew Fox from Lost and Seth Rogen says, "Hey, you know what’s interesting about him?  Nothing." Anyway, some dude over at MTV interviewed Fox recently and decided to make things really awkward by asking him about it, and Fox went out of his way to say he hadn’t seen the movie and had no interest in it.

“Those types of movies are not, like, my deal.” 
"Totally oblivious to it, haven’t seen the movie, it’s not my cup of tea, duuude."

Asked what kind of movies were his cup of tea, Fox said, "I like, you know, Fellini and Bresson and, like, other old filmmakers I’ve heard smart people talk about.  That one foreigner, he’s my favorite."  Poor lil’ guy, it was a cheap shot, I know.  Does your widdow vagina hurt?  Come here and let daddy kiss it and make it better.  Wait, no, that came out wrong.  …I’m going to be a horrible father. 

With the success of Knocked Up, Juno, and Waitress (they had to throw that last one in there so there’d be three), it was inevitable that the academics would get into the mix and tell us what we love about baby movies. 

"This is a sea change," says Leonard Maltin, film historian [Ed Note: Haa!] for Entertainment Tonight. "It reflects what’s going on in the world, which is that women no longer need to feel like victims, even if something as dramatic as this has happened. For decades the very phrase ‘unwanted pregnancy’ was a synonym for soap opera. There was no question what kind of film you were going to see: It was going to be weepy. That has changed enormously. We’re now open enough in our willingness to deal with it and show that we can even laugh at it. These attitudes are in the zeitgeist, and the smarter, hipper movies tap into that."

Zeitgeist, dammit. My gratuitous big-word money was on Schadenfreude.  

"It reflects a shift in morality and acceptance of young women who are not married having sex lives," says Jeanine Basinger, lesbian chair of film studies at Wesleyan University and author of The Star Machine. "There is a difference in the cultural climate. The acceptance of keeping and raising a child if you’re unmarried, or meeting and choosing the adoptive parents and discussing it openly, is a modern phenomenon."

They go on like this for a while.  I’m just a little annoyed none of these movies choose abortion.  I think today’s young ladies need to know abortion is still a viable option.  Or “miscarriage”, as it’s known in my hometown.