ROGEN 2.0
The actor-comedian was popular as a super geek. Now he's lost weight and gotten stylish. Could this new look hurt his career?
Who was that Seth Rogen who showed up to host "Saturday Night Live" last weekend - slimmed down, cleaned up, wearing fashionable glasses?
He wasn't the pasty, lecherous guy who smoked from a bong attached to a gas mask in "Knocked Up," or who dismissed the idea of being a waiter, in "Zack and Miri Make a Porno," by asking, "Would you eat food that I served you?" One of the unlikeliest guys to become a bankable movie star - what with the paunch, the 'fro, the very un-Hollywood teeth - is starting to look sanitary, stylish, metrosexual. And might be losing something in the process.
To be sure, the Rogen on "SNL" is not the Rogen who hits movie theaters today, with above-the-title billing, in the dark comedy "Observe and Report." As a violently delusional mall cop, he takes great pains to look unattractive; his buzz cut makes him look chubbier than normal. That's the Rogen that the masses, presumably, will pay $10 to see. We feel good when he looks bad.
Rogen is hardly the first comedic actor to make good with a less-than-perfect physique, notes Toby Miller, who directs the film and visual culture program at the University of California, Riverside. He follows in a tradition of Fatty Arbuckle, Oliver Hardy, Jackie Gleason, Jack Black - not to mention the recent TV comedies in which the portly, uncouth guy has the hot wife.
But where "According to Jim" and "The King of Queens" take their stars' mismatched relationships for granted, Rogen's movies have always taken great pains to explain why he gets the girl - and that's probably the key to his appeal. He has a demonstrable heart, a lovable vulnerability, and, beneath the marijuana haze, a sharply working brain. He's the underachiever in the classic sense: clever enough to make something of himself, but too lazy or stoned to bother. We believe that Katherine Heigl would try her best to fall in love with him. He's funny, and that overcomes a lot.
Yet the onscreen Rogen doesn't fully realize what he's got. Compared to Black, who exudes "a kind of blundering self-confidence," Miller says, Rogen carries himself with "a nice, ironic self-deprecation."
In one of the sweetest scenes in "Knocked Up," Rogen's onscreen father, played by Harold Ramis, declares that Rogen is the best thing that ever happened to him. "Now I just feel bad for you," Rogen replies.
Why he'd say that is understandable; Rogen's characters tend to be more overtly disgusting, in action and appearance, than Jim Belushi has ever had a chance to be on TV - whether by dating a high school girl who's far too young for him in "Pineapple Express" or creating a website called fleshofthestars.com in "Knocked Up."
It says something about Rogen's appeal, to men at least, that he has long embraced his own grossness, making good by being, as one "Knocked Up" character notes, the guy "with the man-boobs." (He has even apologized to schlubby guys for his newfound svelteness, which he blamed on his upcoming role in "The Green Hornet.")
Rogen honed his image in writer-director Judd Apatow's hugely-successful comedy factory. A writer himself, Rogen has been in Apatow's stable since his days as a player on the TV show "Freaks and Geeks." This summer, he'll star in "Funny People," another Apatow film.
Comedy comes in cycles, Miller says. The prevailing brand from a decade ago was "American Pie," in which "people are just monstrous. 'American Pie' is essentially a movie about stalking."
The Apatow stuff is kinder, a little less shockingly-gross, and several standard-deviations more redeeming. His movies center on crowds of guys who are mutually supportive, at once uncouth and sweet, and in some cases, immutably geeky. Recurring player Jonah Hill, Miller notes, "really is the schlump."
It would be hard to imagine Hill getting Heigl. Rogen, though, is just-good-looking-enough to be credibly romantic, a smart woman's funny valentine.
"He's non-threatening," says Jacy Nova, the editor/writer of the entertainment blog astrochicks.com.
Among her readers - who tend to be college-educated, 18- to 34-year-old women - Rogen is a perennial favorite, Nova says. "They're getting tired of the player mentality," she says. "The nice, geeky guys are coming back in fashion."
But if Rogen's banter, self-effacing and rapid-fire, is essential to his appeal, it's missing completely from "Observe and Report." Written and directed by Jody Hill, this movie is far meaner and flashier than Apatow's work. And it marks the first time we see Rogen playing someone other than himself - not the underachiever, but the underdog.
To see Rogen play dumb, and angry, is almost as jarring as to see him go for handsome. He stakes his claim as an actor here, just as he stakes his claim as a movie star when he de-schlubbifies so completely. It's an admirable career move, in one sense. But it also gives us a little less reason to see a Seth Rogen film. 