Judd Apatow‘s latest film is a sideways sequel of sorts in that it focuses on two of the supporting characters from his highest grossing movie, Knocked Up. Pete (Paul Rudd) and Debbie (Leslie Mann) are married parents approaching their 40th birthdays, but instead of getting easier, their relationship and the lives have grown even more difficult. Well, they’re still living in a big, beautiful home and driving expensive cars, but material things don’t guarantee happiness. Theoretically. This Is 40 hits Blu-ray/DVD last week, and the hefty selection of special features includes deleted scenes, featurettes and some very funny outtakes along with a commentary featuring the writer/director riffing on the film’s production, cast and various musical cues. He also mentions his wife’s and daughters’ incredible acting talents. Keep reading to see what I heard on the commentary track for This Is 40.

If you’ve seen Judd Apatow‘s This is 40, you know that Megan Fox‘s character Desi co-owns a boutique with Leslie Mann‘s Debbie, and she likes to use the shop after hours for some interesting recreational activities. Fortunately, there’s a security camera to catch every clothed detail. In this exclusive clip, Apatow and Fox talk a bit about filming the scenes within the scene. It’s as educational as a home-done rectal examination. Plus, Fox finds Apatow’s sex directions and Charlene Yi’s walking in circles absolutely hilarious. Which is strange, because the funniest thing about this is Bill Hader‘s hat. This is how comedy gets made, people.

Self-indulgent. Nevel-gazing. Structureless. Plotless. These are some of the shared criticisms that have been leveled at Judd Apatow’s This Is 40, but many of these denunciations have been articulated in tandem with complaints about the film’s length. “This is 40 hours long” became a common joke on Twitter after press screenings leading to the theatrical release, and descriptions of critics’ experience of the film’s length were often provided in great detail alongside some of the above criticisms. Dana Stevens of Slate even mistakenly referred to the 133-minute film as “nearly three hours long.” It’s strange that, in the same month that saw the high-profile releases of several two-and-a-half-plus-hour films including Django Unchained, Les Miserables, and Zero Dark Thirty, it’s Apatow’s film that has received the bulk of holiday season duration-related criticism. Sure, there have been complaints about The Hobbit’s 170-minute running time, but that’s also a film that is 1/3 of an adaptation of a relatively short novel and has been projected on some screens at an eye-fucking frame rate. In short, the length of The Hobbit seems to be only one of several problems, whereas the flaws of This is 40 have often been summarized, and inferred, as revolving around its length.

This is 40 is not funny. Or, at least, it’s not the “funny ha ha” outing movie-goers have come to expect from Judd Apatow, purveyor of stoned Seth Rogens and manically birthing Katherine Heigls and screaming Steve Carells. It’s not gut-busting or laugh-out-loud or stitch-inducing, but what it actually is may be something far better than all of that – it’s funny because it’s true. Picking up a few years after Apatow’s Knocked Up, the filmmaker turns to the previously-perilous marriage of Pete (Paul Rudd) and Debbie (Leslie Mann) for his “sort-of sequel.” Pete and Debbie have already been through some minor marital squabbles (remember when Pete would sneak off to the movies, or when Debbie busted in on Pete’s fantasy baseball league?), but their fortieth birthdays (taking place within the same week) bring with them more challenges than they’ve faced before, and more serious ones to boot. All their normal stresses are exacerbated by turning the big 4-0 (Debbie even refuses to let anyone know her actual age), and the addition of financial strains, professional disasters, daddy issues, and a major dust-up at their eldest daughter’s school make it seem like they (and their marriage) might nor survive the week. See? Funny!

It’s less than two weeks now until Judd Apatow’s latest riff-filled look at the life of the married human, This is 40, hits theaters, so that means it’s starting to be time for the film’s marketing team to go for the hard sell. You know what that means… it means they’ve now released a raunch-filled red band trailer meant to lure in all of the teenagers and young at heart people who love to hear people say naughty things, but are still on the fence when it comes to seeing a movie about wrinkled up old people in their 40s (yuck) doing whatever old people do. So what kind of new stuff does this new, more restricted trailer have in it that the ones playing on TV just aren’t going to get you? You’ve got Paul Rudd inspecting the inside of his butt while doing a contortionist routine, a frank discussion about what Megan Fox is hiding under her skirt, Apatow and Leslie Mann’s teenage daughter screaming about dicks, boner talk, mustache talk, and a partridge in a pear tree. Is all of this stuff funny? Yes, indeed it is. Is it funny enough to convince you to see another Apatow movie that clocks in at over two hours? Well, that’s something everybody is going to have to decide for themselves. The newer, naughtier ad is courtesy of Funny or Die, and the film itself is due to hit theaters on December 21. The time to decide whether this one

What is Movie News After Dark? It’s a nightly news column that’s struggling on a slow-news Monday. Luckily there’s plenty of poster art to go around. Our evening begins with a behind the scenes shot from the production of Game of Thrones and its sure to be epic third season. It’s not telling us much, but the official production blog kicking into high gear is enough to whet the whistles of many a fan, including yours truly.

The only way you can describe the new trailer for This Is 40 is to say that it looks, unmistakably, like a Judd Apatow film. Not only are his wife and kids front and center, but so are a ton of other actors that he’s known for collaborating with, they’re all engaging in that stoner-shenanigans-that-still-tug-on-the-heartstrings humor that Apatow perfected if not invented, and it’s all set to a George Harrison song that feels like it was written precisely so it could accompany the sentimental hard sell of a trailer for a Judd Apatow movie.

Space western Firefly is one of those TV shows that every geek is supposed to have seen—it’s Whedon, it’s shiny, it’s a part of the sci-fi canon. Yet, it was only on the air for one season. The upcoming cast reunion at next week’s San Diego Comic-Con is one of the event’s most anticipated panels, but would this be true if the show had gone on for three more years? Would later seasons be able to match the first? Of course, no one can know the answer to that but I think when you consider the show’s enduring appeal, as well as the appeal of one-season wonders in general, you could say that unceremonious, early cancelation is actually a good thing.  When we’re presented with a show where the writing, acting, and production have achieved what feels like a perfect synergy, and then that’s yanked away, it’s infuriating. But maybe we should celebrate that ending.

It’s December 2003, and Mel Gibson is standing in front of a rabid audience after premiering an unfinished version of The Passion of the Christ. This was the same guy who chuckled his way through Lethal Weapon. The same actor who got his start insinuating that a post-Apocalyptic baddie should saw his own limb off. Yes, he’d made prestigious award-grabs like Braveheart, but this was something different. Out of the darkness, someone asked where Gibson could go from here and, shielding his eyes symbolically from the spotlight, he said he couldn’t go back. He’d gotten the big house and the pool and the fame, but there was no way he could return to the types of movies he’d made before exploring the final hours of Joshua of Nazareth’s life. The movie was a plunge into the ocean, and the actor/director knew it. If anything, Funny People was Adam Sandler’s Passion, but it didn’t come with the same sort of obvious shift. It was a quieter change that – innocently as it seemed – served to undermine the career Sandler had. Whereas Gibson (as clinically insane as he is) seemed to grasp what he’d done, Sandler has remained in the dark to his career’s detriment. Bluntly put, Funny People and his choices afterward ruined Adam Sandler‘s career.

If you’ve been closely following the career of Pee-wee Herman performer Paul Reubens (and shame on you if you haven’t been), then you know he’s been crowing about the fact that he’s got a new, Judd Apatow-produced Pee-wee movie in the works. It was almost two years ago when he first broke word that the movie was happening, and then he let everybody know he had turned in the first draft of the script a year after that. While news of a new Pee-wee movie was initially a cause for celebration, after two years of talk one has to begin wondering if this thing is really happening or not. If Apatow and company are really on board and looking to make this movie, then why is it taking so long to get things together? Reubens has been talking again, this time to ComingSoon, and he says he can explain the wait. “I actually wasn’t supposed to talk about it initially,” Reubens admits, “I was talking about it in this very veiled, secret way going, ‘Oh, I wish I could talk about it.’…It got leaked about six months to a year before it was supposed to.” I guess we can chalk that up to Pee-wee’s trademark giddy enthusiasm, but what’s the real scoop when it comes to this movie? Are we actually going to see it anytime soon?

The idea of beginning a romantic comedy at the moment where most others end is a potentially intriguing and promising one. What happens after the meet-cute, the courtship, the third-act conflict and ultimate reunion that leaves our happy couple smiling and in love? If The Five Year Engagement is any indication, what happens next is a slow slog peppered with rom-com conventions, supporting characters who often outshine the leads, and enough laughs to sustain a far shorter movie. When we first meet Tom (Jason Segel) and Violet (Emily Blunt) they themselves have already met, fallen in love and decided to spend the rest of their lives together. He has a great job as a chef in San Francisco, she’s awaiting an offer from UC Berkeley, and their future together looks bright. Until it doesn’t. Berkeley passes, but a school in Michigan offers her a two-year position so Tom gives up his job and the loving couple move east where she blossoms and he begins to fall apart. The wedding day gets pushed back again and again as Tom and Violet struggle to rediscover what brought them together in the first place. Hilarity ensues?

Here comes This Is 40, Judd Apatow‘s self-confessed “sort-of sequel” to Knocked Up, and while it looks like Paul Rudd‘s Pete and Leslie Mann‘s Debbie have sufficiently ironed out their relationship issues, pretty much everything else seems to be falling apart around them. Mortified by their imminent aging (Debbie, in particular, refuses to accept that she’s now turning the big 4-0), the pair embark on a new way of life, thanks to Debbie’s “do better” list. As the film’s first trailer shows us, they have plenty to do when it comes to doing better. They’ll work out! They’ll stand up to bullies! They will make their kids spend more time outside! They’ll probably totally muck up everything! While the trailer’s use of fun.’s “We Are Young” is both too spot-on and too grating, this first look at This Is 40 shows that the film should be packed with that Apatowian mix of heart, humor, and honesty that mark his finest films. Also of note, we should all be so lucky to look like Mann in our fourth decade.

Dynamic duo Nicholas Stoller and Jason Segel continue their tangled professional careers together in The Five-Year Engagement, unlike the last film in which the pair split writing, with Stoller directing and Segel starring, Get Him to the Greek, their new film tackles some tough stuff in name of the comedy – marriage. The film centers on Segel’s Tom and Emily Blunt‘s Violet and their stumble to the altar. From the film’s first scenes, it’s obvious that Tom and Violet are very much in love, but a series of big life events that have nothing to do with their nuptials steadily pile up until it looks as if their five-year engagement will be just that, an engagement, with no wedding at the end. In the style of Stoller and Segel’s previous works, the film is both funny and true, and the addition of Judd Apatow as producer and a cast that includes Chris Pratt, Alison Brie, Mindy Kaling, Rhys Ifans, Kevin Hart, Chris Parnell, and Brian Posehn only pumps up the film’s improv-influenced laughs. The press junket for The Five-Year Engagement was a laidback affair, and one that drove home the point that the film was a collaborative effort between people who actually like each other. Comprised of four roundtables of paired talent, your faithful Reject and a group of other online journalist spent time talking to Segel and Blunt, Nicholas Stoller and Judd Apatow, Brie and Kaling, and Parnell and Posehn. Revelations from the junket were not just confined to

Editor’s note: With Girls premiering on HBO this weekend, we thought one of Kate’s favorites from SXSW was in need of a re-run. This review was originally posted on March 13, as part of our SXSW Film Festival coverage. Multi-hyphenate Lena Dunham has previously hit SXSW with two unique efforts – in 2009, with the debut of her ambitious, lo-fi Creative Nonfiction, and follow-up in 2010 with the controversial Tiny Furniture, which earned the Narrative Feature award in that year’s section. Dunham’s work has proven polarizing – some people admire her self-effacing and very personal brand of filmmaking, while others balk at her navel-gazing style. Returning to SXSW this year, Dunham again brought along a personal project about self-effacing, navel-gazing, shaky-legged twenty-something girls in the big city, but this time Dunham is serving as star/writer/director/producer on a television series, HBO’s Girls, produced with Judd Apatow. And while her previous works might not have the sort of widespread appeal that a television series would require, Dunham’s Girls is wickedly hilarious, quite accessible, and it proves that Dunham’s in-character pronouncement that she could be the voice of her generation is not far off – at all.

Lena Dunham‘s new HBO show, Girls, fits right into producer Judd Apatow‘s wheelhouse: it’s funny, awkward, honest, and never afraid to show characters at their ugliest. The lead, Hannah (Dunham), is a young 20-something looking for direction, similar to plenty of Apatow’s characters in TV and film. Hannah and her friends aren’t the nicest or the most admirable of characters, but they’re about as real as a group of friends can get. Hannah is one of those phases that plenty of artists — such as Dunham and Apatow — could relate to: being young and struggling. In usual HBO fashion, Girls is a show that pushes the pain, never letting its characters off easy. That, amongst other topics, were discussed between Apatow, Dunham, and I the day after its terrific premiere at SXSW. Here’s what Lena Dunham and Judd Apatow had to say about the movie-like structure of the show, writing vomit drafts, and personal comedy:

Last week, the interwebs exploded with the awesome announcement that Will Ferrell, Adam McKay, Steve Carell and Paramount Pictures have come to an agreement on moving forward with a sequel to the 2004 comedy Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy. Sweet Lincoln’s mullet, this is exciting! Even though the movie’s release is at least a year away, you can still pop in your DVD, Blu-ray or HD-DVD (yeah, those are still out there) of Anchorman to refresh yourself in preparation of the sequel. Enjoy some scotchy, scotch, scotch, down into your belly. Or drink from a half-gallon carton of milk on a hot day. Either way, slap on your Sex Panther cologne and take a trip back to the glorious 70s. And don’t forget to stay classy, rejects!

Last month was eclectic. We got Disney‘s like-it-or-hate-it box-office bomb, a sweet and violent comedy following the goons of hockey, one ass-kicking and nonstop action picture, an 80s TV show adaptation that was better than it originally had any right to be, and a Tarsem kids’ film that defied most expectations based on that horror story of a trailer. A pretty strong March, and that’s not even counting The Hunger Games. Before we head into the unpredictable summer movie season, we got 30 days filled with a plenty of excellent and probably not-so-excellent releases coming out. Here are 8 1/2 movies worth seeing this month.

Let’s get it out of the way right now – I liked Tiny Furniture. I was not wild about it, and I didn’t hate it with the passion of a thousand suns. I’m in the minority on this one – the middle. Should it have won Best Narrative Feature at SXSW 2010? Perhaps not. Should it already have its own Criterion Collection release? Maybe. But I find Lena Dunham interesting, and there were moments of brilliance in Tiny Furniture, moments that absolutely spoke to twentysomething ladies looking for whatever “real life” happens to be (ladies like, well, me). And perhaps Dunham’s humor and insight and experience is better-suited to the series treatment, a structure that would condense her more twee affectations into shorter bits, and one that would benefit from a larger cast. And so there is Girls – Dunham’s new HBO series, produced by none other than Judd Apatow. Like Tiny Furniture, Girls chronicles the lives of twentysomething ladies trying to find their way in big, bad New York City. Dunham is joined by Jemima Kirke and Allison Williams, and the series centers on the gals and their lives (often funny, sometimes kind of heartbreaking). The series will premiere at this year’s SXSW, with a three-episode screening on March 12 at the Paramount. Check out the full trailer for the series after the break.

Last year’s lady-centric comedy Bridesmaids cost Universal $32 million to produce and ended up banking over $288m at the box office. Plus it made viable, hit anchoring stars out of both Kristen Wiig and Melissa McCarthy. So, would you imagine that the studio wants to make a sequel? The answer is yes, yes they do, very much, but unfortunately they have a huge stumbling block in front of them. According to a report from THR, the original film’s co-writer and star, Kristen Wiig ,isn’t interested in doing another one. When asked about the potential sequel, that should definitely be once again written by Wiig and her collaborator Annie Mumolo and directed by Paul Feig, Wiig replied, “We aren’t working on that. Annie and I aren’t planning a sequel. We are writing something else.” Oh. Ouch. That sucks for Universal. THR’s speculation over why Wiig refuses to play ball centers on the minuscule $100 thousand bonuses the cast got on the first one, after it became a runaway financial success, but Wiig refused to comment on whether her reluctance to work on another Bridesmaids is financially motivated or not. She also might not want to start doing comedy sequels because she’s trying to move her career in a more dramatic direction. She’s got upcoming dramatic roles opposite people like Annette Bening in Imogene and Robert De Niro in The Comedian. That sounds like a potential springboard into Oscar territory to me. Doing something as lame as a “getting the band back

Prominent producer/writer/director Judd Apatow was recorded while speaking at some sort of L.A. Times sponsored press event recently, and he had some interesting comments about The Academy and how he thinks comedies are treated unfairly at the Oscars. You can head over to 24 Frames to watch the whole thing, or just read below and I’ll give you the gist of what was said. Apatow is of the opinion that there should be a new Oscar category created for “Best Comedy,” much like an Oscar for “Best Animated Film” was created in 2001. His reasoning: “Why not?” Okay, that isn’t his entire reasoning. He goes on to say that because “a comedy has only won Best Picture 5 times in a zillion years” he doesn’t think it would be “screwing up Schindler’s List for Hangover to have its own category.” And he goes even further to say that once a new Comedy category was created the Academy could “get rid of the Key Grip category,” a comment that elicits some boos from a tech-appreciative crowd gathered around the interview area. In response to the booing Apatow explains, “I love the key grips, they do a fantastic job, but in hour four I would rather see Zach Galifianakis show up rather than my friend Curtis.”