Finally got around to renting it last night. I liked it, but I didn't love it, and I can't quite figure out why. Some parts drag a little, for sure, and too many of the funny bits seem tacked-on. There are more pop-culture references than you can shake a stick at, most of which are extraneous and self-indulgent - it's almost as if writer/director Judd Apatow wants everyone to know that he's watched more movies and TV shows than you could ever hope to, but Apatow doesn't really strike me as that type of writer, so...what gives? The guy is hugely talented, adept at penning scenes that drip with realistic awkwardness, and unlike too many mainstream comedies, his feature characters that ring truer to life than most dramas can manage. (Except in the case of Paul Rudd here - I just couldn't get a bead on his character, which I think is a case of underwriting. He has a bunch of funny lines that don't add up to any kind of cohesive picture of a person. Apatow must have thought that Rudd could take a bare-bones outline of a character and run with it, but...not so much.)

My point is that Judd Apatow doesn't need to go the Seth MacFarlane route of pop-culture references disguised as hilarity (much as I love Family Guy, that kind of comedy can't last for a 90-minute feature, especially one that aspires to something a bit more human and emotional like Knocked Up). He's plenty funny on his own merits, and he picks great actors to work with: Seth Rogen is perfect as the shlub with a good heart, Leslie Mann is hilariously oddball, the band of stoner geeks are funny without trying too hard, and Katherine Heigl is a knockout. I've never watched more than five minutes of Grey's Anatomy and generally don't give a rat's about Heigl's inability to censor herself when giving interviews, but I think it's safe to say the Emmy win was no fluke - she's plain terrific in Knocked Up, running the gamut of emotions while staying nicely under-the-top and grounding the movie with her Everygirl sense of relatability. And the scenes between Heigl and Rogen are, unequivocally, the best-written in the movie, and a reminder that when Judd Apatow is on his game, he's pretty close to untouchable.

So Knocked Up needed a more tight-assed editor and a writer who wasn't afraid to let the situations (and characters) speak for themselves as a rule, rather than the exception, but overall I enjoyed it. I think Apatow has better movies in him - truly great ones, the kind that don't need a million "fuck"s and masturbation gags to goose laughs (damn these extended and unrated DVDs). I'm looking forward to seeing what he does next once he gets the Superbads and Walk Hards out of his system.

Oh, Bon Appétit magazine. I want to like you, I really, really do. But just when I get to thinking you're Food & Wine for the less pretentious, you give me something like February 2008's "Green Issue". An entire issue devoted to the few, the proud, the enlightened among us foodies who consume only free-range meat, only locally-grown produce, and only organic, bio-degradable, sustainable, recyclable, low-carbon-footprintable, utterly eye-rollable products everywhere else in their lives. But for now let's focus on the food, and the derisible buzzword of the moment: "locavore".

Locavores are people who buy their food stricly from local sources - meat, produce, dairy, the works. People like Alisa Smith and J. B. MacKinnon on page 27: a couple from Vancouver (of course; it's Canada's San Francisco) who spent a year living as locavores, saw the light, and wrote a book about it. A book that they presume holds interest for, you know, other people. And the rest of the issue continues in the same vein: profies of organic chocolate, rethinking the notably sustainable sardine, eco-friendly restaurants in major U.S. cities, a new "green" vodka on the market, designer bags made out of old coffee bean sacks (fair trade, naturally), etc. All part and parcel of the organic food craze, the vegetarianism of the 2000s.

And before I start sounding like a bitter naysayer, let me just yay-say this: I have no problem with organic food - the industry itself, the growing trend towards it, the people who buy it and the farmers who supply it. I love that consumers are concerned about the welfare of the animals that we too often unthinkingly eat, caring not where the meat comes from and what happened to it on the way to our dinner plate. I love that we can buy fruit and vegetables that haven't been sprayed to hell with pesticides and saturated with growth hormones - that we can taste a natural, pure, untampered-with Florida orange right at our nearest grocery store. What I can't abide by is the snobbery that so often goes along with said organic consumption, the notion that unless you're best friends with your dairy farmer and pick your own tomatoes you're somehow contributing to the downfall of the planet's resources - or, at the very least, an ignorant simpleton who might as well just chug the whole bottle of DDT if you're going to put supermarket broccoli in your mouth, for the love of crimony. Don't you care what you eat?

Yes, I do. I also care about not coming across as a self-righteous blowhard, and furthermore, I respect that not everyone lives in the Tuscan hills and thus can't always subsist on what's local and in season - that sometimes, you need to buy mushrooms that perhaps have had a bit of a road trip on the way to your grocery basket. But that's okay. We're not going to die, the sky is not going to erupt in ozone holes and the birds and bees will continue to chirp and buzz in their as-yet-un-clearcutted forests. Yes, it would be wonderful if everyone decided to demand more environmentally-friendly food and more humanely raised meat from here on out, but until such time, keep your preachy rants to yourself, your foodie memoirs in the drawer, and your superiority complex set on a gentle simmer.