Nathan Rabin, slipping up

There is one universal truth between the authors of this merry blog - The A.V. Club is, without a doubt, one of the funniest and most perfect websites in all of webdom. Most internet sites would be lucky to glance the precipice of the edge of the same neighborhood of humor and insight that the A.V. Club brings to the table daily. It is the one website that we love completely and unequivocally (except for Sean O'Neal. His South Park reviews are shit). Usually love for Nathan Rabin, one of the main writers at the A.V. Club, is free-flowing and robust, blooming with praise and joy.

Apparently it's also a lot like a delicious red wine.

However, even the mighty must slip up sometime. In his most recent entry into the absolutely necessary My Year of Flops series, he starts out with a great deal of praise for Judd Apatow - the end result being to defend the commercial failure Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story. After this string of kind words, he turns on the somewhat growing movement of anti-Apatow fans as a reaction to Apatow's success, that he and his current ubiquitous has been "engendering resentment". Rabin then goes on to point out the major failing of Apatow's films, which his inability to portray women in any sort of non-subordinate manner.

While I cannot speak for Miss Mordant, as we have not yet breached this subject in a conversation, my hardline stance is that the problem with most Apatow films is that they are stupid. Yes, they absolutely do not treat their female characters with anything more than a hamfisted stereotyping brush, but that is only part of the problem for me. The dialogue in his movies (save the classic Anchorman) is filled with childish and profane humor that only works under this somewhat hilarity-inducing guise of "reality". Almost all of the movies turn at the end so they may show some sort of heart or sentimentality that (in my viewing) feels more forced and glossed-over than anything. You can't give me Big Macs worth of dick jokes and misogyny for 2 hours and the switch to fillet mignon in the last half hour (also, his movies are generally too long. Just sayin').

The reason I decided to post this was not to completely spill my opinion on Mr. Apatow (which I may have done albeit accidentally). The reason was that after Rabin defended Apatow for a good three paragraphs, he started to talk about how one of the major reasons Walk Hard didn't sell was the possibly off-putting title. He follows this argument up with this:

As longtime readers know, I find nothing more deplorable than dick jokes.

Nothing more deplorable. Nothing remotely more deplorable than dick jokes. Either Rabin is being sarcastic (which I would doubt) or he somehow missed a great deal of all of Apatow's films. Which could be plausible, I guess. He could very well simply go up for popcorn at the same time when the nearly-guaranteed litany of dick jokes come spewing from the surround sound theater, and return just in time to see heartwarming faux-comedy. this is the assumption I'm going to make to keep a smile on my face.