I thought losing weight was to blame for Seth Rogen’s fall from funny. But maybe we never had the same sense of humor to begin with. How else to explain his starring role in “Observe and Report,” which opens today, the extended trailer for which shows his character, Ronnie, a mall cop, having sex with a woman (Brandi, played by Anna Faris) who’s passed out drunk, covered in vomit? This scene has caused quite a bit of controversy, with everyone from The New York Times to Salon’s Broadsheet weighing in on whether the scenario classifies as date rape. (The scene, FYI, is embedded in the trailer, after the jump. Warning: the language in the trailer makes it NSFW.) Rogen says it is not.
“You can literally feel the audience thinking, like, how the f**k are they going to make this okay? Like, what can possibly be said or done that I’m not going to walk out of the movie theater in the next thirty seconds? … And then she says, like, the one thing that makes it all okay.”
That one thing? When Rogen stop manically pumping away, Brandi, vomit oozing out of her mouth, comes to, and says, “Why are you stopping motherf**ker?” The Times agrees that this is her giving “permission,” writing in their review, “He forces himself on a makeup-counter saleswoman after a date of heavy drinking and drug use. (Before the scene is over she indicates that she had given her consent.)”
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