WARNING: SPOILERS FOR THE FOLLOWING: Up in the Air, Juno, and… uh… 40-Year-Old Virgin.

Up in the Air is a really good movie.  You should go see it. George Clooney is admirably crinkly and Vera Farmiga is sexy and Anna Kendrick is several of my college roommates put together (or maybe several of my put-together college roommates).

Now, that that’s out of the way, there’s something else you should know. Jason Reitman is sad Judd Apatow. This is okay, Judd Apatow is also really talented, but the movies these two men are making are odd inverses of each other, and somebody should let them know.

First, to the delay the placement of spoilers: Juno is sad Knocked Up. In both cases, they’re movies about couples composed of a focused women (Jennifer Garner, Katherine Heigl) and a charming man-child (Jason Bateman, Seth Rogen) dealing with a baby. Yes, Jennifer Garner is focused on a getting a baby and initially Katherine Heigl is focused on her career but they’re both up-tight and down-to-business, while their partners wear ratty old t-shirts and either smoke or really wish they could smoke a serious joint while playing a guitar/video game. Knocked Up is an all-out comedy, so in the end the couple has the baby and stays together, growing to accept each other along with their unexpected blessing. In Juno, not so much. The man-child splits and stays split. The focused women’s lesson in acceptance comes to be about acceptance of single parenthood. Which is a sadder (and probably more statistically common) end to what happens when you add a baby to a profoundly mismatched couple. P.S. Just in case you’re wondering, Juno is not about Ellen Page or Michael Cera. I mean, they’re cute and all, but it’s really not. It’s about the grownups and the poster is a charming lie. I don’t know if screenwriter Diablo Cody knows it, but the heart-hitting punches come to the adults in the movie and the teenagers get away blessedly unscathed with their stripey stocks still up. Though, as she is a divorced person, I bet she does.

Now, to current releases. Up in the Air is sad 40 Year Old Virgin. “What?” you say. “But George Clooney is not a virgin! He is silvery and foxy and . . . and crinkly!” Indeed. But he is, in this movie, an emotional virgin. He’s a grown up who never grew up, traveling to avoid settling down, and surrounded by – you guessed it – competed, well-organized, slightly-dead-inside women. Again, paired up with an older, wiser women (Vera Farmiga instead of Apatow’s Catherine Keener), this half-man/half-boy gets a chance to truly grow up. Although because Jason Reitman makes the sad version, Clooney’s character (spoiler alert) doesn’t end up with the comedic happy ending given to Steve Carell, and the possibility remains that if one spends one’s putative adulthood racing around, one might, in fact, miss the chance to become a man.

Finally, just in case you are uninterested in either Jason Reitman or Judd Apatow, because, I don’t know, maybe you’re five years old, there is another version of this exact story in theaters now. It’s about a driven woman and her immature lover and it’s called The Princess and the Frog. Don’t worry, it works out for them okay.