Judd Apatow is brilliant. As writer, director and-or producer,he has been responsible for almost a dozen of my favorite comedies in the last few years. Superbad, Knocked Up, 40 Year Old Virgin, Pineapple Express, Anchorman, Step Brothers, Talladega Nights, Forgetting Sarah Marshall, and for me personally, the greatest 18 hours of network TV ever made, Freaks And Geeks.
His third film as writer-director is Funny People. It may not be his peak creatively, but it is certainly his most ambitious. Adam Sandler plays a rich and famous comedy actor who is very lonely and depressed. He is diagnosed with terminal cancer and things don't look good. He meets and hires Seth Rogen, an aspiring standup, to write him jokes and eventually take on the role of personal assistant/best friend. Sandler then becomes miraculously cured and yet he still hates his life and those people in it.
The film is an acerbic look at the ugly truth about showbiz, standup comedy in particular. It shows that guys who make you laugh for a living are really unhappy with themselves and the world on the inside. It goes to some dark, uncomfortable places you don't see in comedy.
The second act is where this movie has taken some hard criticism and i can sort of understand it. It involves a subplot involving Sandler chasing after the woman who got away and is now married with children. The reason i say this is because it steers the film away from the raunchy humor for about an hour and delves into serious character development. It's well written and acted nicely, and i can handle it, but some people can't take two genres in one film.
This is the sort of storytelling that could find an audience thirty years ago when Hal Ashby made movies like Harold And Maude but nowadays, moviegoers don't want unpredictable twists and deep plot. They just want to laugh at anything that doesn't remind them of the real world, rather than stop and think how much they might relate to.
I really enjoyed the movie. I just have a small list of people i can recommend it to. Let's put it this way. If you REALLY got psyched about the Transformers sequel this year, don't go see Funny People. You will be forced to think about people and life and relationships and love and who needs to be bothered with that when you can just go deaf while watching stuff blow up around Shia LeBeouf for 150 minutes.
You know who you are.
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