Crazy Amy

Schumer genuinely makes me laugh. I dig her show. But it turns out creating sustained, feature-length comedy is a different bag altogether.

I appreciate Schumer/Apatow's attempts at grounded, human comedy. This doesn't have to be as broad as say, "Spy", which was way more funny and, I think, thematically much smarter. But if you're going for grounded comedy then the characters have to be... well, interesting. And every single character in this is a one-dimensional shell. Each one has their role to play in the script and are nothing beyond that. The performances are strong, and the actors work hard to humanize their characters, but no person in this film is expansive or complex or terribly engaging or remotely unpredictable in any way. In fact, absolutely nothing is unpredictable in this film. So, for me, it comes off as not broad enough to be funny, and not genuine enough to be grounded.

Combine this overwhelming predictability, flat characterization and the sports-stunt casting with Apatow's habit for long running times, and an uninspired, robot-written third act, and you get a film that's more tedious than fun.

But Schumer herself is funny. And more than that, she's important. She's at her best when she's exploding the precious notion of female body imagery in joke after joke about bloody tampons and promiscuity. But the film lacks the courage of its star, which is a complicated criticism, since she actually wrote it.

There was the potential to make something outrageous and beautiful here. That potential was pretty much blown.

All the critics seem to be male, which I find interesting.

Here's a female point of view.

Maybe not all females have been in the protagonist's shoes, but it is very common for women to have problems with monogamy, just like men. Showing a woman who treats men the way most men treat women is not only realistic, but eye-opening. I think that's the problem most men have with the movie. No one wants to see the shoe on the other foot--it's uncomfortable, but guess what? It's reality.

I thought the movie was funny and touching. LeBron James is hilarious as himself.

For whoever says there is no real strong story-line? They obviously missed it. It's about maturing, about figuring out what a person's priorities are in life. It's about the realization that compensation isn't all it's cracked up to be.

There are some makers who although talented in a specific way, move into a space that simply shows their talent to be little. Alexander Payne for example could be making stylized comedies with no problem, but as soon as he moves into elegy and meaning, it all becomes a sophomoric play. We've known Malick in that field and Payne is like a film school grad next to him.

So it would seem Apatow has an effervescent personality, at least enough to want to move out from his comfort zone. He could be cranking penis joke comedies till the cows come home but wants to move into more somber reflection about the pains of life. He has tried this a few times by now.

Here he tries a few switches. A movie about the usual slob who never grew out of adolescence but she's a girl. Men are almost entirely immature or idiots, and for some reason I can't begin to fathom, half of them gay, that is except for the knight in white armor who patiently helps her grow out of herself. He puts them in that New York movie romance where a couple are on and off again and might even think he's turning Woody Allen upside down. Indicative; the familiar romantic scene on a bench looking over at Brooklyn Bridge ends with a blowjob.

None of it sticks after a point and it's off-putting to think he might be thinking of any of this as transgressive. So he has moved out from the familiar safety of what he can do well, into a space that shows him to have trivial insights and odd hangups, from primarily a comedy about life where laughter sanctifies reductions, to primarily a drama about life where muttering dialogue and stereotypes rattle in the nothingness of not having anything to impart. He moves, even if ever so slightly, into territory that Woody, Bergman, and Altman have occupied. But in this space he's shown to be a dunderhead.

This movie is like a lot of similar type of movies; meaning movies that aims to challenge preconceived notions of "what a lady should and should't be like". It quickly becomes banal, predictable and irritating. There's no depth of character here, because you sort of get the gist of the jokes before they're halfway delivered. Having said that; these kinds of movies can and have been saved by good performances. Unfortunately Amy Schumer doesn't deliver that. I don't know why scriptwriters and directors hit the same creative pitfalls every time a movie like this is to be made. We get it: here's an urban girl with a modern outlook on life who does what she wants, sleeps with whom she wants and doesn't apologize for it, etc etc.. good, but then what? A movie needs more than just a cliché of a character, predictable jokes and bad acting.

I really enjoy Amy's TV show and was expecting big things from this movie but ended up feeling I'd wasted my time watching it and it's off delivery leave a bad taste in the mouth. Was it that Amy just wasn't up to a feature length film or was it Judd Apatow's direction that made this not work. Where Amy's mischievous bad taste gender stereotype flipping gags work on her show, here they were missing the knowing nod. Amy fitted her self centered character's skin too well and at feature length you started to believe this was a real person and someone you wouldn't want to spend time with, even in a movie. Schummer was too ugly, and I don't mean that in a physical sense. Hader was good, as were most of the actors, apart from the product placement sports stars. It really started to drag in the last 3rd, possibly because it had nowhere to go, which is exactly where it ended up.