Funny People

Ira (Seth Rogen) is a struggling comic working at a sub shop. George (Adam Sandler) is a famous comedian and movie star who finds out that he's got a rare form of leukemia and won't live much longer, he's put on experimental medicine to try to combat the illness. This revelation rocks George's life. He's made tons of money and has plenty of people to suck up to him, but that just isn't enough. His world is falling down around him, all the mistakes he made have come back to haunt him. He tries to reconnect with the only girl he ever loved, Laura (Leslie Mann) and she doesn't want to talk to him until he tells her that he's sick. That plot line took up far too much of the movie.

George and Ira meet when George goes to one of the old comedy clubs he used to do stand up at and stands on stage without any material, talking about how he knows he's bombing when he can hear people in the audience cough. George ends up hiring Ira as his assistant and their odd friendship/work relationship begins. Ira has always been a big fan of George and is spellbound by the limos, private planes, and the women George has gotten so used to.

Their relationship is at sometimes interesting, I'm not sure where Judd Apatow (the director) meant to go with this picture, he seems to get a little bit of everything, not enough of the good and too much time spent on the bad. Ira likes one of his neighbors, Daisy "Aubrey Plaza" and that was a fun relationship that the movie really neglected. By the end, it felt very underdeveloped. Most of the dialog feels improvised and very clunky. Judd Apatow was trying to convey something here that he just couldn't in the end.

For what does work, this movie deserves a 6/10 rating. It's a dramedy, anyone looking for one or the other will likely be disappointed.

Complex, witty and sprawling Funny People is Apatow's most ambitious film but is derailed at the halfway mark by his primary vices; overindulgence and never-ending second acts. Sander shows sparks of his dramatic sensibilities but isn't quite given the space he needs to shine whilst Rogen's everyman charm gives us the emotional core as does their effortless chemistry. Only Love (TV show) is able to find the same combination of emotional core and legitimately funny moments as Funny People but the commercial failure of this movie is likely down to the marketing as people were expecting a laugh out loud late night movie and ultimately this is entirely unrepresentative. Shout outs go to entertaining cameos from RZA and Eminem.

It's not something new, that comedians (or clowns for that matter), have a sad lonely side to them. This is being explored to quite the big degree here. With an excellent cast. But all starts off with something I don't like at all: Prank calls. Never found them funny and only the calls where they try to sell something to you seem worse.

Having said that, this is only the beginning and is supposed to be a character beat. Now Sandler is playing a comedian, but he can draw from personal experiences. Others here play themselves (no pun intended). Overall this has an amazing cast. I watched the extended cut, which adds more minutes to an already long movie. But I didn't mind. It is predictable, but it is also fun. The drama works and it showcases that Sandler can do more than just being silly. I understand that it's still what most of his fans want to see him in - and not dramas like this. It's unfortunate

I watched this around the time it first became available to rent. It was very forgettable at the time. I watched it thinking it was going to be "funny." But 12 years later it's more relatable to me and understandable, so the humor stands out a lot more than I remember.

I really enjoyed the first half of Funny People. I don't think I've ever seen any other Adam Sandler flicks (I didn't want to), so I was happily surprised by the good mix of comedy and drama here.

As soon as Sandler's ex-girlfriend and her family enter the fray, though, the film comes to a screeching halt. And when we learn new facts about his disease, the film turns itself upside down and inside out trying to figure out what it wants to do with this information. No one knows how to react; not Sandler, not the girlfriend, and not her husband. Judd Apatow thinks they do, but it's so hard to follow the character's ideas and feelings here that the film becomes unreadable. Because we don't know where the characters are coming from, we don't know whether we're watching comedy or drama, so we don't know how to feel or react. The little girls, while enjoyable to watch, are cloying and don't advance the story. And when a lot of screen time is devoted to the people playing games and generally goofing around, you're no longer watching the characters--you're watching the actors simply having a good time, which further slows down and confuses the story.

Seth Rogen's character seems to know what's right, but his voice gets lost amid all the confusion until the end, when we get an all-too-convenient moral finish that doesn't address any of the important issues raised in the film.

I think this could have been a much better film with a lot of the meandering in the second half either tightened up or removed.