Funny People

One of the major rules people should have learned about movies is this: No matter how specific the title is, it may not be what you thought it was going in.

Judd Apatow had two previous titles, both being specific in title, with "The 40 Year Old Virgin" and "Knocked Up". So when you see a movie with a title like "Funny People", you will probably expect a very funny movie; This wouldn't be necessarily incorrect, but misleading: There are funny people in this movie, it is just not a movie that is truly as funny as the title would lead you to believe.

Adam Sandler as George is surely the highlight of this movie, We think we will see Adam playing a serious role, and for the most part, he does. His character, dying from a rare blood disease, is brought up almost immediately, so the movie moves right away.

George decides to go back to the stage after making a handful of truly bad movies (An obvious look back at Adam's acting career) and bombs on stage, but Ira, played by Seth Rogen in a different kind of role, gets some big laughs. George hires Ira to help him write jokes, and a different kind of friendship, but a friendship nonetheless, develops.

George soon gets into touch with an old girlfriend, played by Leslie Mann, Director Apatow's Wife, and the two begin to realize how much they have both changed. She has a husband (Eric Bana, in a truly funny role) and two kids (Iris and Maude, Mann and Apatow's real life children), while George lives a life less fulfilling.

The movie takes a real backseat to conventional rules of movies; There is maybe, at a maximum, of two real clichés in this movie, one mentioned in this review already, and the other for good measure.

The movie feels a little long winded, running at nearly 2 and half hours, and the characters are sad, but interesting. Seeing Adam playing a shadow of himself is certainly a depressing site, and Rogen doing all he can for the man that he admires, since he was a kid, no less, is even better, proving that Rogen isn't a one trick pony, hopefully making this a bit more noticeable for his performance in The Green Hornet next year.

The movie also has some great performances from Jason Schwartzman as an actor starring in a horrible television sitcom and Jonah Hill as a competing comedy performer.

But there has to be a reason why this movie is ranked so low, and it could almost be said of the running time, but its coming right back to my first paragraph about ironic titles in movies. I suspected a laugh riot, and got mere chuckles. The stand up is hard to enjoy, being very oriented in genitalia humor and sex jokes doesn't make it really funny, just repetitive.

And I will be honest: I didn't pay attention to the title business and felt rather disappointed. This is a movie not sitting at the dinner table with all the Apatow produced movies of the last three or four years; like George, he's sitting at his own table, not quite like everyone else.

Perhaps now that I've seen the movie for what it truly is, a drama with some funny parts in it, I can now go back and see if maybe I can look at it any differently.

Here is an Apatow film different from anything he's directed, written or produced lately, and deserves to be seen at least once, and while people will see this and perhaps, not laugh as hard, here is hoping Apatow doesn't lose face and give up on this kind of writing. Apatow can make characters more like real people, and he needs to consider maybe doing a drama a little more than once or twice, now that he has done it. If he doesn't, he might end up like most writer-directors, who just get tired after awhile, instead of trying out different genres of film, regardless of what his "Fans" might say anyway.

7 out of 10.

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

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.

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.

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.