"Funny People" Movie Review

by Christian Toto www.whatwouldtotowatch.com

Ater two hours and 20-odd minutes of Judd Apatow’s “Funny People” it’s hard not to ask, ” … and your point is?”

Apatow, the comic maestro behind “Knocked Up” and “The 40-Year-Old Virgin,” injects a deadly serious note into his third comedy.

Adam Sandler plays a famous movie star who beats back a potentially fatal disease and tries to win back the girl who got away.

But the character is a tough sell, a tag that equally applies to Apatow’s latest comedy.

“Funny People” stars Sandler as George Simmons, a stand-up comic turned blockbuster star who seems to have it all, except he’s dying. Not at the box office or with the ladies. He’s doing great with those. He’s diagnosed with a fatal blood disease leaving him speechless - for a moment.

But the show, and the laughs, must go on, so he hires an unknown comedy writer named Ira (Seth Rogen) to flesh out his act.

George is understandably distraught by his condition, but his biggest fear is that he’ll never reunite with his former flame (Leslie Mann).

“Funny People” feels like a self-loathing project, a commentary on how dead the comic soul tends to be in modern Hollywood. It’s the tale of a clown making money hand over fist on the outside but weeping on the inside, intensified by a robust performance by Sandler.

So why don’t we care about George’s life and death battle, let alone his fractured love life?

The meandering story doesn’t help. The film’s first half concentrates on the George/Ira dynamic, but the rest of the movie details George’s attempt to win back Mann’s character, a lovely woman who seems to ignore the fact that she has two little girls with her current husband (a whacked out Eric Bana).

Rogen, freed from his surly “Observe and Report” role and that of the stoner action hero, is immensely appealing here as the audience’s surrogate, a fly on the wall watching how a megastar like George lives.

The film packs plenty of gut-busting lines as well as comic cameos, including a revealing scene featuring Eminem as himself, and Apatow delivers a crush of great comic lines. Yet for every truth telling moment, like George describing why his generation of comics will always outperform the new cut-ups on the block, we get ham-fisted ones which telegraph the emotions we’re meant to feel.

Much of “Funny People” feels fresh and bold, and it never takes the maudlin turn you feel from the opening sequence. But Apatow’s latest ultimately can’t decide if it’s a warm and wise dramedy or a cynical look at the modern showbiz mindset.