Word: apatow
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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That heart comes bursting out of Funny People, Apatow's intermittently engaging, 2 hr. 26 min. essay in schizo-cinemaphrenia. A transparent attempt to make a grown-up film, it's got two worldviews - one comically misanthropic, the other sloppily sentimental - that have little in common with each other. It's as if, halfway through, you went out for popcorn and mistakenly returned to an auditorium showing a different picture. And that second movie ends immolating itself. (Joel Stein on Judd Apatow: Judd, Seriously...
...Apatow casts his long-ago roommate Adam Sandler as George Simmons, a star of movie comedies who has been diagnosed with a terminal disease, and who hires Ira Wright (Seth Rogen), a struggling young comedian, as his assistant. In what he presumes to be his last days, George realizes he's essentially friendless and loveless, and tries to rekindle the old affair with Laura (Leslie Mann), then a young actress, now a wife and mother...
...surface, Funny People is about stand-up comedians who have a love-hate obsession with their penises. In the movie's many stand-up routines, Apatow surely breaks the feature-film record for dick jokes, including one told by Andy Dick. It ought to be called Funny Penises. Yet Apatow is much less interested in showing sex than in having people talk about it. George has plenty of one-night stands, but mainly as an exercise of his star power. For all the girls he takes home and beds, he's essentially alone - the proverbial celebrity who finds it lonely...
...said that inside every comedian is the urge to play Hamlet. (Hey, Mel Gibson did it.) Well, inside Judd Apatow, he wishes, is a secret Jim Brooks. James L. Brooks is the sitcom titan (Mary Tyler Moore, Taxi, The Simpsons) who forged an Oscar-winning film career as the writer-director of comedy-dramas about attractive neurotics. The needy souls from Terms of Endearment, Broadcast News, I'll Do Anything and As Good As It Gets were all variously self-aware and self-absorbed, and they struck viewers not as comic constructs but as real, flawed people...
...heavy dollop of sentiment that will baffle both Apatow's fan base and those who watched the first half of the movie. Isn't this picture about whether George and Ira will become friends? Isn't there a guy-comedy rule that there's no crying in bromances? And isn't Cats the most derided popular musical in Broadway history? You may recall that, on David Letterman's first CBS show in his new Broadway theater, Paul Newman stood up in the audience and shouted, "Where the hell are the singing cats?" Well, here is a singing...