Word: apatow
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...Judd Apatow movie carried the perky title Funny People, but audiences quickly figured out it should really be called The Guy Who Thinks He's Gonna Die and Isn't Very Nice. Or Funny. It managed a decent $8.7 million on opening day, dropped 15% on Saturday, Aug. 1, and is expected to finish the weekend at $23.4 million. The good news for Apatow and his long-ago roomie Adam Sandler is that their film topped the weekend box office at domestic theaters. The bad news ... Where to begin? Funny People cadged the lowest take for any No. 1 film...
...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...
...Apatow has mixed humor and heart before, but never humor so raw or heart so bleeding. He sets up his audience to go for the gross, then tell them to feel deeply for the folks he's been making fun of. He wants it both ways, and gets neither. Many of his fans, without begrudging his stab at working outside his comfort zone, will beg him to please, please, go back and make Judd Apatow movies...