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...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...
Brooks is the secret touchstone of Funny People; indeed, its two-part structure is Terms of Endearment in reverse, with the deadly disease coming before the lovey stuff. (Sandler even did a Jim Brooks film; unfortunately, it was that rare Brooks misfire, Spanglish.) And where Brooks' stories are usually about the fine line of ethics in human relationships - does a newsman fake a tear in an interview? Does a production assistant lie about her boyfriend to her producer? - this one is about whether a man who says he needs love really deserves it. And (POSSIBLE SPOILER ALERT) the big ethical...
...movement, but it has no more validity. Don't fall for a fad; stick with a quality monster, which has a rich history in literature and cinema, and which keeps producing attractive variations. I speak of the vampire, as exemplified by Park Chan-wook's terrific new South Korean film, Thirst. (See TIME's Video: 10 Questions For Stephenie Meyer...
...just the woman for this virgin vampire. In one long scene of sexual tension, she kisses Hyun and nearly seduces him; in another, he acknowledges both her attractiveness and his rapacious new nature and they consummate their relationship, one whose carnal excess will define the rest of the film. Their love is both sacred and insane: sacra-mental. And the movie goes mad with them. This is a mad love story that gets down to the essentials: ecstasy, pain and all the bodily fluids, especially blood. It's liberating to see a film that melds with the obsessions...