Word: judd
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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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...
...most audiences, Apatow's 2-hr. 24-min. attempt to encase a James L. Brooks-style comedy-drama in an overflowing condom of penis jokes didn't work. Instead of a Terms of Endearment, it's more like Brooks' last flop movie. Yep, Spanglish. (See TIME's video "Should Judd Apatow Be on TIME's Cover...
...including Ira (whom Rogen invests with a cuddly-toy irresistibility). "You're not my friend," he tells Ira. "You work for me." George wants a last chance at human connection, in the person of Laura. And that's where Funny People spins off the rails. (See TIME's photos: "Judd Apatow's War on Jay Leno...
...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...
...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...