This morning (well at noon, but that's morning to me) I went with my fellow blogger to check out Judd Apatow's latest offering Funny People. Two and a half grueling hours later all I got was a shitty bag of popcorn and a strong desire to get my $12.50 back. I'm just going to cut right to the chase here since two years of film studies taught me that I don't actually like writing about movies all that much and present my complains in convenient list form.
-Apatow seemed to have a knack for making movies that were full of hilarious comedy but still managed to have lots of heart. This one had neither.
Enough said.
-The stuff that's supposed to be funny isn't, and the parts that are supposed to be dramatic aren't compelling.
The laughs were few and far between, but there were plenty of moments where I felt like I was supposed to be laughing but I wasn't. I felt like all the stand up scenes were supposed to be funny, but I know that if I saw half that shit in a comedy club I wouldn't even crack a smile. The parts that were supposed to evoke some kind of emotional response were just stagnant as fuck. Not once did I ever really care about these characters and what they were going through. Sandler's character was such a jerk I almost just wanted him to hurry up and die. And I never wanted Seth Rogen to get the girl. That was just fucked up.
-It tries to be two things at once and doesn't do either of them particularly well.
Funny People is both a look at a group of guys trying to make it in the business, and a story about a guy dealing with his own mortality, unhappiness, while trying to win back the love of his life. The A story and the B story never really seemed to gel. Sometimes I felt like I was watching two completely different movies.
-People have occasionally complained that Apatow doesn't know how to write female characters. I'm starting to agree with this.
Seriously, what the fuck was with Leslie Mann's character? How did she not smack Sandler in the face when he didn't tell her immediately that he was getting better? How did she even temporarily think it would be a good idea to run back to him? And most importantly, why the fuck wasn't she funny? It just feels like such a huge fucking waste of talent.
-This movie had no business being two and a half fucking hours long.
If I'm going to sit my ass in a movie theatre chair for that long I better be getting some epic shit. I'm talking Lord of the Rings or fucking Titanic level epicness. I really don't understand how anyone sat in an editing room and decided that every single one of those scenes needed to stay in that movie. Especially all that shit of Adam Sandler's character's movies. One or two scenes of him waxing nostalgic, or a few posters in the background would have been fine. I did not need to see so much of the baby man or that merman fuckery. Especially when the merman did nothing but remind me of an actually funny movie you may have heard of called Zoolander.
I get that the title was trying to be ironic, I'm even a total sucker for movies that get slapped with the "dramedy" label, but this was just one big ol' bloated mess.
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