Funny People (2009)

Ira (Seth Rogen) is a struggling comic working at a sub shop. George (Adam Sandler) is a famous comedian and movie star who finds out that he's got a rare form of leukemia and won't live much longer, he's put on experimental medicine to try to combat the illness. This revelation rocks George's life. He's made tons of money and has plenty of people to suck up to him, but that just isn't enough. His world is falling down around him, all the mistakes he made have come back to haunt him. He tries to reconnect with the only girl he ever loved, Laura (Leslie Mann) and she doesn't want to talk to him until he tells her that he's sick. That plot line took up far too much of the movie.

George and Ira meet when George goes to one of the old comedy clubs he used to do stand up at and stands on stage without any material, talking about how he knows he's bombing when he can hear people in the audience cough. George ends up hiring Ira as his assistant and their odd friendship/work relationship begins. Ira has always been a big fan of George and is spellbound by the limos, private planes, and the women George has gotten so used to.

Their relationship is at sometimes interesting, I'm not sure where Judd Apatow (the director) meant to go with this picture, he seems to get a little bit of everything, not enough of the good and too much time spent on the bad. Ira likes one of his neighbors, Daisy "Aubrey Plaza" and that was a fun relationship that the movie really neglected. By the end, it felt very underdeveloped. Most of the dialog feels improvised and very clunky. Judd Apatow was trying to convey something here that he just couldn't in the end.

For what does work, this movie deserves a 6/10 rating. It's a dramedy, anyone looking for one or the other will likely be disappointed.

Fmovies: One of the major rules people should have learned about movies is this: No matter how specific the title is, it may not be what you thought it was going in.

Judd Apatow had two previous titles, both being specific in title, with "The 40 Year Old Virgin" and "Knocked Up". So when you see a movie with a title like "Funny People", you will probably expect a very funny movie; This wouldn't be necessarily incorrect, but misleading: There are funny people in this movie, it is just not a movie that is truly as funny as the title would lead you to believe.

Adam Sandler as George is surely the highlight of this movie, We think we will see Adam playing a serious role, and for the most part, he does. His character, dying from a rare blood disease, is brought up almost immediately, so the movie moves right away.

George decides to go back to the stage after making a handful of truly bad movies (An obvious look back at Adam's acting career) and bombs on stage, but Ira, played by Seth Rogen in a different kind of role, gets some big laughs. George hires Ira to help him write jokes, and a different kind of friendship, but a friendship nonetheless, develops.

George soon gets into touch with an old girlfriend, played by Leslie Mann, Director Apatow's Wife, and the two begin to realize how much they have both changed. She has a husband (Eric Bana, in a truly funny role) and two kids (Iris and Maude, Mann and Apatow's real life children), while George lives a life less fulfilling.

The movie takes a real backseat to conventional rules of movies; There is maybe, at a maximum, of two real clichés in this movie, one mentioned in this review already, and the other for good measure.

The movie feels a little long winded, running at nearly 2 and half hours, and the characters are sad, but interesting. Seeing Adam playing a shadow of himself is certainly a depressing site, and Rogen doing all he can for the man that he admires, since he was a kid, no less, is even better, proving that Rogen isn't a one trick pony, hopefully making this a bit more noticeable for his performance in The Green Hornet next year.

The movie also has some great performances from Jason Schwartzman as an actor starring in a horrible television sitcom and Jonah Hill as a competing comedy performer.

But there has to be a reason why this movie is ranked so low, and it could almost be said of the running time, but its coming right back to my first paragraph about ironic titles in movies. I suspected a laugh riot, and got mere chuckles. The stand up is hard to enjoy, being very oriented in genitalia humor and sex jokes doesn't make it really funny, just repetitive.

And I will be honest: I didn't pay attention to the title business and felt rather disappointed. This is a movie not sitting at the dinner table with all the Apatow produced movies of the last three or four years; like George, he's sitting at his own table, not quite like everyone else.

Perhaps now that I've seen the movie for what it truly is, a drama with some funny parts in it, I can now go back and see if maybe I can look at it any differently.

Here is an Apatow film different from anything he's directed, written or produced lately, and deserves to be seen at least once, and while people will see this and perhaps, not laugh as hard, here is hoping Apatow doesn't lose face and give up on this kind of writing. Apatow can make characters more like real people, a

I'll start by saying that I am a Judd Apatow fan. I've loved most of his movies, including the two previous movies he's directed, The 40-Year-Old Virgin and Knocked Up. I've seen each many times, and they are two of my favorite comedies.

This, however, didn't prepare me for his newest, Funny People. Apatow has become well known for his sweet, adult comedies, but this movie is very different from his others. I would almost call it a "funny drama." This has it's pros and cons. I don't think I laughed out loud as much as in either of the other two films, but what I got in return, is an actual good movie, that's actually ABOUT something.

I liked Adam Sandler before I knew what a good movie was, as I grew up watching his lighter movies, like Waterboy, Happy Gilmore, etc. I've seen him so much that he ceased becoming an actor to me and actually reached a point of self-parody. His role as comedian George Simmons is perfect for him, because he's basically playing himself, to a point. He gives the performance of his life, even better than Punch-Drunk- Love. His portrayal is cold and confused, angry and hurt. It's what a comedian might truly be like when he's not on stage. He plays it perfectly, providing a likable character while at the same time showing us there might not be so much to like. He's the best part of this movie, and that's saying something

The supporting cast is great, as usual. Seth Rogan actually plays a different character than his other movies as Ira, who acts as a great foil to George Simmons. Jason Schwartzman and Jonah Hill provide some great comedic backup, including their hilarious fictional sitcom "Yo, Teach". In fact, a lot of the laugh out loud comedy from the film stems from the many supporting performances and cameos (My favorites being Marshall Mathers and James Taylor). Eric Bana is very funny, and Leslie Mann gives an impressive performance as well.

Funny People's only real problem is it's ambition, and that's definitely the best problem to have. It's nearly two and a half hours, and while I didn't have a problem with the length, it obviously had to end when it did, as there aren't many people who would want to sit through a three hour comedy. I wish it could have ran even longer, as some subplots weren't fleshed out nearly enough. I really liked the romance between Ira and Daisy (Played by Aubrey Plaza, who is sweet and funny in every scene she's in), but it was rushed, and in the end cut short, which is a shame, because it's one of the best parts of the movie.

Above all, this is a real movie. It's success doesn't just depend on the amount of laughs it receives. Thanks to Sandler and a thought provoking story, this is more than just another raunchy-sweet comedy. The movie will definitely divide people more than the others, and I'm not sure it will find as big of an audience. Judd Apatow has improved tremendously with each movie he's directed, and, despite his detractors, he's going to be the king of the comedy movie for a long, long time.

Funny People fmovies. I really enjoyed the first half of Funny People. I don't think I've ever seen any other Adam Sandler flicks (I didn't want to), so I was happily surprised by the good mix of comedy and drama here.

As soon as Sandler's ex-girlfriend and her family enter the fray, though, the film comes to a screeching halt. And when we learn new facts about his disease, the film turns itself upside down and inside out trying to figure out what it wants to do with this information. No one knows how to react; not Sandler, not the girlfriend, and not her husband. Judd Apatow thinks they do, but it's so hard to follow the character's ideas and feelings here that the film becomes unreadable. Because we don't know where the characters are coming from, we don't know whether we're watching comedy or drama, so we don't know how to feel or react. The little girls, while enjoyable to watch, are cloying and don't advance the story. And when a lot of screen time is devoted to the people playing games and generally goofing around, you're no longer watching the characters--you're watching the actors simply having a good time, which further slows down and confuses the story.

Seth Rogen's character seems to know what's right, but his voice gets lost amid all the confusion until the end, when we get an all-too-convenient moral finish that doesn't address any of the important issues raised in the film.

I think this could have been a much better film with a lot of the meandering in the second half either tightened up or removed.

I need to get my biggest criticism for "Funny People" out of the way here at the beginning: it is not the movie the marketing campaign would lead you to believe it is. While it is true of the ads that this film is more than just a comedy and that it contains some heavy themes involving a near-death experience, it would be more accurately described as a dark drama punctuated by some very funny lines. But I suppose that doesn't get people in to see the movie.

After all, the film stars Adam Sandler and Seth Rogen (who have wonderful rapport), among many other, uh, funny people, and is written and directed by Judd Apatow, the director of "The 40-Year-Old Virgin" and "Knocked Up." Of course the trailers have been playing up this angle but, as my wife commented, that's like marketing "Schindler's List" as "From the director of 'E.T.' and 'Jaws'." It doesn't tell you much about the movie you are about to see.

This beef aside, what you will see is a very mature drama (yes, I said mature despite the rampant penis jokes) reminiscent of the best work of Hal Ashby and Cameron Crowe. Sandler proves once again that he is a fine actor, and his performance as successful movie star/comedian George Simmons is tonally similar to his fantastic work in "Punch-Drunk Love" and "Reign Over Me." A very isolated man made rich by a number of films that look like rejected Wayans Brothers ideas, George lives in a castle of a house, complete with an indoor and an outdoor pool. His only obvious human contact consists of photo ops with his fans, and the servants at home that he keeps at arm's length. Early on he is diagnosed with a rare blood disorder for which no clear treatment exists. Death on his doorstep, he begins to examine his life. He hates himself, but that he let so many important relationships go to waste is something he hates even more. It's time for a change.

Enter Ira Wright (played tenderly by a slimmed-down Rogen), a struggling stand-up who works at a deli counter and lives on a pull-out couch and in the shadow of his successful roommates, comic Leo (Jonah Hill) and sitcom star Mark (Jason Schwartzman, who also co- wrote the simple acoustic score with Michael Andrews). Ira and George cross paths at a comedy club where George performs a self-loathing monologue that generates almost no laughs. Ira follows his act, trashing George's apparent depression. In spite of this, George hires Ira to be his right hand man, as a joke writer when he decides to return to stand-up, and as a general errand boy. The dynamic of this new relationship is unclear to Ira, but it seems like a foot in the door—and it sure beats serving macaroni salad to soccer moms.

What follows is a long road to recovery, physically and emotionally. I say long, because the movie runs almost 2 ½ hours—a daunting running time for a comedy or a drama. Anyone who has enjoyed Apatow's work as a director knows that his films have become incrementally longer. At times, I wished he would take the advice from the character Alan Tudyk played in "Knocked Up," as Katherine Heigl's boss who instructs her to not necessarily lose weight, but to "make everything tighter." I wouldn't know what to tighten exactly, because there are many excellent scenes. No matter. I would rather sit through 2 ½ hours of this than the same length of loud, racist pummeling robots. I hope there are other moviegoers out there that share my sen