*** Official "FUNNY PEOPLE" Review Thread (1 Viewer)

[mattCR]

Sometimes a movie hits a formula and tries to work with it. "Funny People" sets up it's concept in the first few minutes, revolving around the ailment of one of the main characters, and how he reacts to it.

The film is another of the bro-mance type comedy that Judd Apatow is famous for. And, as a bro-mance comedy, it has some great moments. There are generally some good laughs.
But what has come to strike me about Apatow films is that the female characters are often woefully underused, despite the fact that those characters may end up being the force behind some of the best moments in the film. Funny People really suffers in the mid-section, as Rogen's wannabe love romance never clicks simply because we don't have any time to get a read on her.. who she is, or why he even has any fascination with her at all. She might as well be a cardboard stand in, because it just never happens to tell us anything about why she matters to anything.

This isn't a downbeat review of the film though. When the laughs happen, they are generally pretty funny. There are two sequences that I was surprised at how funny I thought they were.
But the film creaks under it's own weight in scenes like the exit from the ex-'s house, as an overlong discussion with her spouse led to a child's outburst that was telegraphed minutes beforehand and hung in the air with what should have been tension but ended up being just a long painful wait for the expected.

"Funny People" is a good, not great, effort. It has too many flaws to be in the same league as the far superior "Knocked Up" or "Forty Year Old Virgin" and doesn't have nearly the laughs of either of those films.
For all of that, it's redeeming moments are still enough that I would recommend it.. though maybe a bit lukewarm. If you see it in a theater, you won't feel robbed. If the first time you see it is on DVD/BD, it would probably be a better experience.

:star: :star: :star: / :star: :star: :star: :star: :star:

 

[TravisR]

I thought Funny People was one of the best movies I've seen this year. It's legitimately sweet, sad, funny and filthy and it's no easy task to juggle those things at the same time. I think people only looking for the huge laughs and crazier moments that were in The 40 Year Old Virgin and Knocked Up may be dissapointed but this was exactly the movie that I hoped it would be.

It's been said in a bunch of interviews already but this is a dirty version of a James L. Brooks movie and that's alright by me.

 

[Patrick Sun]

The riskiness in being a film about comedians and funny people in general is that you had better bring the humor, lots of it, but you also need to unearth some humanity at the heart of the humor. The film's setup starts with a successful comedic film star, George Simmons (Adam Sandler), finding out he's got a disease that threatens to shorten his life considerably, goes back to doing stand-up comedy just to break up the darkness of his predicament, and he somewhat befriends Ira (Seth Rogen), who works at a deli shop and does free stand-up comedy, trying to get that big break. George hires Ira to write jokes for him. This unlikely friendship provides the framework and bromance angle for the film as George tries to keep his condition underwraps, while making use of his time, with Ira's help. George sees things through a veil of regret and reaches out to his old girlfriend Laura (Leslie Mann), who got married, bore 2 daughters, and they re-connect, and George sees what he missed out on by taking the easy road of stardom and celebrity bachelorhood. It's the last act that just feels clunky and uninvolving for me.

Clocking in at almost 145 minutes, it's a long film for a "comedy" or even a "dramedy". The last third of the film sags quite a bit, I think another 10-15 minutes could have been excised, and trimmed some fat that stalls the film's momentum as it reaches its conclusion. Adam Sandler does some decent acting in the first half of the film, but the film just sort of gets away from him in the second half. Seth Rogen's Ira should have been written a little funnier, but he gets in his share of laughs and quiet comedic bits. The rest of the ensemble is fine (Jason Schwartzman, Jonah Hill, Eric Bana, Aziz Ansari, Aubrey Plaza), but their subplots didn't really add much to the film, except to sprinkle in some comedy scenes to buoy the film's running time.

This film was a little more cinema-like than I was expecting with a Judd Apatow production. Starting with Janusz Kaminski as the DP, the look of the film simply looked less like a sitcom filmed on video (or a conventional 3-camera TV shoot), and more like an honest-to-goodness film. So that was appreciated, even though it does introduce some film grain, and lens flares at times, but overall, more effective in setting the tone.

I give it 2.75 stars, or a grade of B-.

 

[Robert Crawford]

This thread is now the Official Review Thread for "Funny People". Please post all HTF member reviews in this thread.

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Crawdaddy

 

Bromance involving a wicked old jaded comedy actor (Adam Sandler) and the wide-eyed ingenue he hires to be his assistant while he deals with his illness by ignoring it and getting back into stand-up comedy.

Its true that Funny People is a mature work from Judd Apatow, but I consider Knocked Up and 40 Year Old Virgin about the two maturest movies in the genre ever made. You might argue that's because its a genre about boys refusing to grow up, talking about their genitals and refusing to settle down. Judd has always been prepared to take those kinds of guys and basically force them to grow up or settle down, which is the riskiest thing you can do in that genre.

Funny People is less of a high-concept film than his two previous efforts, particularly as the plot wends its way following the characters and their relationships. One of its central themes is a very interesting one about what's its like to be a comedian and have to deal with the more serious aspects of life, like the news that you have a life-threatening illness, most obviously. If his previous films seemed often bloated, despite their strong focus, Funny People suffers badly in its final hour. Unfortunately for Funny People, there seem to be many hours to choose from in Funny People. For all its two hours and twenty-odd minutes, Funny People seems far far longer. It could have benefited from picking one thing to wrap up by the 90 minute mark; Funny People seems intent on wrapping everything up, and using many words to do it, instead of ever using a single image, which is what separates films from plays. This is down to the way Judd works; his scenes are often pieced together from riffs and variations the actors have done on his material during filming; which is why his actors, who are usually comedians themselves, always use words to resolve things. This problem could have been solved by excising entire improvised scenes and replacing them with single images, to save us all going through unnecessary arguments, where characters often talk about their themes and feelings, which if Judd had written it, would be bad writing. To put it simply, Judd's movies tend to lack what Hemingway described as the iceberg principle: what you see is only the top of the iceberg; it hints at the rest of the story underneath. This principle is obviously more suited to dramas than comedies, where the most important thing is humour, so things necessarily are a bit more explicit than in dramas.

Being a fan of Judd's work in general, you grow to accept his faults, but the strengths of Funny People make it a real shame that it lost its focus so badly in the final hour. It contains Seth Rogen's most charming performance to date, and Adam Sandler creates Judd's most fascinating characters to date. Its filthiness lacks the variety of previous efforts, mainly being repetitions of the word "cock." Unfortunately there are only so many times this word can be used in a movie before it begins to sound like a fetish. Yes, its that bad.

Here be spoilers, as I need to discuss the offending portion of the movie. Sandler's character is a really bad guy. He presents as a villain in the opening. By 90 minutes we nearly forgive him how he treats people and grow to not mind living with him; but then Judd felt it necessary to give his wife, actress Leslie Mann, and their two children, all of who featured memorably in Knocked Up as Paul Rudd's family, along with Australian actor Eric Bana, a sizeable chunk of screen time. Sadly all these characters are completely unnecessary and they dissolve what once was an interesting situation into the oldest of Hollywood cliches, a love triangle. The problem was it was enough work to get us to like Adam Sandler's character, and get him to start being nice to Seth Rogen's character, that we were satisfied when that occured, at 90 minutes. It simply wasn't necessary to do all that French farce business surrounding Eric Bana being Leslie Mann's new man and them sneaking behind his back, all the while the only interesting storyline (Seth Rogen) sits on the couch minding the kids.

So, a movie with great promise that severely broke its promise through poor discipline and an inability to draft its material and cut its fat to create a far better-tasting meal.