Funny, Funny People

"I don't wanna hang around in someone elses scene
Fashionable people doing questionable things"
-Fashionable People, Joel Plaskett


Okay let me preface this, I know I was suppose to review the Zune and Windows 7 from a gamers point-of-view on Friday but my roommate came by and we hung out Friday and Saturday and James posted on Sunday and well, Sunday I saw Funny People and I needed to talk about it somewhere and my friends do not like this kind movie.

Sunday I buckled down and walked to the mall and headed to the Galaxy Cinema in Waterloo and saw the newest Judd Apatow, distributed by Universal Pictures, running length: 2 hours and 26 minutes, Staring Adam Sandler, Seth Rogen, and a multitude of other Apatow comedians, as well as internet sensation, Bo Burnham.

Lets give a little information on what this is about, I imagine there will be spoilers. A comedian George Simmons (Played by Sandler), has had a career (not unlike the career Sandler himself has had) with lots of low-brow crazy situtation movies that had mass succsess and made him famous(not unlike Sandler), but now he finds out he is dying of cancer (unlike Sandler, I assume). This prompts Simmons to relive his days of standup and he goes to a very dark place in his act. Meanwhile, struggling comedian Ira Wright (Seth Rogen) has to follow this and just heckles him during his own set, which strangely promnts Simmons to hire him as his assitant/writer. Through watching him get sicker and eventually better we discover that he has no-one to talk to about this, just Ira, which leds Simmons to try to make it back together with his ex-fiancée, who is the only women that he ever loved, but he cheated on her twelve years earlier. This nearly distroys her marriage with Clarke who is played by Eric Bana, but it gets salvaged. This is Bana's second of 3 movie rolls of the summer and the other one will be out on the 14th which is The Time Travlers Wife, which was a great book, you should read it. Hopefully the movie will live up to expectations, but movies rarely do so we will just have to take it sitting down, so to speak.

Let me speak to the people who only like Adam Sandler type comedies. First this is not like them, you will probaly hate it. Second, this is NOT a comedy, its a drama about a man who is a jerk (jerk is way too light of a term) who needs to connect with someone but does not really have the means to do so in a meaningful way. At one point, his only friend (who is someone he hired) tries to do the right thing but it happens to be against Simmons' goals and pretty much gets told off and pushed back to the distance that he normally keeps people at. The only comedic elements in this film come from the fact that all the main characters are in fact, Comedians. There is alot of penis jokes in this movie, it's like each actor put their personality and comedy sets into each character, this movie could have actually happend if Adam Sandler was a jerk, not married and was dying. I personally loved the film, everything was really great. In my opinion it's the second best Apatow film after Forgetting Sarah Marshal, and the best Sandler film, its dirty, but real, smart but low-brow, funny yet sad, and if I was Sandler I would end my carrer on this. That's pretty much everything to say about the movie, its not like any of the movies any of the main people in it have done and it's great if you were not the biggest fans of either of their earlier works.