Funny People

Sometimes at work, I have to wait for things to execute. This is when I get things like this done.

So anyways, the latest Judd Apatow film came out a while back and after a couple weekends, I was finally able to go see it. The reviews of the film were fairly mixed, especially in comparison to Knocked Up and The 40-Year Old Virgin. Peer reviews, mostly from Facebook status updates, were brutally negative. I think the major problem with the film, at least in the context of people who aren't critics, was that it was terribly misrepresented in advertising and I was only aware of the overall mood of the film by reading through the lines...this isn't a comedy, it's really more of a drama, involving people who are funny. Apatow's previous two films were comedies in the sense that the plots were extreme to comical effect, here - the plot isn't funny at all, it just happens to revolve around comedians. Let me next say that I liked this film, I liked it a lot. I say that now because most of the following is going to come off pretty negative. The film was good, I thought, despite of itself. I think most of the people who hated it probably went in with a perception of what an Apatow movie is, and didn't get it, others likely saw the film's flaws as a greater problem then myself.

I listened to an interview with Apatow shortly before the film's release and he kind of explained how the storyline came to be, how he originally wrote a movie about a dying comedian, then another romantic-comedy sort of thing involving an ex, and then a buddy film about comedians...but none of the stories really panned out, and eventually he kind of combined them into a single film. As anyone may be able to gather from that explanation, none of the stories really pan out and they don't exactly flow together well. There are three very clear acts in the story, but they seem almost irrelevant to each other. The film isn't sure who it's about - Rogen or Sandler - and it suffers from this lack of focus, like many of my posts. It's kind of a hard movie to wrap an opinion around because, while it was an enjoyable movie going experience, it didn't come right out and make that clear. You had to try to enjoy it, which is never a good thing in terms of any form of entertainment.

What did you think about it?