Monday at the Movies - June 4, 2018

Welcome to another installment of “Monday at the Movies.” This week, more pudding than I was expecting.

Punch-Drunk Love (2002) – Voluntarily watching an Adam Sandler movie is quite low on my list of priorities, and yet Punch-Drunk Love is just a film that happens to have Adam Sandler in it. Guided by the masterful script and direction of Paul Thomas Anderson, a true Cinema King favorite ever since There Will Be Blood, Sandler proves himself quite competent when he puts forth the effort. Sandler stars as Barry Egan, a plunger salesman with seven sisters, an anxiety problem, and a temper to match; contemporaneous with meeting the besotted Lena Leonard (Emily Watson), Barry’s life falls headlong into a number of implausible schemes, ranging from identity theft to exchanging pudding cups for airline miles. It’s the sort of oddball plot that might fit in a Coen Brothers movie (think Burn After Reading), only Anderson is more deadly serious than I suspect the Coens would ever attempt, aided by a tense and clattering score from Jon Brion that seems to anticipate Anderson’s later work with Jonny Greenwood. That Anderson gets as good a performance from Sandler as he does a score from Brion is one of the film’s greatest pleasures, as Sandler funnels his nervous energy into a compelling character who bears none of the lame humor pervasive in the rest of his career. Among the surprises of the film, aside from the pudding, is a captivating appearance by the late, great Philip Seymour Hoffman as a shouty mattress salesman slash phone sex pimp; Hoffman is as commanding as he ever was, an apt reminder of his unsettled performance as Anderson’s eponymous Master. Punch-Drunk Love is a brisk forerunner of Anderson’s longer epics, but it displays his consistent manipulation of tension, even in the screwiest of circumstances.

That does it for this week’s edition of “Monday at the Movies.” We’ll see you next week!

Funny People (2009)

I'm off to a bad start. Out of three movies I've reviewed since my big return for another season of moviegoing, two of them have been complete duds. If it weren't for Robert Downey, Jr., I'd feel like a voice crying out in the wilderness.

But I'm not here to weep over my bad choices. I'm here to help you make good ones. I've sort of already played my hand here, but this weekend I had a chance to catch Funny People, Judd Apatow's latest. In short, despite being punctuated by some clever and classic Apatow moments, Funny People is anything but, overlong in some places and tragically predicatable in others, with a cast that could do - and has done - a heck of a lot better.

If you've seen the trailer for this, you've seen the whole movie and all its highlights. Adam Sandler plays dying comedian George Simmons, who hires newbie funny person Ira Wright (Seth Rogen) and gets a new lease on life when his disease goes into remission. With his second chance, George decides to pursue former flame Laura (an underused Leslie Mann), despite the fact that she's married to Aussie businessman Clark (Eric Bana). Hilarity, you'd expect, ensues.

Unfortunately, it doesn't. While the trailers - as well as the title and the track records of Apatow & Co. - suggest that the movie is a laugh riot, I didn't find my sides splitting. Instead, I found myself staring at the movie in disbelief - disbelief that I'd been so horribly duped, disbelief that the movie wasn't over yet (at two and a half hours, it's not for those with a short attention span), disbelief that so many funny people could be assembled in such a droll production. Perfect example - Aziz Ansari, who appears for a quick cameo role which consists primarily of him delivering his stand-up routine about how absurd Coldstone's size names are (particularly "Gotta Have It"). While Ansari is hilarious on his live album, in Funny People he's just not funny. I don't know why that is, but it's as though the movie is draining itself of humor in order to feed its own spiraling runtime.

I'm not quite sure what went wrong on the way to this movie. Maybe it's casting genuine funnyman Seth Rogen as the second banana to Adam Sandler, who for my money has never actually been funny (granted, I've never seen Happy Gilmore or Billy Madison, but I just can't believe the hype). Maybe it's the fact that Leslie Mann only gets one scene in which she's allowed to be funny; the rest of the time she spends playing a highly cliched "girl who got away but remains conflicted about it all." Maybe it's the fact that the movie could have been ninety minutes without sacrificing any of the story's heart; instead, the film is protracted and brutally long, especially in the decidedly not-funny first hour or so in which Adam Sandler is dying.

Part of the problem is that Funny People is two different movies: the life-and-death drama and the get-the-girl comedy. But where some films might be able to consolidate those two concepts into one distinct package, Funny People is fragmented almost precisely in half, and the fragmentation is so palpable that it's difficult to believe that the George Simmons playing CandyLand with the kids is the same George Simmons who was popping pills earlier and asking Ira to kill him. Nor is it easy to accept Laura's on-again-off-again flip-flop on her husband's philandering; one minute she's peeved that he's cheating, the next minute she doesn't even think about it, and the whole thing never really makes too much sense.

There are some lights in the film. Seth Rogen delivers a few of his trademark one-liner quips, often nonsensical and non sequitur, but it's an art he's mastered, and so bully for him that he can still throw a punch (metaphorically and, in the case of the film's climax, literally). Apatow's children Maude and Iris (last seen in Knocked Up) also appear, little bundles of spontaneous energy that light up whenever they're on screen. But the problem is that the film is so bloated that these shining moments seem like stars in the sky, exceptions to the rule. Sure, the many ways George and Ira lampoon a doctor's thick accent are hysterical, but they're buffered by twenty minutes on either end of just downright unfunny material.

At the core, the film's problem is false marketing. Perhaps, then, this review would have been better if the film had been entitled Marginally Funny People (in many less than funny situations). At least then I wouldn't feel cheated.
Funny People is rated "R for language and crude sexual humor throughout, and some sexuality." If you've seen one movie with any of the cast or crew involved, you know what's coming - F-bombs galore, sexual dialogue up the ying-yang, brief violence played for laughs, and a sex scene with fleeting nudity.

I Now Pronounce You Chuck & Larry (2007)

Dennis Dugan's 2007 so-called comedy I Now Pronounce You Chuck & Larry offended me on a lot of levels. No, the plotline of two heterosexual firemen (Adam Sandler as Chuck and Kevin James as Larry) who pretend to be homosexual to collect one's insurance benefits isn't at all offensive. It's a lot of other factors that troubled me to the core.

Take first the fact that, as comedies go, this one isn't terribly funny. If we're being honest with each other, I did laugh at a lot of points in the film. Yet these were quick laughs, brief "Ha!" moments interspersed between scenes that are terribly unfunny. Not because they're offensive or crude, just because there simply isn't a joke in sight. Or if those pass for jokes, I missed a memo somewhere.

Also patently offensive: Adam Sandler. Kevin James is great here (and in the sitcom that made him a star, The King of Queens), but it's unfortunate that he's not the lead in a movie that could have been saved by giving him a larger role - and replacing Sandler, who continually seems bored. Sandler seldom makes eye contact with his costars, leading me to believe that he's either practicing some new tick of method acting, or he's reading cue cards because he's not interested enough in his part.

That might be the fault of Jessica Biel, who's supposed to be playing the sexy lawyer defending Chuck and Larry, with whom of course Chuck falls in love. Did I miss a meeting somewhere? Are we giving Miss Biel acting roles because she has some talent? Because she has some endearing physical characteristics? Because to be honest, I don't see her possessing either. Forgive me for needing more in a movie than She-Hulk in wet lingerie (a scene that I'm convinced was used as a trick to get straight men into the theaters without feeling "gay").

Also forgive me for being patently offended by Rob Schneider's uncredited role as the wedding chapel owner who weds Chuck and Larry. Did I mention he's supposed to be Asian? Uck. Steve Martin's Frenchman in The Pink Panther was funnier than Schneider tries to be, which is admittedly not saying much. I'm not sure which is more offensive - that Schneider tries to revive the antique tradition of "yellowface" (a term originally used to disparage the Charlie Chan film series), or that he tries to be funny. He fails miserably on both counts.

The final offense this film commits is wasting perfectly good actors in this muck of a mess. I've already shed a tear for the misuse (I should probably say underuse, since he makes the best of his part) of Kevin James, but note Steve Buscemi who has a sum total of three scenes - an insult to a talent of his caliber. Dan Aykroyd... well, maybe not a talent, but he's reduced to giving the preachy "message" of the film in an eye-rolling climax. And Ving Rhames - oh, poor Ving Rhames. The man tries his best to redeem his largely inconsequential role as a closeted homosexual fellow fireman. Rhames is over-the-top, but I feel sorry that the man who embodied Marsellus Wallace (please, no jokes about Zed here) is stuck in movies nowhere near as funny as it could have been.

Oh, and I almost forgot. It's not even original. It's remarkably similar to a 2004 Australian film, Strange Bedfellows (similar to the point that the first film's makers are in legal combat with the second's). The original might be funnier, but after this one, I'm not exactly inclined to find out.