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.

Pineapple Express (2008)

These are the cats that brought you Superbad, the poster declares, and, with much of the same cast and exactly the same sense of humor, it's not hard to believe. It's also not hard to have a great time with a movie that couldn't take itself less seriously.

I'm an unabashed fan of these Judd Apatow "Frat Pack" comedies (You Don't Mess with the Zohan aside, which I couldn't even finish), but something about the premise brought a skeptical Cinema King to the sofa for the DVD run of this one. Seth Rogen plays Dale Denton, a stoner who witnesses a murder and runs to his dealer, played in top form by James Franco, to hide out. The pair end up fleeing into the woods to avoid Ted Jones (Gary Cole, the father of film's Brady Bunch and Ricky Bobby) and his feuding henchmen (Kevin Corrigan [Cousin Sean from The Departed] and Craig Robinson [Darrell from The Office]). Meanwhile, Dale tries to save his relationship with his high school girlfriend (literally, she's 18), played by Amber Heard, though this subplot fades in and out with only a hilarious appearance by Ed Begley, Jr., as Heard's father, to redeem it.

This is another in a famously uncomplicated line of comedies from Apatow & Co., but it's one of the funniest - perhaps even more so than Superbad, which I loved. Pineapple Express takes everything I loved about Superbad - silly characters, rapid-fire dialogue, and a race to... somewhere (Franco says something along the lines of the splendid line, "I wish we could run away to... nowhere.") - and adds things Superbad didn't have, like the inimtable rising star Danny McBride and plenty of gunfights & explosions. If there's one thing I can never have too much of, it's explosions.

I praised the dialogue earlier, similar praise being offered for Rogen and Evan Goldberg's previous screenplay (Superbad, for those not paying attention), especially because this movie really finds its niche in the kind of dialogue that's becoming popular these days - quick, hysterical, and occasionally mumbling. Rogen and Granco in particular do a masterful job of handling their lines, in which their characters frequently find themselves digging themselves into a verbal hole, often ending their scenes with self-conscious reflections like "That was too far" or "I shouldn't have said that, that was mean." It's also a credit to director David Gordon Green that he knows when to cut the scenes and how best to pace them so the laughs keep coming.

There's not a whole lot more to say about Pineapple Express except that it's a lot of fun. There's no heavy message - except maybe something about the nature of friendship (platonic friendship between males being a central tenet of Apatow flicks) - so it's really about having a good time. The movie won't appeal to everyone, of course; there's bound to be accusations of it being a "stupid" movie or condemnations for its drug culture backdrop. But for those who have enjoyed the Apatow train thus far, Pineapple Express might prove addicting.

The MPAA rated Pineapple Express "R for pervasive language, drug use, sexual references and violence." The violence is exceptionally cartoonish and only occasionally bloody, and the sexual references aren't as explicit as they have been in the past. Drug use, though, is all over the film, as is crass language some might not care for.