apatow

The 21st Best Movie I’ve Seen This Year

#21 Funny People

 I almost don’t want to comment on this movie because, since I saw this movie in theaters, I’ve been trying to remove it from my memory entirely.

Now, this movie is not that bad. But it’s not good, and it’s frustratingly not good, as what seems to be a good premise is combined with standout performances from both Adam Sandler and Seth Rogen into a movie that is somehow completely lousy at accomplishing any of the goals it sets out for itself.

I’ve been as stalwart a supporter of Judd Apatow as there’s been in the past few years, for several reasons:

A. His good movies – both movies he’s produced (Anchorman, Superbad) and directed (40 Year Old Virgin, Knocked Up) are hilarious and incredibly rewatchable. If you were to list the Ten Best Comedies of the Last Ten Years, that list would include at least four Judd Apatow movies. In fact, let’s make that list (Apatow movies are marked with a *):

 

Best Comedies of the 2000s

  1.  Anchorman*
  2. Old School
  3. Shaun Of The Dead
  4. The 40 Year Old Virgin*
  5. Wedding Crashers
  6. Borat
  7. Napoleon Dynamite
  8. Superbad*
  9. Meet The Parents
  10. Talledega Nights*

I’m sure everyone’s got favorites in there, as well as ones that they hated and feel shouldn’t be on the list, but just below these movies would go:

   11.   Zoolander
   12.   The Hangover
   13.   Team America: World Police  
   14.   Tropic Thunder
   15.   School Of Rock
   16.   Knocked Up*
   17.   Dodgeball
   18.   Step Brothers*
   19.   Road Trip
   20.   Van Wilder

All good comedies, but all clearly a slightly lower tier than the aforementioned movies.  Either way, Apatow was involved in six of these 20 movies as either a director, writer, producer, or all three, and so he’s earned our good graces. I’m inclined to give him a pass.

B. Funny People was a failure of trying too hard, which is the sort of failure I appreciate. I hate sloppy filmmaking. I hate half-efforts, and poorly executed jokes. I hate seeing movies where the actors didn’t quite nail the bit, but the director moved on anyway. This movie was none of those things – everyone was clearly giving it their all, it just didn’t work out.

The problems with Funny People relate more to narrative momentum than anything else. No one in this movie is particularly likable – most noticeably Seth Rogen’s character, who really needs to be – and without anyone to root for, the whole movie just sits there, limply. There’s no interplay between a cold, closed-off Sandler and a warm, awkward Rogen, because the film makes them feel like they’re sort of the same person in different situations, which totally destroys the whole point of the movie. More damningly, Apatow forgets a key element of storytelling – he never creates a protagonist. Rogen and Sandler sort of share the protagonist’s load, each of them doing just enough to make you think the movie might be about them, and not quite enough where you don’t know which one you’re supposed to identify with.

People have knocked the film’s third act as the point where the movie derails. But the truth is that movie hadn’t actually built up enough speed to derail – it just chugs along, vaguely keeping our attention. The little engine that couldn’t. </train metaphor>

The problem is plot structure more than anything: Sandler’s efforts to win back his ex-girlfriend come too late in the story – almost two hours (!) into the movie. No one’s willing to start caring about a love story at that point in a film.

 This pains me to say, but in a more capable director’s hands, this could have been a much better movie. But Apatow invested too much of himself in the movie – his wife plays the love interest, his kids play the children, his ex-roommate (Sandler) is the protagonist (maybe), and it’s loaded with videocassette footage that Apatow himself had shot – of Sandler back in the day, of his child’s performance of CATS, etc. He can’t see the difference between what’s actually moving and what’s merely moving to him.

 If there’s a good way to fail, it’s this way: trying to go deeper, trying to make a comedy that’s more emotionally compelling than your average boner joke fare (though, wow, there are a lot of boner jokes in this movie). And that’s why I’m trying to pretend it never happened. Apatow’s earned the right to have us dwell on his successes rather than failures.

 

For now.

Addendum

I'd just like to put a little addendum on the previous post here: I'd meant to bring up Apatow's use of the same actors in every movie and TV show in a little more detail, but I felt the post was going on too long anyway, and just skipped ahead. But one of my points that I'd thought of was that in every project Apatow does, almost all the actors translate over and receive major parts in the new project, but the actresses do not. Seth Rogen, Paul Rudd, Steve Carrell, Jason Segel, etc. - they've got all the screentime on every project. Sometimes people like Busy Phillips and Carla Gallo show up for a small cameo, but Apatow essentially leaves all the actresses behind on each project and takes the actors with him to star in the next project. He even built that group up over time, adding people like Rudd and Carrell as they fit in, never leaving someone behind, but never picking up an actress in that group.

I wondered why that was, what that said about Apatow's personality. Was it perhaps a little misogynistic? Did he feel that the actresses he'd worked with were untalented or replaceable? Did he just feel more connected to the actors he worked with than the actresses, and kept them accordingly? Did he feel he could either take one or the other with him, and decided to take the actors? I seriously thought about this for a while. These are the things I think about when I'm driving, which is a major reason I should probably not have a license.

Then I realized there was an exception (not, like, out of thin air. I was on the internet). From The Cable Guy all the way to Knocked Up, Leslie Mann appeared in a lot of Apatow's major projects. So I decided maybe I'd misjudged Apatow and it was just a coincidence.

And then I discovered that Leslie Mann is Apatow's wife. Ah. That makes sense.

In other news, I saw another cut of the Celebrex commercial. It's now even longer, and mentions "death" as a side effect twice. Excellent. Really drive that point home, boys.

Review: Knocked Up (2007)

The title is a lie. This is not a review of Knocked Up.

There's a reason for the lie, of course, and that is that when I started to sit down and write a review of Knocked Up and why I liked it so much, I realized that the reasons I liked it had less to do with the movie and more to do with the process that took place that before the movie, the series of events that brought the movie to the screen. I realized that I like this movie in kind of the same way you would like watching one of your friends win a marathon, or your kid win a geography bee. It's about being proud of something, of following something from its struggling early beginnings to its greatest victory. It's about being a part of that world. So, this is a review of that world. This is a review of Judd Apatow and Seth Rogen, and everything they created.

Eight years ago, "Freaks and Geeks," Paul Feig and Apatow's high school misfits drama, was released upon an unsuspecting NBC audience, who for the most part rejected it out of hand. It was an hour-long drama that was equal parts comedy and youthful angst in the most compassionate, honest way possible. A huge number of the storylines were ripped from the personal embarrassments of the writing team's high school years. It was a TV show about what high school was really like, where everyone looked like people you actually knew in high school, everyone was as uncomfortable and emotional as they really were - and it was always, always extremely funny. Five or six years later, shows like it would start popping up on television, but at the time nothing like it had ever been done. NBC never really knew what it had, never knew how to promote it, yanked it around for a season, pulling it on and off the air, and finally canceled it before the season ended. It was a knife to the heart for Apatow, he never forgot it.

Two years later, realizing he'd gotten all sorts of talented actors involved in the acting business who were now getting no work, he launched "Undeclared," a half-hour comedy in the same style about a bunch of slacker college students who spend most of their time hanging around the dorm and trying to entertain themselves - basically, a half-hour comedy about real college students. He brought back Seth Rogen, he fought tooth and nail and found a way to bring back Jason Segel, he ended up bringing back six or seven more actors from "Freaks and Geeks" before the show was pulled, because of course it was canceled before the first season finished. Virtually everything Apatow did ended up being canceled in those days: he had a mess of pilots under his belt that had never been picked up, and his attempts to launch the careers of the actors and actresses he picked were usually laughed at.

Naturally, those careers ended up taking off anyway - James Franco, David Krumholtz, Tom Welling, Jenna Fisher, Linda Cardellini, Charlie Hunnam, Monica Keena - because all of those actors were just as talented as he said they were. That was what was so frustrating to Apatow about his career; everything he touched was pulled away from him, but at the end of the day he was always right. The actors he discovered always turned out to be gems, everything he made would garner oceans of critical acclaim and loyal fans. But the audience, that giant audience that has networks wining and dining you and begging you to stay, that audience was never quite there. Mainstream success never arrived, and Apatow left the television industry and went back to movies, and it seemed hardly anyone noticed he was gone. Maybe nobody did.

Eventually, though, "Freaks and Geeks" and "Undeclared" came out on DVD. And word spread around, people began to follow the stories from beginning to end, and Apatow began to gather a larger contingent. But it wasn't just seeing the shows that brought him support, it was the world that he offered on these DVDs. Every single episode had commentary, sometimes more than one. But rather than just a commentary from the show's creator, or from the executive producers, up to seven or eight people involved would get together to contribute the track: half a dozen actors, sometimes the director or the writer would join, and often Apatow himself would sit in to guide the commentary. Rather than spend the time back-patting or breaking down the elements of the story, the commentary tracks were about telling old jokes and bringing up forgotten stories. And there was an honesty to them - during one, Jon Kasdan (the writer of the episode) and Apatow talked about how Kasdan had quit the business after the show was canceled, sending Apatow a letter that basically said "you broke me." The fact that there were able to get together a few years later and discuss the episode was a testament to Apatow's ability to admit mistakes and move on.

It's that honesty that makes Apatow and his projects so appealing. Apatow never pretended that he was making great art, he never gave interviews that maligned people for not appreciating his genius, he never claimed to be a genius. In the world of Hollywood producing, that's a rare feat: everything made is important and made by people of exceptional, untouchable talent, nothing is made by someone who just likes making TV shows that are funny. Apatow never pretended he wasn't working hard, he was clearly putting his own lifeblood into everything he made, you could feel it just hearing him talk about it. In interviews years later, he talked about how he managed to put himself in the hospital through the stress, he estimates he might've taken ten, twenty years off his life in those more stressful times. But by then he was out of the industry and producing movies again, and nothing had been heard from him in a few years.

In the meantime, as far as I can tell, Rogen did nothing. Rogen states that the lazy, unfocused life that he and his apartment mates live in Knocked Up is a fairly close approximation to his actual life for a while. Pretty much the only person who hired him as an actor was Apatow, and so Rogen kept standing by, waiting. Eventually, he ended co-writing a script with Apatow called "The 40-Year Old Virgin." Rogen pushed to have it be as profane as possible, the argument if you're going to have someone as sweet and awkward and honest-looking as Steve Carell as your lead, doesn't it make it that much funnier to have him be surrounded by completely opposite characters? He turned out to be more right than he knew.

And of course, The 40-Year Old Virgin ended up being a smash success, but what was important about it was that it wasn't that was the first time Apatow had something hit big but rather that the thing that hit big wasn't any different from the things he'd made before. It was that same loose, improvisational style, that blend of comedy and honesty, all those things that had been the trademark of everything that Apatow had done that had failed. It was a vindication that he'd been right all along.

Knocked Up is an extension of that success, in fact the culmination of it. It features only actors who've been in Apatow productions before, and the four actors playing Rogen's best friends are his actual best friends, three of whom played his friends all the way back on "Undeclared." Even the day players are roles filled by people connected with Apatow in some way - actors from "The Office," or Loudon Wainwright III, who played the father on "Undeclared" and contributed the soundtrack to Knocked Up. The world created is the world they built from the ground up, filled only with people they discovered and trained. It's like these films operate in their own universe, their own tiny Golden-Era Hollywood filled with actors who only appear on screen when summoned by Apatow. And you got to see it all come together right before your eyes.

My brother didn't like the film, found it just coarse and unfunny, full of drug jokes and constant profanity, and I see his point, because it is full of drug jokes and constant profanity and it's easy to get turned off by it all those things, I know a lot of people who were. But watching this movie meant I got to watch the moment when all the awkward young actors I've followed finally truly found their feet. And I don't mean to say - I can't emphasize this strongly enough - that it wasn't funny but I found it funny because I've gotten attached to these actors. I mean to say that I've gotten so in tune with how these movies feel and flow and how the jokes land that it just made it that much funnier, and I got to see all the sweetness and camaraderie that's apparent, not in spite of, but actually through the dirty jokes and drug humor. It was everything I'd been waiting for. And that's saying something.

Four stars out of Five.