Unfunny people

Rating: Null/10 (15 December 2011)

There is some clever stuff in this, brought down by uninspired attempts at comedy. So if it's just laughs that you're looking for, they're all rehashed here with familiar faces to deliver them, better reach for Superbad again or the recent Bridesmaids.
But the film deserves a few words on the structure, it's an excellent design. The protagonist is a guy who's been living beneath the image of his girlfriend, a TV actress for a CSI-type show. He is comfortable that way, as we learn it's the only thing that makes him get up from the couch and clean up his place, preserve some semblance of order. His job is to score the episodes for the show, he does this by literally working on the synthesizer beneath her giant projected image. She dumbs him, he tears the image in a fit of frenzy. Slinks depressed again back into the couch.
He gets up from the couch for a trip to Hawaii, once more something he has picked up from his girlfriend. There he learns how to pick himself up again, on a surf board, or up in front of an audience to play the piano. His dream, sidetracked by slovenly routine and a passionless job, is to orchestrate a rock opera about Dracula, a man who was doomed to love eternally in his head.
It's meant to be a dark, emotional piece, yet playing one of the songs for an audience of disinterested tourists, it elicits hearty laughs. Turns out that what he was writing all this time, funneling his own important self into the thing, was after all a comedy and not a drama. So the circumstances around him open up the self-pitying work into selfless entertainment.
Eventually he stages his vision, we can tell this much early on, and it's an uproar. It's an opera with muppets, with himself in control of the protagonist. He plays his own strings, finds a love that does not merely give him a reason to get up from the couch but inspires creative passion out of him.
For all intents and purposes, it's really potent stuff the way it's structured. One of the best for the year, as far as layering a lesson about the mechanisms that control life within a fiction that is transformed with that life is concerned.
So I doubly lament that it's an Apatow production, a middling one at that. Paul Rudd plays the goofy stoner surfer. Jonah Hill plays the bumbling waiter with aspirations of a music career. It's miserable stuff I tell you, every attempt at a laugh. Our entry in Hawaii is completely touristy, the shiny plastic of a postcard, like the real place I suppose has turned by now, one big holiday resort for people who can afford it.
Which is all highly ironic, given how the whole thing is not meant to be a drama. But we don't make the discovery with the protagonist for this to matter deeply, it's a dumb comedy from the get go. If you're patient enough or don't mind, you can watch just so you can imagine a better film out of it.