Product: Funny People
Rating: 2.0
Apatow's weakest work to date
This was a movie that reached a bit beyond the director's talent level. Apatow for all his praise of his last two directorial efforts, is basically a formula director. His formula is basically alot of penis, masturbation, and oral sex jokes masking the promotion of conservative morals & family values (No sex before marriage with 40 Year Old Virgin & the responsibility of fatherhood in Knocked Up). That might sound bad but his first two films were effective comedies. Not so much with this one.The first hour of this movie is actually pretty great. It establishes the two main characters well, Seth Rogen's trying to find a way through the door comedian Ira, and Sandler's character of George Simmons which is mostly meant to mock his real life success as a movie star. Rogen is essentially playing the same character he has played in most of his starring comedic roles up to this date (minus Observe and Report) so its mostly Sandler's show in this one. They do a great job at lampooning his career with him but also let him be an interesting character in his own right with the look into his hollow existence and self realization of it. Its quite entertaining as they develop a working relationship and go on the stand up circuit.The Movie kind of falls apart after the first hour after a plot device from that hour is dropped and so the film goes off a completely different tangent. Now Sandler's character is contacts with his ex-fiance who is married and has children, and Sandler is now focused on reconnecting with her and the rest of the film revolves around that pursuit and the whole stand up comedy part is dead in the water, and alot of the minor characters from earlier in the film are for the part written out of the flick (given a few minutes of screen time at the end to wrap things up, like a small budding romance Rogen has with a comedienne and his funny yet adversarial roommates.)I dont know why Apatow did this, maybe he fealt vain and show off his wife and children again like he did in Knocked Up (even worse here as he even brings in a home video of his daughter at a talent show and gives them a ton more face time here) or whatever, but for for the rest of the movie we have another one of formulaic tricks, the conservative family values part. So you basically you know how this little endeavor ends. Another problem is that this is way way way too long. This movie shouldn't have had to be 2 hours long let alone its 2 and a half hours running time. Its just too much.With a brilliant first half hour ruined by the next hour and half this movie was disappointing. It exposes Apatow for the mediocre talent that he is, that he isnt nearly as good of a director or writer as he is as a producer. Its good when he hands over the reins to better talents like Jody Hill and David Gordon Green because he can't seem to handle all the processes at once. Skip this.