Product: Funny People
Rating: 2.0
Twice as long, half as funny, and much the same
There are some genuinely funny parts of Judd Apatow's longest film to date, and most of them involve a truly awful network sitcom Jason Schwartzman is starring in called "Yo, Teach!" That accounts for about five minutes of this film; you keep wondering what Apatow thought he was doing for the other 148. The first half involves a famous Adam Sandler-like stand-up comic (played by Adam Sandler, showing almost no distance whatsoever from his usual persona) who discovers he's ill with a variant of leukemia, and who starts mentoring a young nebbishy comic (inevitably played by Seth Rogen) as he also seeks to make amends for his horrible behavior throughout his life, his lack of connections with his family, and (in particular) chasing away the great love of his life (Leslie Mann). Then the Sandler character unexpectedly responds to his treatment, and the rest of the film is mostly a (lengthy) shaggy-dog story of a weekend trip he and the Rogen character take to the San Francisco Bay Area to perform a comedy gig so he can hook up again with the married lost sweetheart.You keep waiting for the point of the movie to be revealed, and it's not until the end that you begin to see how you're supposed to make sense of the characters. By this point the patterns we see them in are so familiar from Apatow's other films that we can almost color in everything ourselves. A man has to grow up and stand on his own two feet; selfish people will eventually become lonely; a man's best friends are his freakish loser roommates... all this will seem dully familiar. Mann does not embarrass herself as Sandler's lost love; and the two charming daughters she and Apatow share, Maude and Iris, steal much of the movie as her character's daughters. Rogen does everything we've seen him do before by being shambling and lovable, and Eric Bana seems in the wrong film as Mann's studly Aussie husband. The "Laugh, clown, laugh" first section of the film would be truly intolerable if not for the brief comic bits with Schwartzman and (again inevitably) Jonah Hill as the loser roommates, and for the absorbing decorating details of the Sandler character's fabulous oceanside palazzo.