Funny People

There are few film going pleasures more delightful than to see an actor that no one expects much from giving an amazing performance. Everyone expects great things from Jack Nicholson or Meryl Streep, so it's not as satisfying when they do knock it out of the park. But when someone like Adam Sandler comes along and gives us - for my money - the performance of the year, it's something to really savor. Sandler has been great before in Punch-Drunk Love, so I knew he had this in him, but he buries his great work under piles of dumb comedies and bland melodramas. Yet even in films like Anger Management, you could tell there were layers to his performance that the film itself did not complement. Freed from all shackles, he is finally able to deliver the most fully formed character of his career.

Adam Sandler became popular at the exact moment that his brand of humor would have most appealed to me. I still consider Happy Gilmore and Billy Madison to be among the best comedies of the 90's.That said, after Little Nicky my interest in his comedy waned; I grew up and Sandler didn't. Yet he played such an important part in my early film going experience that it was hard to let that go. I still try and catch his movies from time to time, and I secretly hope he one day is able to leave behind his comedies and become a more respected actor. So my bias was certainly there to want a great performance out of him. In Funny People, he plays George Simmons, an Adam Sandler-like comedian who has reached the zenith of his career but has let fame get to him. With no real friends and no family, he is forced to deal with his diagnosis of Leukemia alone. He goes out to a comedy club to perform (his jokes consist of such winners as "what will you all do when I am gone, who will amuse you?") and quickly bombs. He is followed by Ira Wright (Seth Rogen), who rips into Simmons. Simmons decides to hire the young comic as his assistant/friend/confidant. It is from their relationship that the plot - and the humor - flows.

What struck me most about Sandler's performance was how completely unlikable he was willing to be. A real sticking point for me with a lot of big name actors is their unwillingness to be unlikable on screen. They always make the most unsavory characters redeemable, lovable even. Not Sandler. He embraces the inherent misanthropy in Simmons, making him a bitter, angry, vile person with no real sense of how to treat other people. He's like a funnier Daniel Plainview. And yet he earns our sympathy through the tricks of director Judd Apatow. Apatow fills the film with a sense of a lost past for Simmons. Sandler has had probably half his life recorded for audiences at this point, so the film uses much of that footage to gives us a history of Simmons. Perhaps the best use of such footage is from when Apatow and Sandler were roommates back before either was famous. The two would make prank phone calls and have a fun time together. This footage opens the film, and while very funny, it gives us such a strong sense of that human connection that Simmons has lost over the years. Where he once could enjoy life with his friends, fame and money have stripped that from him.

The film also wouldn't work without Rogen to balance it. He is at the opposite side of the career spectrum of Simmons, and we get the sense that he and his friends are living a similar like to Simmons and his friends pre-fame. We are asked to wonder whether they will be able to overcome that which destroyed Simmons, or whether they will follow in his footsteps. We can already see seeds of a similar life path and jadedness in the character played by Jason Schwartzman, but Rogen seems like a levelheaded enough person to avoid it. It is these wonderful character dynamics that make the whole piece really shine.

For me, Funny People was a perfect confection of humor, drama, acting, characters, story, themes - everything I could want from a motion picture - for the first hour and a half. Really just perfect. But it's a two and a half hour movie, and as a result, it starts to lose its power with the final hour. Apatow has always been a self indulgent filmmaker, and it has worked in his favor before. Here he goes too far, unfortunately, and it honestly could ruin the whole experience for a lot of people. As he did in Knocked Up, he casts his wife and two children in the film. Here, however, they become the central focus of the film for the final hour, taking the focus off of Simmons and his relationship with Ira. This segment was vital to sending home the message of Simmons being doomed to stay the unhappy person he is, but it could have been done in about twenty minutes or so. When Leslie Mann breaks out a home video of her and Apatow's daughter in a school performance of Cats, it's clear that Apatow has gone far off into his own head.

And yet, I love that a filmmaker would make a movie for himself first and foremost. Apatow's passion for these characters and their world shines through in spite of (or perhaps because of) that final hour. It's not a film for everybody, and especially not a film for those expecting the usual Sandler comedy, but it was the perfect film for me. It's a real shame that Sandler won't be remembered come Oscar season, because I really feel that he rises above other comedians turned dramatic actors of late (Jim Carrey, Will Ferrell) and delivers a brilliant performance. The real heart breaker, though, is that this film won't make as much money as his usual fare, and he will go back to starring in low rent David Spade or Kevin James comedies. I hope that the great actor hiding within Sandler doesn't stay hidden again for long, but when movies about man-babies and mermen make more money than thoughtful comedy-dramas, I guess it's only inevitable.

Superbad

Who'd have guessed? In a summer of threequels, giant robots, rat chefs, amnesiac spies, and The Simpsons family, it is the duo of Judd Apatow and Seth Rogen that will walk away the real champs. Knocked Up started the summer off with a bang, and now Superbad - which Apatow produced and Rogen wrote - ends the summer on an even higher note.

Superbad sounds like many a teen comedy: a single day in the life of high school seniors looking to lose their virginity before graduation. Indeed, many of the plot points are straight out of other films: the two leads, Seth and Evan (Jonah Hill and Michael Cera), need to buy the booze for the party in order to impress their respective crushes. They enlist their friend Fogell (Christopher Mintz-Plasse), who has a fake ID, to get the alcohol. From there their night is filled with many misadventures. In short, this could easily be a pretty generic movie. Yet somehow it is able to overcome the plot to be probably the best, most sincere, and funniest teen comedy since American Pie.

What makes it all work is a script that understands high schoolers. That could be a result of the fact that Seth Rogen and co-writer Evan Goldberg first wrote the screenplay when they were in high school. These characters aren't high school stereotypes, but recognizable people. I don't know about you, but my high school didn't have nearly as defined cliques as John Hughes might lead you to believe. Yes there were nerds, yes there were preps, yes there were jocks, but there were also a lot of people who just were. They weren't popular, but they weren't losers either. That gray area is where Seth and Evan exist. They get picked on by people of higher status, but then in turn are held up in comparison to other characters. Not taking the characters to an extreme is what makes it so relatable, and so funny.

It also helps that it's really about something, not just getting drunk and having sex. At the core of Superbad is one of the best examinations of a friendship I've seen in a teen film. Seth and Evan aren't going to the same college after graduation, and you can tell from the beginning of the film that they're very uncomfortable about that, though they don't know how to broach the subject with each other. They've been friends since elementary school, and they aren't sure if their friendship can survive such a big hurdle. The ways in which the two come to terms with their impending separation is surprisingly touching and at times bittersweet, and it is this element that shines above all others.

Because the friendship aspect is so important, two really strong actors were needed. Hill and Cera do a great job of making you believe they've been friends for years. Hill can be a bit one-note at times, often going over the top. Yet Cera is able to reign him in every time with his subdued, subtler work. Indeed, Cera's Evan really is the funniest character in the movie, though you'd probably not be able to quote his lines like you might with the other characters. Instead, the laughs with him come from the smallest things, like way he looks at things, the way he walks, or the way he reacts to the world around him. The third member of the gang is Fogell, aka McLovin. A lot of people have already proclaimed him the funniest character of the summer. The hype isn't totally warranted, but he is still quite amusing. Had the McLovin jokes not been revealed in trailers, he might have seemed a lot more fresh than he came off as. Still, his story of getting booze for his friends could have felt like a major tangent to the film had newcomer Christopher Mintz-Plasse not been able to handle it so well, so he deserves some recognition for that.

But above all else, this is a comedy, and a very funny one. I'd say it's probably funnier than Knocked Up was, although it could be close. Even the opening and closing credits are handled in a very funny way. And often the humor is unexpected in that the film never repeat the same kinds of jokes. They hit us with a gross out joke, then hit us with an over-the-top fantasy sequence, then make us laugh at a silly childhood flashback. The film is constantly flowing and surprising, rarely allowing us to guess what jokes could come next. It all works really well, with the disparate jokes never feeling too out of place or contrasting in styles to each other.

While I liked the movie more for its examination of teenage friendship than for its story of a booze search, I can't deny that it all worked very well and I was never bored. Hopefully this doesn't turn into a franchise like American Pie did (the opportunity is clearly there). But then again, Apatow and Rogen have been consistently surprising us for almost a decade now, and if anyone could be trusted to make a sequel that is actually warranted, it'd probably be these guys.

Knocked Up

With Knocked Up, writer/director Judd Apatow solidifies his status as the best thing to happen to comedy in years. I don't think we've witnessed a filmmaker ascend as quickly and as strongly in the comedy genre since the heyday of Mel Brooks in the late 60's and early 70's. After his double-header of Freaks and Geeks and Undeclared on TV, Apatow switched to the big screen and gave us The 40 Year Old Virgin. Those all profited from lowered expectations, as no one really knew who this man was or what tricks he had up his sleeve. But there's no catching us off guard this time, Mr. Apatow, and that's what makes Knocked Up so delightful: you expect it to reach those lofty heights achieved by his previous works, and largely it does.

What's surprising about Apatow's oeuvre is how simple his premises can be. To go into detail on what Knocked Up is about might seem a a bit redundant: it's in the title. Yet how can he continually create winners out of such simple, one sentence premises? The answer is all in the characters. These aren't one note slapstick caricatures that you're supposed to laugh at, but very real people that you want to laugh with. The story of a lovable loser named Ben (Seth Rogen) getting his one night stand Alison (Katherine Heigl) pregnant is really more about showing us what these two people are made of than simple hijinks. They're also surrounded by Alison's sister Debbie and her husband Pete (Leslie Mann and Paul Rudd), as well as Ben's friends Jason, Jay, Martin, and Jonah (Jason Segel, Jay Baruchel, Martin Starr, and Jonah Hill). Every one of them is a delight to watch and add flavor and nuance to such a simple idea of a story. Much like he did in Virgin, Apatow makes the film as much about the relationships between all the secondary characters as about the plot.

Seth Rogen as Ben is a revelation. He's been paying his dues for years in small parts in films as varied as Anchorman and Donnie Darko, as well as staring in both of Apatow's TV shows. He's not the type of guy you think of when you think lead actor, but there was never a moment here where I doubted him or didn't buy him as the lead. Perhaps part of this has to do with the way he's portrayed as a secondary character who is thrust into the limelight; even he is slightly surprised to be the focus of the story. Early on you see Alison and Debbie getting into a nightclub, and off to the side is Ben, unassuming and barely noticeable. Yet this is his story, and he comes to embrace the curve life has thrown him with both charm and determination. If there's any remaining doubt that Rogen can pull off a staring role, look no farther than his scenes leading up to the birth where, when trying to look out for Alison and his unborn child, he tells everyone who is being a hindrance to screw off. This isn't just some goofy stoner anymore, but a man who wants very much to make sure his child will be brought into this world safely and correctly.

The rest of the cast is all wonderful. Heigl fits her role perfectly and you can kind of buy her eventual love for Ben. Paul Rudd is always reliable as the goofy sidekick, and his one liners are among the best in the film. But he also gets a chance to stretch, and he is able to be both repulsive and sympathetic at times. Leslie Mann is an actress I have never warmed up to, but being Apatow's wife, I've accepted that she will always get roles in his films. So color me surprised that she was quite great in her role. She could be shrill on occasion, but mostly I got her character and appreciated the way she balanced out Rudd. As for the guys playing Ben's friends, they always leave you wanting more of them. They pop in just long enough to give you a laugh and an insight into Ben's life before disappearing again. They aren't as well developed as the friends in Virgin were, but then they aren't meant to be as much of a focal point as those characters were.

I think the best argument for what's so great about Knocked Up is that, at easily over two hours, it is a film that should have worn out its welcome well before it's over. Yet these characters are so inviting and engaging that I didn't want to leave their world and would have stayed there for far longer if given the chance. It also didn't hurt that it may have the best laugh to minute ratio of any film so far this year (who knew Munich references could evoke so many laughs?) After such a lackluster May filled with bad sequel after sequel, it's nice to find something so refreshingly funny and original out there.