Funny People Who Need People Are The Funniest People In The World

When I saw the posters for Funny People, I thought to myself, “Aw, Apatow finally gave his wife a serious role in one of his movies.” And then, the quirky-but-cute Leslie Mann doesn’t show up for the first half of the movie.

The thing to know about this movie going in is that it’s not funny ha-ha. In fact, the movie should be called Funny (not ha-ha) People or maybe Funny (Strange) People. Because that’s what it’s about.

Really, though, that’s what all Apatow movies are about. People love all the gross humor and all that, but what always supports that are characters. Strange characters trying to figure out what “normal” is–late era victims of a cultural revolution that left us knowing how to groom, how to behave, how, in short, to grow-up.

As a strange person, I kind of like that. I kind of identify with the 40-year-old virgin, the guy who knocked up the girl, and now the sensitive self-deprecating comedian who’s struggling to, uh, struggle less.

First up, though, I note for Knox’s sake that Seth Rogan has lost a fair amount of weight, and is looking pretty good. (I think he’s kind of good looking, in a friendly sort of boy-next-door way, but I’m not exactly qualified to judge.) And, his love interest is Aubrey Plaza, who is adorable but convincingly mousey in this role.

Unfortunately, people identify primarily with the gross humor, which means that Apatow is sort of stuck delivering that, if he expects to keep up the same box office receipts. But as the Farrelly brothers can attest, even that wears out. But if you’re not expecting that, and at the same time not put off by it, uh, this is your movie.

The story is that young, sensitive comedian Ira, living with two more successful guys (Jonah Hill as a better stand-up and Jason Schwartzman, who also has a composer credit on this film, as the handsome young sitcom actor), gets a sudden break when big-shot George Simmons (Adam Sandler) discovers he’s dying and needs a new assistant.

Simmons is a weirdo. He’s been very successful, and so lives a self-involved, shallow existence. In short order, Ira becomes his closest–if not only–friend. Ira ultimately helps him remake the human contact he abandoned on his way to success. Including, incidentally, Leslie Mann, who figures heavily in to the third act.

There are two obvious ways a story like this can end and I was rather pleased that this movie took neither of those two routes. If there’s a message here, it’s awfully close to that old saw attributed to Ed Wynn: “Dying is easy. Comedy is hard.”

Well, what can you say about this movie? It’s ridiculously better than the abysmal Punchline, the 1988 Tom Hanks/Sally Field vehicle, both in terms of being funny and in terms of being not incredibly painful to watch. It has a lot of funny parts, too. And it manages to deal with its serious topics in a fairly light-hearted manner.

And, typical of Apatow, he doesn’t take the easy way out.

Sort of amusingly, this is probably the least gross of his gross-out comedies. Most of the gross stuff is, well, comedians telling jokes, which is a lot less graphic than having those jokes acted out.

One thing I love about movies like this is that they can line up the comedians (Dave Attell, Norm MacDonald, Sarah Silverman, Charles Fleischer, Paul Reiser, Ray Romano, etc.) for the group scenes or montages, serious or funny, and it’s going to be cool.

One of the big problems with Punchline was that neither Fields nor Hanks were stand-up comedians. Their material wasn’t very good, and they demonstrated very well that being affable and even charismatic was no substitute for having stand-up chops.

Sandler, Hill and Rogan actually are (or have been) stand-up comedians, and Rogan does a nice bit of bad stand-up that demonstrates subtly, yet clearly, how his character grows (as a stand-up) over the course of the movie. Sandler also does a good job being the self-involved character who manages to be really, really self-involved.

When Mann shows up as the sort-of frustrated older actress (and mom of the same two adorable Apatow kids who were in Knocked Up), you kind of get an eerie feeling like all these people are acting a little less than remembering. That’s–well, either really convenient or just good acting. (As Groucho Marx nearly observed, it’s a lot easier to get good acting out of a comedian than good comedy out of an actor.)

Anyway, I liked it. The Boy liked it, even though it topped the 2 hour mark. I thought it was pretty tight despite the length. I had a little trouble with believing Seth Rogan was a stand-up comedian. I liked that he was Mr. Sensitive but I didn’t see how Mr. Sensitive could actually survive as a stand-up.

And that raised another issue that was really only lightly touched on. I mean, if all your friends are comedians–hardcore pro or wannabes–then it’s gotta be a bitch having a real problem. For one thing, that particular subculture (at least by reputation) considers jokes to be an acceptable response to things most humans don’t joke about.

I mean, the highest form of eulogy is to roast the deceased. I kept thinking about Andy Kaufman having a hard time convincing anyone he was dying.

I just wasn’t sure how someone like Ira could survive. Ah, what the heck. It worked for me. And I sort of wonder if the sensitive character, the one who turns up in these movies and seems so out of place for adhering to a traditional view of sex and relationships, isn’t Apatow himself.

Fun fact, though: Sandler and Apatow were room-mates, and the movie opens with some home movies from that time period.

David Fincher’s Zodiac

David Fincher rose from humble beginnings (music videos for Madonna and Alien3) to become one of the most influential filmmakers of the decade through films like Se7en and Fight Club, but since 2002’s Panic Room, he’s been associated with dozens of films that never got made (or got made without him).

So, it’s with some anticipation that his newest film about the Zodiac Killer is met, and it’s not surprising that it perhaps doesn’t meet with expectations.

Zodiac is a sprawling story, not primarily of the Zodiac killer, but of Robert Graysmith, an editorial cartoonist who becomes obsessed with deducing the identity of a crazed killer who is writing taunting letters to the newspaper where he works.

This is more a film on the lines of Close Encounters of the Third Kind than Silence of the Lambs. The only violence is early on: The Zodiac went on a little spree early on in his “career” and this is shown somewhat graphically. But really, this is practically a Fincher movie for people who don’t like Fincher movies. After the initial spurt of violence, you still have two hours of psychological suspense thriller to endure.

Despite finding it rather low key, I rather liked it, but this is my kind of film. Alongside the always good Jake Gyllenhaal, Mark Ruffalo, Anthony Edwards and Robert Downey, Jr. (typecast as a guy who ends up drinking and drugging his way to obscurity), it was peppered with short, solid performances from lesser known actors who still usually play meatier roles: Brian Cox, Chloe Sevigny, Candy Clark, Dermot Mulroney, Philip Baker Hall, James Le Gros, Charles Fleischer, and on and on. (The only place this may have backfired, ever-so-slightly, is in the casting John Carroll Lynch as the pedophile prime suspect. Lynch does a great job, but I had just watched Fargo, where he plays Marge Gunderson’s gentle, artistic husband.)

In some ways, the low-key atmosphere makes the intense parts more intense, but the fidelity to actual history means there is no great climactic point—in particular, no great showdown between Graysmith and Zodiac. They do share a moment, and it’s important but not really satisfying in the cinematic KABOOM sense.

Just as it doesn’t meet some expectations, there are those who would over-hype it because it is a Fincher film, but it’s best to approach this as a competent but modest slice-of-American-history movie. It won’t actually lose much on the small screen.

Finally, some critics objected to the lack of period music: I actually thought that was one of the strongest points. Veteran David Shire (Norma Rae, All The President’s Men) provides a score that’s way less self-conscious and hip than, say, playing The White Album would’ve been. Although the story takes place in a let’s-call-it-”colorful” period of history, it also transcends the time.

(originally posted 2007-03-11)

Torture Porn Redux

I may have misled Knox in my recommendations post by referring to Borderland as not torture porn. I see my reviews at the time suggest otherwise but apart from a gory opening, I’m not remembering the details. As I recall, the horrors were less flamboyant and more banally real–making them all the more horrible.

I remember mostly being concerned about it, rather than it actually happening. I’ll review it when I can and see if my recall is correct.

Meanwhile I’m watching Captivity, which caused a kerfuffle when it came out because of its posters. The kerfuffle struck me as dumb. It is torture porn, though, by my definition. The movie’s sole purpose seems to be to degrade Elisha Cuthbert. Her abuse, interspersed with other women being abused, dominates the first half hour. The second half hour is more abuse, with another person being abused alongside her.

The final half hour is the big reveal, the why, the twist ending. The entree into this part is really, really stupid, but that’s not the point, really. The point is, we’ve had an hour of torture up till now, there’s nothing you can bookend it with that makes this movie not about sadism, or that makes it a documentary, or anything other than enjoying that first hour at some level.


The script was co-written by schlockmeister Larry Cohen, who recently wrote the tight Phone Booth and Cellular but who goes back to the blaxploitation days and the It’s Alive series. He also directed one of the better “Masters of Horror” episodes. No big shocka, though, he’s a working man, and someone probably said, “Hey, Larry, whip us up something Saw-like.”

The real gut-punch, though, is that it’s directed by two-time Oscar nominee Roland Joffe, who achieved fame with The Killing Fields and The Mission–which was referred to as something akin to torture porn at the time, unfairly, in my opinion–and then went weirdly off the rails by directing (at least in part) Super Mario Bros., the first ever video game movie.

Freeman Hunt (whose blog is missing from my roster on the right, I just noticed) maintained in an earlier thread that the Saw movies were just about torture–that that was all that was going on. But here you see when that really happens. Cuthbert is simply tortured. There’s no suspense, really. She’s going to be tortured, she can’t do anything to stop it, there’s no transformation that can occur, she’s done nothing wrong other than be pretty and famous.

If you just can’t tolerate the gore, all the reasons for it–however, good–won’t change that. If that’s what you’re into, then you don’t care about the reasons. But if you see it as just another color in the palette, then there’s minimally an aesthetic and maximally a morality to how it’s applied.

Best of Fest

Knox asked me which films I would recommend from previous After Dark festivals, and whether they were things you could actually view on (e.g.) Netflix. Last question first: Yes, they’re all get-able through and get aired on FearNet and sometimes the Sci-Fi channel, so I have to assume they’re available through Netflix as well.

I wouldn’t recommend watching any horror movie on a network that has commercials, with the exception of FearNet because FearNet only puts one commercial break in, early on. (They do the noise at the bottom of the screen, though, which is nasty.)

Recommending movies is a much harder process, because it’s highly personal (and doubly so for horror) and the experience tends to be different at home which affects some movies more than others.

But assuming you’re not a horror fanatic, there are a few recommendations I can make pretty comfortably.

Borderland is probably the most genuinely frightening film of the three festivals, not because it’s based on a true story (which is usually an excuse for lameness) but because it’s so very, very plausible. Americans down in Mexico end up crossing paths with a violent gang. Sean Astin plays a very creepy role. I remember being concerned that it was going to veer into “torture porn” but the horribleness is mostly kept at a very real level–that is, you know, in real life, we’re more rattled by things that we brush off in horror movies–and is still very effective. (UPDATE: My reviews at the time say it is, actually, torture porn-style violence. So, use caution.)

The Gravedancers is probably the most fun. It stars “haunted house” and goes “Poltergeist”, with more than a nod to “Scooby Doo”.

Rinne (Reincarnation)is probably my favorite movie of the three festivals, but it’s not for everybody. It’s a mystery, you have to be very attentive, and it breaks Blake’s law of movie reincarnation (which is that audiences reject using dramatically different actors for the same characters). But it “made sense” to me. (It reveals “the rules” and “follows the rules” without being predictable.) Apparently some people find it slow, though. Subtitled. Must be relatively immune from “they all look alike” syndrome.

I love the atmosphere in Unrest, which is powered almost entirely by the verisimilitude of the situation. The corpses are not just realistic, they’re real. The writer/director having been a med student gets the feel just right.

In an entirely separate way, I loved the “realism” of Mulberry Street,which comes from the setting and the truly excellent characterization. I get the idea that the writer/director pulled his friends out of the neighborhood and said “Here, be in my movie.” Which may be totally false–because they all do their lines excellently and without sounding stilted–but it feels that way. The movie runs out of steam when it goes into standard zombie/plague mode, sort of ironically, or this movie would be a horror classic.

I can’t really recommend The Abandonedbecause I didn’t like it. But I don’t like this kind of movie. No matter how well done, if I know the characters are doomed from the start and yet the movie is going to make them go through the motions of surviving, I get both bored and pissed off. But for whatever reason, this movie is the only one they show on pay cable so maybe it’s a good example of a kind of movie I really dislike.

In the horror-like-Buffy-the-Vampire-Slayer-is-horror category, there’s The Deaths of Ian Stone.This is one of the few films that had a real budget, like $14M or something. It shows. And while it’s darker than Buffy, it feels like it could be a pilot for a Buffy-like series.

Butterfly Effect: Revelationhas a similar feel. I mean, the whole premise isn’t far off from “Quantum Leap”, which always threatened to scramble Sam’s brains. They just do it in this one.

Out of the 24 films, then, I’d feel comfortable recommending six pretty strongly. Sturgeon’s Law and all that.

If you’re okay with campy low-budget type flicks, then I can add Tooth & Nail,Nightmare Manand Autopsy.The camp in T&N may be entirely accidental but director Kanefsky (Nightmare) knows the limits of his medium and knows a laugh is as good as a shriek–and Autopsy is so completely committed to the “funhouse” style, it’s unimaginable that they didn’t know exactly what they were doing.

So, those are my recommendations.

Except for Autopsy, there’s not really any heavy gore in any of them (and the gore in Autopsy is right on the line of horrific/comic). Oh, there’s a compound fracture in T&N, that’s always good for an “ew”, and the majority of Unrest features half-dissected corpses as props. (I’m trying to remember if there was a lot of gore in Borderland. If there is, I’ve blocked it out.)

For hardcore fans, most of the movies have something to recommend them. And for would-be filmmakers, these would have to be interesting if only to examine: a) how much can be done on so little; b) how easy it is to go off the rails.

But for entertainment, the six abovementioned are worth the 80-90 minutes.