Funny People

Let the high volume blogging and inevitable decline in post frequency begin! No TV yet... I watched the first half of the hour of "Better of Ted" this morning... I like the show very much, and encourage anyone who doesn't like sucky crap to watch it. That being said, I don't feel compelled to write anything about it. So... movie!
The girlfriend and I went to see "Funny People" last night. First off, let me say that I'm a pretty big fan of Judd Apatow, I've been pleased with the vast majority of movies he's directed. I love "Freaks and Geeks", I enjoyed "Undeclared". I'm a pretty big fan.

As a second bit of context, I didn't see the end of the movie. Why? Short answer; we walked out. I'll get to a longer answer in a second.

I don't feel great writing about a movie that I didn't see in it's entirety, however, there seems to be an important fact missing from every other review I've read about this movie: This movie is long... like really long... we left, by my best judgement, 14 hours into the movie, and I could see no way -short of stopping mid-scene and rolling credits- that it was going to end anytime soon.

For the most part, the first half was executed in a warm funny way, it wasn't quite funny enough, nor was the contrast between the two halves stark enough to classify this movie as suffering from "Stripes syndrome" but the symptoms could certainly produce a wrong diagnosis. Instead the movie flows more like a conversation with someone in which you're initially interested but at some point realize that you haven't been paying attention, you're not really sure what they're getting at, and you can't find a way out without exposing that you don't really care and haven't been paying attention.

As the first half ends, the movie becomes dark, and rambling... mostly rambling as darkness peaks in spurts throughout the move. It slowly becomes clear that Sandler's character shows the potential (I say "shows the potential" because I don't know how it ends... I'll watch it on DVD in a few months and write an addendum to this post... for now I'm turning a blind eye to my glaringly obvious ignorance and pushing ahead) to be just as shallow and unfortunate as we've all hoped he's not. Rogen's character stands by and watches, seemingly powerless to do anything, as Sandler's character encourages others to make the same mistakes he's made.

Apatow's movies work because his characters are funny and likable. There's plenty of funny -again, in the first half- but none of the characters are especially likable, and any goodwill they had built in the first half was very quickly squandered in the second. Luckily we had my girlfriend's mono to use as an excuse to not sit through another... well, I don't know how long. Doesn't really matter. The point is that I wasted at least 30 minutes of my evening watching the movie fall apart last night, and another half hour of work writing this today... Only one of those was regrettable.