Life, Death, Regret and Comedy

Funny People is a film about the kind of friends we all have, the ones who seem compelled to make other people laugh.  The space this film inhabits explores the varying motivations behind such funny people, and what they sacrifice through relationships in order to get to the top.  Writer/director Judd Apatow’s latest film is a comedic heavy-weight hitter.  The kind which puts its audience up against the ropes using highly emotional story arcs, and then knocks us out with cleverly placed jokes when we are at our most vulnerable.  A masterful blend. 

           The film centers around grown up funny man George Simmons (Adam Sandler in arguably his strongest performance to date) who has recently learned that he has a very short time to live.  This is a major problem for the super-star comic, because he lacks the necessary support group that most people need to get through a sickness like this.  He has starred in a dozen movies, but lives in his own kind of solitary confinement high up on the hills overlooking LA.  It’s not hard to say what led George to this place in his life.  His botched marriage George dubs “the one that got away”.  The story implies that there is a certain kind of collateral damage that comes with being close to a comic like George.  Sometimes, his material relies on how he has or will hurt his loved ones.  It’s contrasts like these that make George’s story so compelling.

           George soon meets an aspiring comic named Ira (Seth Rogen).  George senses that there is something about Ira’s writing style that would compliment George’s own voice, so he makes him an offer.  Soon Ira, becomes George’s new right-hand man and the only thing close to resembling a support group that George has.

           This is not merely a film about one comic’s struggle with mortality.  No, it is much more nuanced than that.  Trust me, it’s also much more hilarious than its dark subject matter implies.  As in previous Apatow films, there is a cavalcade of supporting cast members, each of whom deliver mostly fantastic performances. 

 The film is rather lengthy, and by the time four major characters reach the home of Simmons’ ex-wife (Leslie Mann), the story begins to careen down an arc that requires us to quickly believe in the extent of all of this couple’s marital problems.  The pay-off, though rushed, is genuinely satisfying.  It implies, that each character will choose a path that is truly best for themselves, not just what the audience would most like to see. 

 Here Apatow does not stick to formula, he sticks to his guns and creates characters with remarkable depth and extreme vulnerability.  His wonderful insight into what makes a character intriguing, and most importantly, the characters that surround him, make this film what it is. 

 

 

4/5

Moon makes us revisit age old questions...

Although I am not old enough to remember the original 1969 moon landing, my loved ones have often indirectly done their part to help me re-create the scene in my mind.  I remember years ago, trifling through a box of my late grandfather’s old newspaper columns The Casual Comment.  I happened to stumble across an article he had written dated merely days after Neil Armstrong first took those now legendary “small steps”.  In it, my grandfather reflected upon the wonder and mystery of what it was like, to now live in a world in which “man has walked on the moon”.  Now, 40 years later at what some would call the height of our technological prowess,  a film like Duncan Jones’ brilliant Moon questions where we are headed, in an age when sending an ordinary human to the moon does little to satisfy our fancy, or our dollars.

I have to warn you, this week’s movie is one that I can assure you has probably flown under your radar.  No it is not a big budget vehicle like Transformers, therefore it doesn’t have quite the same ad revenue behind it.  I promise you though, your experience will be much more gratifying. So in breaking with the golden rule of most film critics, I am going to tell you why it is worth your time to see a film like Moon

Astronaut Sam Bell (a knock-out performance by Sam Rockwell) has endured quite the long haul.  For three years he has been the lone man on a crew intended to harvest the moon’s resources in order to produce clean burning energy for the entire world.  Sam doesn’t work for the government but for a massive corporation that has hired him out to do this job that painstakingly requires the abilities of human interaction.  Basically, if the machines screw up while he’s up there, it’s Sam’s job to work out the kinks.  In between menial tasks such as these, he waits.  He longs for home, for his wife and daughter.

With just a few weeks to go on his shift,  an accident occurs near the space station.  When Sam wakes up in the infirmary being looked after by the ship’s A.I. Gerty (voiced wonderfully by Kevin Spacey)  he finds a disturbance somewhere outside the space station.  What he finds there is beyond anything he could have possibly imagined.  It is from this point that the rest of the film delves into the struggles Sam faces as he interacts with the other new human he has discovered on the ship, which also happens to be…himself.  I realize full well I may have lost some of you with that last sentence, but I assure to say much more would be spoiling far too much.

There are few scenes you can watch in Moon without thinking of its predecessor 2001: a space odyssey, but the genius of Moon is that it pays homage to its forerunners while still managing to say something current and fresh.  The film is a wonderful sample of a dying genre: hard sci-fi.  The kind that makes us ask questions that I’m sure my Grandfather was asking that summer night 40 years ago:  What is it that makes us human?  Where do we go from here? And what does our future hold?

4/5