..Gary Dretzka
..Noah Forrest
..Leonard Klady
..David Poland
..Douglas Pratt
..Ray Pride
..Kim Voynar
..Michael Wilmington

..Wilmington on DVD ..MCN Weekend

Funny People Plus, Thirst, Adam,
and Yoo-Hoo Mrs. Goldberg

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Funny People (Three and a Half Stars)
U.S.; Judd Apatow, 2009
    
Take it from Judd Apatow, Adam Sandler and Seth Rogen. Money doesn't solve everything, and maybe the right health care or good sex doesn't either. But at least moolah, good doctoring and the horizontal bop may help you make better, more serious movies, somewhere between all the crowd-pleasing dirty joke-a-thons.

Sometimes though, those dirty joke-a-thons can be good and serious too. Director-writer Judd Apatow has become such a comedy movie powerhouse, so cornering the market on his specialty -- sex comedies about horny nerds, mixing raunchy, excrement-spiced hilarity with often successful attempts at quasi-sensitive human drama -- that I wonder if Funny Business runs the risk of being dismissed by some as Apatow's, and star Sandler's phony Oscar-mongering serious bid.

That wouldn't be fair, though the strategy seems obvious: tell the same smutty jokes about sex and flatulence and all the rest, set up the same kind of sexual power fantasies. But make your lead character -- in this case, Sandler as comedy movie king George Simmons -- a lonely, sad but still indomitably gag-slinging fellow, who's lost his one great love (Leslie Mann as ex-wife Laura), and is apparently dying of a rare blood disease. Then have him watched over, in all his sad affluence and melancholy L. A. hedonism, by young loser-comic Ira (Rogen), whom George impulsively hires as his death-watch go-fer.

Guess what. I liked it. In fact, it's my favorite Apatow movie, if you just count the ones he's personally directed (The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Knocked Up) -- and maybe also if you add all the others he's had a hand in, including Pineapple Express.

Funny People works, most of the time, on all of the levels it's trying to hit. It's a very, very funny Apatow sex comedy and a canny dive into the world of L. A. standup comedy -- and it's also a human drama, capable of touching, or at least groping, your heart, or at least mine. It's typically offensive, of course: Rex Reed didn't like it, partly because he doesn't like the way Sandler looks in a swimming suit. (Any comebacks?)

It's actually possible to compare Funny People to Sideways, and though it's not anywhere near as good, at least they're on the same wavelength - as buddy-buddy comedies with believable and funny people and milieus, with a darker vein underneath. I won't kick if Sandler gets nominations or prizes of some kind for this; he does an excellent job in a role that's no pushover: playing an L. A. player/winner who's also a jerk, and who has to stare for a long time into the abyss.

Anyway, comedy performances are all too often slighted, and you don't want to see a trend coming on where Steve Martin, Eddie Murphy, and Sasha Baron Cohen all have to start developing terminal illnesses (like Bruno?) to get recognized. Funny People is a funny show that, despite some rocky moments toward the end, deserves its praise. (By the way, I don't care about Sandler's swimming gear. Or even Rogen's.)

The movie starts with George seeming to make fun of death in a little video. Then, all too soon, he's facing it, with a doctor telling him he has a leukemia-like, mostly fatal illness, and that the only likely treatment is an experimental regimen with only an 8 % success ratio. Sobered, George tries to escape his current world of Sandler-like boffo box office big movie bad jokes, blockbusters in which he plays mermen and babies, and revisits his past. He starts playing comedy clubs again, little places where he can connect with a live audience, who will pay him in laughs and act unofficial mass shrinks. At one of those clubs, he runs into Rogen as a young unsuccessful comic named Ira, who amuses him by making fun of the darker speculations in his monologue -- and he hires him as his (Eve Harrington?) go-fer and sounding board.

Ira isn't exactly the happiest of funny people either. He rooms with an egotistical, successful TV comic actor and sort of comedy babe-magnet, Mark (Jason Schwarzman) and a soon to be successful standup buddy Leo (Jonah Hill), and makes his real living, building deli sandwiches. Suddenly, he's plunged into George's world of beach homes and stretch limos, and also, he's privy to George's obsessions, like falsetto balladeering and George's pursuit of his ex-wife Laura (Leslie Mann, who has an influential husband around). Leslie is, George has belatedly decided, his one true love, perhaps because she looks better than him in a swimming suit. (Perhaps not.) But Laura is no easy prey. When they were together, he cheated on her constantly and now she's been married for years and has two daughters (played by the Apatow girls).

But, such is George's jokester's charm, that she proves surprisingly susceptible, though she has an Australian husband Clarke (Eric Bana), who is friendly, self-confident and possibly dangerous.

By the end, the friendship between George and Ira has been exposed as more of a volatile employer, employee relationship, where George, however pally, calls the shots,

The climax of George and Laura's tale has some Hitchockian implausibilities, especially when Clarke disappears and Ira oddly decides to turn into Dr. Phil. But, up 'til then, Funny People scores big. Everybody around me was laughing, and none of them looked like studio plants. Sandler underplays George, adopting a relaxed, resigned manner, that helps the jokes and doesn't cornball up his sickness. Rogen does his specialty, a raunchy smart guys a little over his head, and though I thought he flubbed his big crying jag scene, he's as good as usual. So is Jonah Hill. (I was less high on Schwarzman, but then I didn't see any of them in swimming suits.) And Bana amusingly sends up Australia and machismo. (Or are they the same thing?) There are also a parade of comics and standup scenes, including Andy Dick, Charles Fleischer and Ray Romano, that are sometimes reminiscent of that great comedians' chorus in Woody Allen's Broadway Danny Rose.

Now, Funny People is no Broadway Danny Rose either. (Rim shot.) But for much of its run, I was perfectly happy with it, even if it's hard to imagine that George has no one to hang around with in L. A. but Ira -- and maybe hard to forgive Apatow for not giving us more inside Hollywood characters and jokes. Instead he focuses on standup, and he mostly outdoes David Seltzer, Tom Hanks and Punchline. The characters, the talk, and the emotional and humorous rhythms seem just right.

Apatow gets knocked for his reliance on sex and crap. But here, we see that a repertoire like that is just par for the pressure cooker world of standup. If you had to get laughs from a lot of strangers, you might start relying on sex and crap too. They're pretty damned reliable. I'm not too high on Farrelly Brothers movies either. (There's a Farrelly joke or two in Funny People.) But they wouldn't get made if people didn't laugh at them. And they do.

That's the ultimate kick and last laugh of Funny People. It presents comedians, especially Jewish comedians, as a breed apart, whose ability to get laughs, even out of life's worst moments. (Take the Holocaust. Please.) gives them a strong, sure, but not always controllable power. A sexual power as well. You can believe George as a stud and Ira as his raunch acolyte. Funny People also has a beautiful ending, which I won't describe, except to say that I agree with Apatow's final Preston Sturges-ish sentiments. Sometimes writing a good joke is as good as sex. And making people laugh when they want to, can be a goddam wonderful thing in this crazy caravan. Even if all you've got are sex and crap jokes.

      
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Thirst (Three Stars)
South Korea, Park Chan-wook, 2008

Emile Zola's Therese Raquin, with its pre-James M. Cain deadly adultery plot, was made into a fine French period noir by Marcel Carne. Here, the same dark novel supplies the inspiration for a bloody, violent, riveting, sometimes nauseating vampire movie by Park Chan-wook, who made the snazzy Korea-noir OldBoy and here tries to come up with a Dracula Always Rings Twice.

He almost does, though the film will be way too violent for people who think movies are way too violent -- and maybe not violent enough for the real sickos. Like Park's other stuff, it's stylishly lurid and wildly exciting, and it has a great schnook-hero in Song Kang-ho, as the monk who woke up a vampire, and an absolutely terrific femme fatale in Kim Ok-vin (or bin) as Tae-ju, who makes Lana Turner look like Bernadette of Lourdes.


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Adam (Three Stars)
U.S.; Max Mayer, 2009

Hugh Dancy, who played the charming and chatty magazine stud alongside Isla Fisher in Confessions of a Shopaholic, shows real range here by playing Adam, a New York recluse who works sometimes as an electronic engineer, is a planetarium nut, and suffers from Asperger's Syndrome, which makes him seem anti-social. Adam also has a big crush on neighbor Beth Buchwald (Rose Byrne), whose dad (Peter Gallagher) disapproves -- a snobbish guy despite his own problems with the law.

This is a perfectly sweet and well-made little movie, but not especially memorable. My preferring the bloodthirsty Thirst this week may suggest that I'm some kind of deviate, or possibly put me on somebody's emotional blacklist. But vampires deserve compassion too. Kudos to Dancy though. Maybe his next role, with lots of latex, will be Winston Churchill.


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Yoo-Hoo, Mrs. Goldberg (Three Stars)
U.S.; Aviva Kempner, 2009

Aviva Kempner's treasurable documentary on Molly Goldberg herself, the great Gertrude Berg -- and on her golden decades on radio (where the Goldbergs originated) and on TV, with the smash hit Jewish family comedy show about Molly and her brood in the Bronx -- is both a splendid reminiscence of a superb, too often neglected actress and show, and a stinging portrait of a black list tragedy.

That's, of course, the sad tale of the destruction of the career of Berg's costar Philip Loeb, who played Molly's hubby (perfectly) on the air, but who ended up losing his gig when the morons from Red Channels and the like called him a Commie. (Berg herself tried hard to help Loeb stay on the show, and later to start it up again and bring him back). Finally, the one time actors' union activist Loeb lost heart and killed himself, inspiring the onscreen black list suicide scene played by Loeb's friend (and host), Zero Mostel in The Front. May the people who drove Loeb out of TV and into his grave rot in Hell, and may their present-day apologists, like venom-tongued McCarthy fan Ann Coulter, rot along with them. And God bless Gertrude and Molly, which He surely does.

This is a terrific little movie, not least because Kempner so obviously adores her subject: the saftig, beaming, endlessly resourceful and funny Berg, who understood families, especially Jewish families, like few other show biz greats, and whose work as actress and writer inspired a flood of classic family TV sitcoms after her, from I Love Lucy to All in the Family and Roseanne.

Molly and the Goldbergs were sometimes damned as stereotypes. (Interviewee Ed Asner recalls that reaction.) But the movie I think, proves that her humor defused rather than fed any prejudices. Unfortunately, there are few Molly Goldberg videos or DVDs available today -- the one available on Amazon comes mostly from the show's final season, when the producers unwisely packed the Goldberg family off to the suburbs. But perhaps this fine, infinitely lovable little movie will inspire some kinescope-unearthing efforts for a future DVD.

Anyway, It's good to see Molly again. And to remember how warmly and well she drew us into her window and into her world, with a simple Yoo Hoo.


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Read Michael Wilmington on DVDs

- Michael Wilmington
July 30, 2009

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