Entries in the Category "the 40-year-old virgin"
Golden Globes Recap
This will be shorter and less detailed than my usual next-day awards show extravaganza. I had family visiting this weekend, and both my mom and aunt joined me for the Globes viewing, so we were able to crack jokes and comment on the clothes in real time, which sort of took away some of the excitement of doing it here. What can I say? SO SORRY INTERNET. We still have the Oscars.
Continue reading "Golden Globes Recap"
Movie Review: Funny People
Being major Judd Apatow fans, Jeremy and I saw this Friday night. We were pretty shocked at how empty the theater was, actually (it was maybe a third full) and wondered if maybe the "Adam Sandler plays serious, has cancer" thing was scaring off comedy fans. The film ended up pulling off a paradox, hitting number one at the box office this weekend, but still playing way below expectations. More on that from the Los Angeles Times here.
The paradox is sort of apt, because the movie in general was both brilliant and disappointing. It doesn’t have the same ring as The 40-Year-Old Virgin or Knocked Up, the sort of guys-sitting-around-talking-about-ridiculous-things-foul-mouthedly-and-hilariously thing. It’s really quite different; it’s a more mature film, and I don’t say that just because it’s more serious, which it also is. Those movies were like specific gags revolving around a premise; this movie puts more of the focus on the premise, and the gags that do appear are only incidental. What I mean is, how do you make a movie about a handful of people (and cancer) funny? Well, make the lot of them comedians, and then you’ll have to show them doing their acts from time to time, and it will lighten the mood.
This seemed to be the thought process, and it somewhat works. For the first hour and a half, though, I wasn’t really concerned that it wasn’t that funny because it was so good. The movie settles itself amongst the inner tensions of these three roommates who are aspiring comedians and actors (Seth Rogen, Jason Schwartzman, and Jonah Hill), how they pretend to support each other but secretly compete with each other, and how the dynamic shifts when one guy (Rogen) becomes apprenticed to the most famous funny guy in the movies, played by Adam Sandler. Also, the famous guy has terminal cancer.
Let’s get it out of the way right here: Adam Sandler is actually terrific in the role; he’s both playing himself and not playing himself. (Several reviewers have felt the need to point out in their reviews that Sandler is, in fact, married with children. I guess because they were afraid that people at home would be worrying about him.) He has the career of Sandler (he’s a huge star who can’t even walk through the vestibule of the hospital where he’s received his diagnosis of untreatable cancer without being asked to pose for pictures taken via iPhone) but his personal life is in shambles because he’s a huge jerk who has alienated everyone. David Denby at The New Yorker described Sandler’s character as “frighteningly intelligent,” and yeah, it seems right, only in the sense that the character zeroes in on people’s weaknesses and exploits them. It’s this quality that made him a great comedian and a terrible friend, and the movie shows all that without having to say it explicitly, and it’s really quite wonderful.
And then… well, the movie takes a turn about halfway through, when Sandler’s situation changes. He picks up the movie and takes it with him on a journey that is not nearly as fun as the stuff that came before it. Seth Rogen had a very important role in the first half--he bridges the gap between Sandler’s world of fame and paying gigs and his friends’ world of amateur night and good faith loans, as well as playing the guy on the precipice, the guy who could sell out if he wanted to, but isn’t yet sure that he wants to. Again, bridging a gap, this one between cool Hollywood ruthlessness and old-fashioned affability. Unfortunately, Rogen becomes a pointless hanger-on in the second half. The movie coasts to what seems like it will be a very bleak, cynical ending, and then it chickens out and closes on a scene that is both hackneyed and implausible. And we walk out of the theater, Sad People.
A writer I really like, Linda Holmes at NPR’s Monkey See blog, had a really different perspective on the movie: she connects the first half and the second thematically and declares the film a success. I think she’s right about theme, but I think that the changes of both tone and focus are too egregious to declare the movie a success. Still, as they say on the Internet, your mileage may vary.
For what it's worth, I will watch Funny People again for that first movie; I will probably turn it off when it hits the second. Overall, it’s worth seeing, provided you can deal with major tonal shifts, the two-and-a-half hour running time, and newfound respect for Adam Sandler.
Edited to add: see also Sling Blog's Editors' Recap of Funny People
Entertainment Weekly's 100 New Classics: Summed Up
I’m coming closer and closer to finishing up the AFI lists—with the most minimal effort it will happen this week—but before that happens I thought I would sum up the EW list with my two favorite things, opinions and statistics.
Here’s how I felt about the list:
Least enjoyed: Blue Velvet, Drugstore Cowboy, Evil Dead 2, Fatal Attraction, Natural Born Killers
Most enjoyed: A Room with a View, Brokeback Mountain, Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, Ed Wood, Glory, Hannah and Her Sisters, In the Mood for Love, Schindler’s List, The Incredibles, The Lives of Others
Most enjoyed (pre-list favorites): Back to the Future, Clueless, Donnie Brasco, Edward Scissorhands, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Fargo, Ghostbusters, L.A. Confidential, Lost in Translation, Memento, Men in Black, Moulin Rouge, Office Space, Rushmore, The 40-Year-Old Virgin, The Naked Gun, The Silence of the Lambs, The Truman Show, Thelma and Louise, Witness
Additionally, I’ve been compiling a list of Notable Omissions--movies which were released between ’83 and ’07, and thus eligible for the list, but which are unaccountably absent. The list will appear in a future entry (or, if it keeps expanding, in two of them).
Here’s some stats that interested me:
The breakdown of the list by decade is 30 films from the 1980s, 45 from the 1990s and 25 from the 2000s. Even so, the majority of the films I watched were from the 1980s, which is easily enough explained: while my movie coverage has been adequate in the ‘90s and ‘00s, I’m still playing catch-up to movies that came out when I was a child.
The directors whose films I watched the most of were Steven Spielberg, Ang Lee, Alfonso Cuaron, Sam Raimi and James Cameron, at 2 films each. Cameron actually had 3 films on the list, but I had already seen Titanic (January 1997, the afternoon after I took my SATs, in case anyone cares). Other twice-appearing directors were Tim Burton, Rob Reiner, and Paul Thomas Anderson--each of whom had one movie I had seen previously and one movie which I watched this summer for the list--and Martin Scorsese, Peter Weir, Ridley Scott and the Coen brothers, each of whom had two films I had already seen.
One benefit of the EW list which I have mentioned previously is that its horizons extended beyond American-made movies. Another feature of the list, which I didn’t notice until I began compiling these stats yesterday, is that the EW list includes female directors--only five of them, but that still trounces either AFI list at zero and zero, respectively. Three of the female-helmed movies were massive hits: Shrek (co-directed by Vicky Jenson and Andrew Adamson), Clueless (Amy Heckerling) and Big (Penny Marshall). I had seen all of those movies, multiple times on multiple occasions.
The other two were critical darlings, and represent the only two Oscar nominations for Best Director that have ever happened to women. Ever. [Edited to add: I have since checked IMDb and realized that I misread Jane Campion's biography. One other woman received a Best Director Oscar nomination, Lina Wertmuller in 1975. My indignance is, I think, still warranted.] Those movies are The Piano (Jane Campion, in 1994—this was a list movie) and Lost in Translation (Sofia Coppola, in 2004, already seen). Though neither woman won the directing award, both took home the same consolation prize: Best Original Screenplay. At this rate, another woman should be due to lose Best Director in another five years. That’s not a fault of the list, of course, but of Hollywood standards in general.
One final observation: the Entertainment Weekly list feels, in general, darker and more gothic than the AFI lists. It seems densely populated with drug movies, mob movies, serial killer movies, sci-fi creature-on-the-loose movies. I don’t think this is necessarily because those darker genres are being made more of today. Look again at my Ed Wood entry and all those movies Bela Lugosi made.
The difference is that genre movies are becoming increasingly more respected; probably Francis Ford Coppola started things off by making operatic mob movies (popular since the 1930s) which so effectively utilized the concept of the American dream that the Corleones became a part of our cultural fabric. These days, any serious director can make a critically-acclaimed crime movie (see last summer’s The Dark Knight, or, from two summers ago, Zodiac). On the flip side, so-called “feelgood” movies are losing respect. Too many brainless romantic comedies which force two patently unlikeable characters to kiss in the rain and get married as the end credits roll, too many of those disposable kids’ movies where the kid discovers his dog can fly and that helps him stand up against a bully, or whatever.
Basically, it’s hard to scrounge up the sincerity that elevates a movie like It’s a Wonderful Life above its Hallmark-y premise, and they just don’t do it that much anymore.