I read somewhere a reviewer refer to Judd Apatow’s new film, Funny People, as his “James L. Brooks movie.”  Well, if James L. Brooks isn’t making James L. Brooks movies anymore (his last film was 2004’s Spanglish, which not coincidentally was also the last time, before Funny People, that I enjoyed a movie starring Adam Sandler), then I for one am more than happy to see Judd Apatow fill the void!

I’ve been hearing a lot of disappointment from people who have seen Funny People.  I suppose if one goes in expecting the laugh-a-minute experience of The 40 Year Old Virgin or Knocked Up, one would be disappointed.  There is a lot of very funny humor in Funny People, but also some lengthy stretches without any laughs at all.  This would be a big problem if what was happening in those laugh-free-zones wasn’t compelling — but I found everything to be VERY compelling.  Funny People is a much more adult, nuanced film than Mr. Apatow’s first two movies, and while I positively ADORED those first two films, I am also thrilled to see him exploring some deeper territory here.

Adam Sandler plays George Simmons, a wildly successful comedian and star of many hugely popular and sort-of-juvenile, well, Adam Sandler-type movies.  Despite his success, he is all alone in his huge mansion (except for his house-keeping staff, of course), and struggling to deal with the news that he has been diagnosed with a form of leukemia.  Seth Rogen plays Ira Wright, a young man trying to break into the brutally tough world of stand-up comedy.  Their paths cross one evening when George drops by a comedy club where Ira is waiting to perform, and Ira quickly gets sucked up into George’s orbit.  Ira is star-struck by getting to spend time with his idol, and desperate to taste some of the massive fame to which George has become inured, and George — though he’d never admit it — is lonely and looking for some sort of companionship, having driven away all of his former friends, girlfriends, and family.

Rogen and Sandler are both at the top of their games, creating fully believable, lived-in characters that feel completely real.  I have often said that I really like Adam Sandler’s comedy, but that I can’t stand his movies.  This remains true for me.  But I have really enjoyed the few films in which Sandler has actually tried to ACT — films like Spanglish, and Punch-Drunk Love.  In those movies, I was quite impressed that Sandler could actually create a real, sympathetic character, and he does similarly high-quality work here.  Rogen too turns in probably his most human performance here (at least since Freaks and Geeks).  Don’t get me wrong, I’ve LOVED Rogen’s comedic performances in his recent films (such as the aforementioned 40 year Old Virgin and Knocked Up, along with Superbad, Zach and Miri Make a Porno, and many others).  And he certainly garners some yucks in Funny People.  But he also plays things fairly straight for most of the movie, and he demonstrates a great confidence in allowing others to get the big laugh lines.

It probably helps that so much of the material in the film seems like it was based directly off of the real-life experiences of Mr. Apatow, along with Rogen and Sandler.  Adam Sandler IS a goofy oddball who has reached extraordinary heights of fame.  Rogen IS only a few years distant from his years of struggling (as a writer, not a stand-up comedian, but the similarity is there) in Hollywood.  And Mr. Apatow spent a long time in the “wilderness” before attaining critical and commercial success with The 40 Year Old Virgin.

Frankly, one of the main charms for me about Funny People is just how specific all of the references and characters in the film are.  I don’t know where the line is between Apatow/Rogen/Sandler’s real life-experiences and the fictionalized stories created to dramatize the film lies, but pretty much everything in the film feels dead-on and “real” to me, even little details like the wardrobe and set-dressings.  There’s a scene, early in the film, in Ira’s room, and you can see behind him, hanging on his wall, a framed photo of Garry Shandling.  Shandling is dressed in a suit, seated at a desk chair, and facing the camera with a slightly puzzled expression on his face.  Behind him is his desk, which is on fire.  I know that photo — and I remember cutting it out of a magazine when I was a kid (and I’m certain I still have it in my possession somewhere)!  Now, I hold no aspirations to become a stand-up comedian, but I do remember being a kid and idolizing certain comedians (many of whom I still idolize!), and there’s something so RIGHT that that particular photo would be hanging on Ira’s wall.

As with all Apatow productions, the main cast is surrounded by a wonderful array of brilliant comedians and actors who fill out the supporting roles.  Ira’s roomates are Mark Taylor Jackson (Jason Schwartzman), and Leo Koenig (Jonah Hill).  Mark has achieved some measure of success in Hollywood, starring in a Head of the Class style stupid sitcom called Yo Teach.  (Check out this fake sitcom here in two brilliant clips that are way-more substantial than what we actually get to see of Yo Teach in the finished film.)  Leo, as with Ira, is still struggling to become a successful comedian.

Leslie Mann portrays Laura, the “girl who got away” over whom George pines.  Mann remains as gifted a comedic actress as ever, though I thought that several of her scenes veered too far into schmaltz.  I’m not sure if I should fault her or Apatow’s directing for this.  (Sadly, one of the film’s most major mis-steps was a major scene for Ms. Mann.  In the very second scene in which she appears in the film, she meets up with George, who has told her of his illness.  She breaks down and weepily declares that he was the love of her life.  I found that scene to be WAY too over the top for my taste — and also totally unnecessary, narratively, as it was already totally clear that George considered HER the love of HIS life, and I would have preferred to hold the suspense until later in the film as to how exactly she felt about him.  The weepy scene also soured me a bit on Laura’s character and Ms. Mann’s performance — though I do think she is quite solid for the remainder of the film.)

Complicating Laura and George’s relationship is the small fact that she is married with two kids.  Mann and Apatow’s real-life kids make a return appearance (after dazzling as Mann and Paul Rudd’s kids in Knocked Up) and are once again very cute and very funny.   Eric Bana positively kills as Laura’s Australian husband Clarke — it’s an astounding emotional and comedic performance from an actor not well known for comedy.  Finally, I also advise you to keep your eyes peeled for a wonderful array of cameos from comedy big-shots (Norm MacDonald, Paul Reiser, and many more that I won’t spoil.)

There’s a lot that Mr. Apatow has to say in Funny People — about the comedy world, about Hollywood, about mortality and marriage and the way people respond to tough situations and difficult choices.  The film is filled with humor, but a simple comedy this is not.  Is it a little long?  It surely is — and I must admit that a leaner cut of this film would probably be a stronger film.  But I was more than happy to spend 2 and a half hours in Mr. Apatow’s world along with Ira, George, Laura, and all of their crazy friends and family.  Bring on the inevitable even-longer Director’s Cut on DVD!!

I love Harold Ramis.  For his performance as Egon Spengler in Ghostbusters (and Ghostbusters 2) alone, the man deserves to be recognized as a comic genius.  When you also consider his involvement in films such as Animal House, Caddyshack, Stripes, Groundhog Day, Anaylze This, and so many more, then you have to realize what an impact he has had on film comedies over the past 30 years.

And yet, it seems like Mr. Ramis has fallen out of the spotlight in the aughts.  He’s had some great (albeit small) acting roles (in Orange County, Knocked Up, and Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story), but none of the films he has directed recently have made much of an impact: Bedazzled (in 2000), Anaylze That (the misbegotten sequel to Analyze This from 2002), and The Ice Harvest (in 2005) all came and went without much fanfare.

So I was very excited when I read, last year, that Mr. Ramis was hooking up with Jack Black and quite a few members of the Judd Apatow comedy troupe (Michael Cera, Paul Rudd, Christopher Mintz-Plasse) as well as a number of other very funny people (Oliver Platt, David Cross, Hank Azaria) for the Biblical-comedy Year One.

For a movie crafted by so many talented folks, though, the result is surprisingly mediocre.  Oh, it’s funny, don’t get me wrong.  There are plenty of big laughs.  But there are also plenty of scenes that are very flat, with few if any laughs at all.  And, even of the jokes that work, a lot of the humor of the film feels rather tame, rather familiar.  Stacked up against the great comedies of the past few years (mostly from the Apatow brand) like The 40 Year Old Virgin, Superbad, Knocked Up, etc. etc., — comedies that took your breath away they were so funny, and, even more than that, felt like original, unique works, very different from any movie comedies that you’d ever seen before — Year One pales in comparison.

My biggest joy in watching the film came from sitting back and watching the great cast at play.  Oliver Platt, in particular, is just marvelously loony as Sodom’s High Priest.  I was also pleasantly surprised by the amount of screen-time that the great David Cross (who plays Cain) got.  I didn’t expect him to reappear after the early scene with his brother Abel (Paul Rudd), so I was pleased by his large role in the second half of the film.  I should also mention Xander Berkeley (George Mason from the early days of 24) who is just terrific as the King, and Vinnie Jones (a familiar face from Guy Ritchie’s films) as the menacing soldier Sargon.  (I had to look up his character’s name on imdb.)

Year One is a funny film, and I enjoyed it.  But I had expected much more.  It’s not quite the triumphant return to grace for Harold Ramis that I had been anticipating.

Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story is one of the few films from the past several years that Judd Apatow has had a hand in (he co-wrote the film and was one of its producers), that, despite his involvement, did not receive a lot of love from audiences upon its release.  My own recollection of seeing it in theatres was that it was sort of funny but not fantastic.  However, upon a second viewing on DVD last month, I must say that I have fallen head-over-heels in love with this film!

Walk Hard is, first and foremost, an evisceration of a very specific type of film: the Oscar-bait musical bio-pic (like Ray, Walk the Line, etc.).  In scene after scene after scene, the film mercilessly sends-up every single ridiculous cliche of those types of movies.  

We meet young Dewey growing up in a ramshackle farm down South, enjoying an idyllic life.  But a day of fun with his brother (”ain’t nothing horrible gonna happen today!” the doomed tyke promises) ends in tragedy after a machete-fighting accident.  Out of that grief, Dewey discovers his musical ability, playing the blues (”I got the blues… cut my brother in half…”).  A few years later, a nervous Dewey performs at a High School concert.  (Starting here, Dewey is played by John C. Reilly, despite the fact that the character is only 14 in this scene.  As Apatow and Director/co-writer Jake Kasdan note in their DVD commentary, they were interested in poking fun at  ”just how young the lead actor THINKS he can play” in these sorts of movies.)   Despite the innocuousness of the pop ballad Dewey performs (entitled “Take My Hand”), the concert erupts into a frenzy of sexualized dancing (as, you know, Rock and Roll is wont to cause).  After being condemned by the local priest (”You think we don’t know what you’re talking about when you say take my hand?!”) and his father (”The wrong kid died!”), Dewey decides to leave home and set out on a musical career.

What follows reads like a crazy check-list of the types of scenes one could expect in these sorts of films, charting our hero’s rise and fall and eventual redemption.  Dewey gets an opportunity to perform his music for a disinterested record company executive (played brilliantly by John Michael Higgins, who proclaims: “You have failed conclusively!  There is nothing that you can do, here in this room, to turn that around!”) but, of course, once Dewey plays one of his own songs (the titular “Walk Hard”), the executive is blown away, as are his Hassidic Jewish backers (Harold Ramis — yes, Harold Ramis — Phil Rosenthal, and Martin Starr in delightfully over-the-top Hassidic get-up and accents).  As Dewey becomes a star, his path crosses with many famous musicians, played by an astounding array of actors in one bizarre cameo after another: Frankie Muniz as Buddy Holly!  Jack White as Elvis Presley!  And, in the movie’s funniest scene, Dewey meets the Beatles, with Jack Black as Paul McCartney (”John, I’m sick of you being so dark when I’m so impish and whimsical!”), Paul Rudd as John Lennon, Justin Long as George Harrison, and Jason Schwartzman as Ringo Starr.  In each case, the casting is so bizarre and yet so weirdly perfect.

The film continues to follow Dewey through the years as he morphs through a variety of musical styles and influences.  He goes through a Dylan phase, creating nonsensical protest songs.  (Here’s a line from the dead-on parody of “Subterranean Homesick Blues”:  ”Mailboxes drip like lampposts in the twisted birth canal of the coliseum/ fairy teapots mask the temper tantrums oh say can you see ‘em.”)  Dewey, like Johnny Cash, is affected by his time in prison (”I understand the common man the way I never did before!”), leading to his writing a “Folsom Prison Blues”-type song called “Guilty as Charged.”  (”If you say my love is too large… then I’m guilty… guilty as charged…”)  Of course, as Dewey gets more and more successful he becomes increasingly arrogant and unmoored from reality.  In the ’70s, in another of my favorite sequences from the film, Dewey becomes obsessed with perfecting his “Pet Sounds”-esque musical masterpiece (”I’m hearing… more aboriginal percussionists.  And I want an army of digeridoos!  Fifty thousand digeridoos!”)  

Ultimately, Dewey’s drug habits drive him to near-ruin and estrangement from his friends and fellow musicians.  But, as always happens in these movies, hitting rock bottom enables him to sort out his priorities and re-connect with his family.  Towards the end of his life, when he is invited to a musical salute to his life and career (in which we get to witness a wonderful and ridiculous cover of Dewey’s song “Walk Hard” by Jewel, Jackson Browne, Lyle Lovett, and Ghostface Killah), Dewey gets the opportunity to sum up his life for the audience in a wonderfully on-the nose parody of the typical bio-pic redemptive finish (”This, is finally what I’ve learned,” he sings: “And then in the end, it’s family and friends.  Loving yourself.  But not only yourself…”)

I’ve spent a while summarizing this film, but believe me I’ve only scratched the surface.  There are so many wonderful digressions.  Apatow, Kasdan and co. left no stone un-turned as, in moment after moment, they take everything that we’ve seen a million times in these musical bio-pics and turn the crazy up to eleven.  Similar to the way that I now find it difficult, after watching Tropic Thunder, not to laugh at the idea of “serious” Hollywood war movies, after Walk Hard I don’t think I can ever again take a movie like Ray or Walk the Line at all seriously.  

I’m not sure why I was so lukewarm on this film the first time I saw it.  It might be because, in this sort of parody film, there aren’t really any characters for one to latch onto, emotionally.  But John C. Reilly is absolutely magnificent in the lead role.  He’s able to ground even the most insane bouts of lunacy in the film, and he’s able to be lovable even when engaging in over-the-top spoiled musician bad behavior.  And he is an astounding musician and singer.  By the way, the music in this film is phenomenal, and that’s something that became much more apparent to me upon a repeat viewing.  The filmmakers have created an enormous catalogue of songs for Dewey, which we hear in snippets throughout the film.  These songs are very catchy (and VERY funny), and the way each song is able to evoke a specific influence and style (as Dewey travels through the years and through an array of musical periods) is nothing sort of magnificent.  After watching this movie last month, I immediately went and downloaded the soundtrack from itunes (which contains complete versions of a whopping THIRTY songs created for the movie).  Needless to say, that soundtrack has been in REGULAR rotation on my ipod.

I also need to mention the film’s tremendous supporting cast.  The Office’s Jenna Fischer is a delight as Dewey’s love Darlene, conveying innocence and naughtiness all at once.  SNL’s Kristen Wiig has a harder role as Dewey’s first wife.  As Apatow and Kasdan describe on their commentary, “in order for our hero to be incredibly sympathetic and still heroic when he leaves his wife for another woman midway through the movie, you need his first wife to be AWFUL to him throughout the whole first half.”  Well, Wiig dives into that assignment head-first, creating a hysterical portrait of a shrewish wife who doesn’t believe that Dewey will ever amount to anything.  Tim Meadows and Chris Parnell are also terrific as Dewey’s much put-upon band-mates.  And there is an amazing array of other very funny people who pop up in small roles throughout the film: Craig Robinson (The Office, Knocked Up), Martin Starr (Freaks and Geeks, Knocked Up), Jack McBrayer (30 Rock). Ed Helms (The Daily Show, The Office), David Krumholtz (playing almost the exact same role that he had in Ray), Jane Lynch (The 40 year Old Virgin, Role Models), and many other familiar faces all kill in their small roles.

As an added bonus, the DVD is packed with terrific special features.  There are lots of deleted and extended scenes, out-takes, and an entirely new cut of the film (entitled “The Unbearably Long, Self-Indulgent Director’s Cut”).  There’s also a lot of fascinating behind-the-scenes material that chronicles the enormous effort that went into creating all the music for the film.  Finally there is Apatow and Kasdan’s commentary track, which is insightful and funny (as you can tell since I’ve mentioned it several times already in this review).

Bottom line:  If you’ve enjoyed the other movies from the Apatow troupe (The 40 Year Old Virgin, Knocked Up, Superbad, etc…) but you skipped Walk Hard, I suggest you remedy that oversight as soon as you can!