As I noted in my review of I Love You Man, I have a love-hate relationship with Apatow. While I thought 40 Year-Old Virgin was an incredibly funny and fresh comedy, his shtick quickly grew stale. Really, how many times can you retreat the same old ground: man-child suffering from arrested development. After a certain point, you just want to yell out, "come on, dude, grow up." What's especially frustrating is that Apatow's short-lived television series Freaks and Geeks was amazing. It seems that those directionless high-school students that Apatow created just never managed to grow up.

Funny People, then, might be considered Apatow's first real attempt at a grown-up comedy. Adam Sandler plays a thinly-veiled version of himself, George Simmons. A middle-aged comedian who's had a run of successful films, Simmons is faced with a terminal disease. Much to no one's surprise, this results in his reflecting back on his life and realizing that all the success that he's had doesn't amount to much. At this point, there's nothing new here in the film's overall story line and structure.  What really makes this first part of the film worthwhile are the three supporting characters, three young comics trying to make it in Hollywood. The energy of these struggling three makes for an interesting contrast to Simmons' very established yet lonely life. If the film had stayed on course and focused on this, I think Funny People would have been a far more worthwhile film. As it is, the film veers away from this story and dramatically changes gears. 


In the second half of the film, Simmons seeks redemption by looking up an old girlfriend -- "the one who got away" when he chose his career over love. At this point, then, the film turns into a drab romance. While Eric Bana's short cameo is entertaining enough, it hardly makes up for the clumsy storyline. There's something about American films that no matter what the subject matter, there has to be a romantic element, some kind of relationship angle. If you're lucky, the romance is fairly innocuous but, more often than not, it tends to really diminish the film. In this case, it really diminishes the film.
 
 

The J and I saw this on the same night that we saw AWAY WE GO. Of course, if you're reading this blog for the first time right now, you would realize it by going to the very next entry -- an entry that was put up months ago. I don't know what the hell happened during the summer, but the last three months just whizzed by and I've got a backlog of movies to get through. To help get through this pile, I've decided that I'm only going to review films I've seen for the first time. I spend a lot of time re-watching older films (some for pleasure, some for class). If I were to comment on those, I'd have to live in front of my computer.


Anyways, so I'm going to stop blathering about the blog and start doing some actual blogging.


I've always been a sucker for romantic comedies. Most of the time, no matter how bad they may be (and boy, they can be really bad at times), I'll usually drag myself to see them. Rom-Coms are like candy -- not nutritious but very comforting in a sweet and sickly sort of way. At their worst, rom-coms are like generic hard candy. They just leave a heavy coating in your mouth and eat away at your teeth compelling the need to do something to get that film out. At their best, however, rom-coms are like really rich, dark chocolate. More than just candy for kids, they can be complex and sophisticated bites of wonderful.


500 Days definitely falls into this latter category. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that 500 Days just might be the best romantic comedy since Annie Hall. Romantic comedies, like any other genre film, has to abide by certain conventions -- boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy tries to get girl back. But abiding by these conventions does not mean being limited by them. The best romantic comedies bend and twist these standards in such a way as to reinvent the very genre itself. 


The basic structure of 500 Days is non-linear. We start at the end of the relationship and we move throughout time, figuring out where the relationship went wrong. The film jumps from day 1 to day 350 to day 20, etc. Rather than following a simple chronology, this film basically goes against the grain and seeks out important thematic moments. It ties together seemingly disparate periods so that we can see that a relationship does not slowly dissolve in a clean, logical manner. In fact, if nothing else, this film revels in the very illogic of love. 


The film's male lead, Tom (played by Joseph Gordon Levitt, who's had quite a career revival since his appearance in Brick), tries desperately to understand his relationship, to make sense of what happened, to find a logical a reason for the relationship's demise because if he can do that then he can figure out an equally logical way to fix it. Without giving too much away, I'll simply add that the film ends in a way that defies logic. But, again, that's what makes this film so wonderful. In some ways, it echoes the ending of Annie Hall -- the relationship is over and so Alvie Singer (Woody Allen's character) creates a play in which he can revise the ending of his relationship -- to create a neatly packaged fiction to make up for the messy reality.


I realize that many people go to see films as an escape and there's certainly nothing wrong with that but I think the best films provide a particular kind of escape that allows us to return to real life with a refreshed, renewed, and newly enlightened understanding.



 
Academic Film Reviews