• Edgar Arce talks “The Cove” with documentarian Louie Psihoyos. [Latino Review]
• With Judd Apatow’s “Funny People” on the brain, Saul Austerlitz takes a look at the “dramedy” through the years. [Chicago Tribune]
• Meanwhile, Patrick Goldstein looks at the mystifying missed opportunity of the film’s one-sheet. [The Big Picture]
• Judd Apatow’s risky departure from formula with “Funny People.” [Wall Street Journal]
• Denise Martin talks to “(500) Days of Summer” star Joseph Gordon-Levitt. [Los Angeles Times]
• PODCAST: Yours truly talks the Oscar’s move to 10, the “Let the Right One In” remake and more with John Campea et al. [The Movie Blog]
Thanks to commenter AmericanRequiem for reminding me to post the new “Funny People” trailer. (Hey, I have to sleep sometime.) From where I’m standing, it’s a notable improvement on the previous trailer, not least because it’s considerably more tight-lipped about plot developments than that one was. Shame about that.
Interesting that this one seems to place more emphasis on the Seth Rogen character, who was pretty much just parsley on the side in the first one.
• Drew McWeeny catches up to “In the Realm of the Senses” 23 years later on Criterion Blu. [HitFix]
• Anna Pickard breaks down the “Funny People” trailer. [The Guardian]
• Steve Weintraub chats with “Big Bang Theory” star Jim Parsons at the Saturn Awards. (It’s one of my favorite sit-coms, so I thought I’d share.) [Collider]
• So you’ve been asking yourself, “What does a producer do, anyway?” Here’s a primer. [indieWIRE]
• So if you live in Glascow, you can finally watch Monty Python’s “Life of Brian” in a cinema. [The Independent]
• Deborah Landis, designer of the red jacket Michael Jackson wore in “Thriller.” [Speakeasy]
• Dan Zak catches up with “Chéri” star Michelle Pfeiffer at 51. [Washington Post]
• The 25 sexiest movies ever. Eh. [Entertainment Weekly]
Over at Examiner.com, Jeff Sneider (you know him around these parts as “The InSneider”) has put together a rundown of the 10 summer movies that have a shot at awards glory. In my post-Cannes Oscar column I mentioned how dreadfully quiet the first half of the year has been for awards hopefuls. After all, this time last year we’d already seen “The Visitor” and “WALL-E” as viable contenders, but this year — nothing.
Sneider is hanging his hat on a number of films he apparently hasn’t seen yet (Michael Mann’s “Public Enemies,” Judd Apatow’s “Funny People,” etc.), but most of the love goes to Kathryn Bigelow’s “The Hurt Locker,” which I’ll be getting to in due time. And I can’t say I disagree. Along with the perennial Pixar entry of the year, Bigelow’s Iraq character study clearly has the stuff if Summit is willing to go there. It needs to make money first, of course, which is why we’re getting trailers and posters that amp up the action elements. But it’s Bigelow’s best work ever and features awards caliber performances from Anthony Mackie and especially Jeremy Renner, both of which are mentioned in Sneider’s column.
Patrick Goldstein has already covered this matter in some detail, but I must admit the news that Judd Apatow’s “Funny People” is due to clock in at 150 minutes in length gives me some pause.
Editing is a sensitive and flexible art, and one shouldn’t presume to have a better sense than the director of the rhythmic requirements of an unseen film. And as Goldstein points out, if James L. Brooks-style dramedy really is Apatow’s creative touchstone here, a languid running time is par for the course.
But as someone who found both “Knocked Up” and “The 40 Year-Old Virgin” on the over-extended side of things, I’ll just say that the film will have to be very sharp indeed for me to enjoy two-and-a-half hours in the company of Adam Sandler.
I recently discussed the positive buzz building around Judd Apatow’s “Funny People,” which has thus far turned up numerous allusions to the unabashedly sentimental seriocomic stylings of James L. Brooks — a comparison that promises either polished awards-bait, mawkish pap or both, according to taste.
Suggesting that the Brooks similarities hold true beyond a glib glance-over of the film, Apatow fully acknowledges his debt to the “Terms of Endearment” filmmaker (with whom he worked on the 1990s animated series, “The Critic”) in this recent New York Times piece, which addresses his and his team’s weightier aims for the project:
Asked why, at 41, he would follow movies about sexuality and childbirth with a film about mortality, Mr. Apatow was circumspect. “I’ve unfortunately been around people who have been ill and seen people figure out how to deal with it,” he said. Some, he added, “just keep plowing on forward, and they don’t seem to change.”
“What I took from (working with Brooks) was, the audience is supposed to like the movie, as simple as that sounds,” Mr. Apatow said. “If they’re not loving it, you failed.”
But even Mr. Apatow’s closest confederates recognize that “Funny People” may not be as easily loved as his two previous films. “I wouldn’t describe it as dark,” said Mr. Rogen, a star of “40-Year-Old Virgin” and “Knocked Up.” “I would say it’s more ambitious in what it’s attempting to make light of.”
This sober tone colours the entire piece, as Apatow expresses his desire to make a “Tuesdays With Morrie”-type story but — before you retch — with the twist that “the main character learns nothing,” while the words “grown-up”, “intensely personal” and even “existential” come up at various points. No pressure, then.
I don’t mind admitting that I wasn’t entirely won over by the trailer for Judd Apatow’s “Funny People,” which, for all its smartness, seemed to me a little too calculated in its bid for laughing-through-the-tears pathos. Like pretty much everyone else, James L. Brooks struck me as an obvious point of reference — but whether we were talking Brooks on a good or bad day was unclear to me. It’s just a (very long and over-expository) trailer, after all.
Now Jeff Wells has chatted to a couple of folks who have seen it, and is passing along the word that Apatow has seemingly channeled Brooks on a very good day indeed. Awards-season good, even:
Possibly an award-level thing, a director friend said this morning, although he was just passing along the chatter. It’s more in the realm of Sandler for Best Actor and Apatow’s script for Best Original Screenplay, he speculated, than a Best Picture shot…but you never know.
So I called a non-vested guy who’s seen it, and here’s what he said: “Really funny, a really sweet movie, a lot of veracity…really a brilliant film. Everybody’s game goes up a lot. It’s a James L. Brooks-level thing and a great role for Adam. It’s a perfect blend of everything Sandler has done in a serious vein. The film could be a bit of a marketing problem because it’s about show business but it’s so real.. It’s about a famous guy, a comedian, having to deal with the fact hat he has no life and nobody to turn to. But he gets better [through a relationship with a younger comic]…it’s basically a love letter to having a family.”
No specific mention of Leslie Mann, who struck me on paper as the film’s likeliest awards prospect, but that was a shot in the dark. Anyway, I seem to recall hearing near-identical chatter about “Spanglish” before it finally surfaced, so I’ll remain guarded. (I’m expecting something better than that fiasco, of course, but I’m just sayin’.) Encouraging buzz, nonetheless.
Ahh. The dust is settling. And on the horizon, just visible through the mist and waiting to drive us all up the wall once again: the 2009 Oscar season.
I’ve been writing this year-in-advance column for probably six years now, and I always look forward to gazing ahead. No one dives in so pathetically deep this far out as yours truly, but in exchange for not having a life for the past few months, I get to unload this burden the day after our annual season’s peak and forget about little gold men entirely for a few months.
It’s quite liberating.
The most interesting thing about the season to come, from my vantage point, is the lack of a dreaded “frontrunner status” for any of the contenders. Some might say Clint Eastwood’s Nelson Mandela project (which is not called “The Human Factor,” mind you — the director says the film is currently untitled and is based on John Carlin’s book “Playing the Enemy”).
Others might say Rob Marshall’s “Nine” (coming from a money-tight company hoping to avoid echoes of “Memoirs of a Geisha”). But I don’t see a “Geisha” from here, or a “Charlie Wilson’s War,” expected heavies waiting to miss the mark. The field is curiously flat, and as a result, excitingly broad.
Let’s get to it, shall we?
Before we really dig into net year’s Oscar race on Monday, what about the new Judd Apatow comedy “Funny People” starring Adam Sandler and Seth Rogen. Could the multi-hyphenate finally find some love from the writers’ branch, maybe? Acknowledgment for Leslie Mann’s antics, maybe? Anything outside of HFPA?