Due Date

When I saw the first trailer for Due Date, I was interested, because it seemed to have the potential to be a modern day Planes, Trains and Automobiles. I was also a bit wary, because the trailer itself wasn't actually very funny. So while it didn't turn out to really measure up to some of the great road comedies of the past, I was glad to have enjoyed it enough to make seeing seem worthwhile. It's not the most creative movie ever written, but a lot of times mediocre material can be salvaged by a good cast, and Robert Downey, Jr. and Zach Galifiankis are two of the best funny actors working today. The surrounding supporting players aren't as unique and compelling as you'd hope, but they work well enough to give material for the two leads to bounce off of.

Todd Phillips has never really been very impressive at his job, and the main problem with the movie is the script that he and the bevy of other writers involved came up with. There's just not a ton there to work with. Some of the dialogue is pretty good, especially pretty much everything Downey says when he gets pissed, which is often. But less effort is made to justify the contrivances of this movie, such as why the two mismatched main characters are stuck together and why they are eventually able to bond. Of course it's something that has to happen, it just doesn't feel natural when the transition occurs after not a whole ton of prodding. And the biggest gap in the story involves the resolution of several highly dangerous crimes that take place, in a way that just completely ignores how the world works. I get that it's a comedy and that I should just enjoy it, but usually movies at least try to hand wave this stuff somehow rather than completely ignoring it.

And while I liked the performances, the characters were a bit thin, especially Galifianakis'. His performance of an overweight, effeminate, idiotic, delusional man-child is enjoyable, but unlike his role in Phillips' The Hangover, pretty much all of the humor comes from pointing out these characteristics repeatedly rather than showing how these characteristics would be funny. As I mentioned before, the supporting cast is decent. Danny McBride makes another stellar cameo as a war veteran working at the Western Union, and Juliette Lewis makes for a pretty good pot dealer. It's kind of funny seeing Michelle Monaghan as Downey's wife after their roles together in Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, though despite Jamie Foxx' likability, I really could have done without the subplot involving those two, and he was also heavily involved with the ashes-in-coffee-can bit that was way too The Big Lebowski for me. So that probably gives you a pretty good feel for how the movie goes - lots of issues with the writing, but still enjoyable because of the people in it. It makes for a pretty enjoyable movie that's far from a great one, and one I'm not desperate for the chance to see again. Better than it could have been, but less than its potential.

Funny People

After creating two very good comedies with a bit of heart and building a movie empire as a producer, Judd Apatow returned last year with his third film, which has quite a bit more focus on sentiment rather than laughs. I saw a lot of people skeptical of his ability to pull this off, although I would guess most of them haven't seen Freaks and Geeks. I had no issue with the idea of Funny People, and it's successful in a lot of ways. The fact that it's not a great movie isn't because Apatow shouldn't try to be serious, it's just that a large chunk of the movie ends up being pretty unwatchable.

It's an odd thing, really. The movie's dangerously long for what could still be called a comedy, approaching two and a half hours. But Adam Sandler gives a surprisingly good performance as an actor and comedian who finds out that he has a very dangerous disease, and tries to get back to his stand up roots. Seth Rogen is his typical likable self, playing a much less confident version of himself who's struggling to make ends meet and gets hired by Sandler to be his assistant and help write jokes. Jonah Hill and Jason Schwartzman are both very good as his roommates who he must occasionally butt heads with because this movie is more dramatic. For reasons I'll get into in a moment, the movie needs a love interest for Rogen, and Aubrey Plaza does her usual sarcastic thing pretty well in that position. It was funny seeing the origins of Aziz Ansari's Raaaaaaaandy character, and tons of people make cameos as themselves, either in casual interactions with Sandler's character or in brief snippets from his fake filmography.

For the most part, the movie manages a good balance between the humor and the drama, with its great cast doing the typical improv-heavy vulgar conversation thing in one scene and seriously considering mortality in the next. There might be a few too many sad musical montages, but it never really goes over the top trying to sell Sandler's plight, maybe because his slightly self-destructive tendencies make him feel like a real person rather than just a sad sack trying to manipulate your emotions. So it's really disappointing when the movie hits the breaks on what it's been doing to spend like forty minutes wasting our time with a romance subplot. Leslie Mann and Eric Bana are both pretty good, likable actors, and they do a fine job in this movie. It's just that the part that they're in really doesn't belong with the rest. Everything else pretty much grinds to a halt as Sandler reconnects with Mann as the one that got away, as Apatow proudly presents his wife and daughters again, and then her husband played by Bana shows up to create a whole lot of awkward and difficult to watch tension. These scenes just keep going and going until the breaking point, while I was desperately waiting for them to get back to the real movie.

Eventually they do, once the scripts reaches its Time to Wrap Things Up phase with some predictable character development and resolution, although even being a bit rote as it was it was still better than what just came before. People reconcile and part ways as necessary, and everything ends just about the way it should. It's really too bad the movie went on that whole tangent, because apart from that I really liked it for the most part. As it stands, it's the least of Apatow's three films, though still worth seeing if you like the cast enough. I don't mind if he still wants to be sentimental last time, as long as he makes sure the script is a lot tighter than this.