'Funny People' film gets down to dramatic business

By The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette

LITTLE ROCK — "Funny People" is Judd Apatow's third film as a writer-director - and the first in which he sets aside all the tomfoolery and gets down to dramatic business, according to the review in Friday's MovieStyle section.

Opening Friday, this is still a comedy, with laughs as big as the ones in "The 40-Year-Old Virgin" and "Knocked Up." There just aren't quite as many of them, and there are none of the fanciful shenanigans at the movie's edges that gave those other pictures their vaguely surreal airs: No musical numbers; no odd and kooky stoners; no improvisational riffs in which the actors take off on ad-libbed tangents. Well, almost none of those.

A lot of "Funny People," in fact, plays like the scene in "Knocked Up" in which a married couple exploded into such a vicious and profane argument you wondered if you really should be laughing. There is certainly nothing funny about the new movie's early scenes, in which an Adam Sandler-esque superstar, George Simmons (Adam Sandler), learns he has a rare form of leukemia and only months to live.

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