The SmarK DVD Rant – Dangerous Comedy!

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The SmarK DVD Rant – Dangerous Comedy!

"Dying is easy. Comedy is hard."

– The Joker

I think that one of the reasons that safe and predictable pop culture junk like the Night at the Museum movies or the (Noun) Movie series keep getting made is that truly cutting-edge comedy isn’t always funny. Yes, Monty Python was routinely brilliant, but for every Dead Parrot Sketch there are a million misses within the same show. I personally find it easier to deal with a swing for the fences that misses rather than a tepid ground out to first, because at least there was the potential for gold in one of them. Sandra Bullock mugging for the camera makes $100 million because you know exactly what you’re getting and it doesn’t scare people off. The Hangover made nearly $300 million domestically because it was an easy-to-understand concept pulled off spectacularly well.

And then there’s Bruno and Funny People, released around the same time earlier this year…

bruno

Bruno

I was a big fan of Borat until it became a kind of ubiquitous Austin Powers-like source of annoying quotes for hipster douchebags everywhere. Repeated viewings haven’t held up as well as I’d hoped, mainly because the shocking stuff pulled off by Sacha Baron Cohen isn’t particularly shocking any longer. However, at heart it’s still a movie with something to say about stereotyping different cultures and making assumptions about foreigners, even if the message sometimes gets lost in the child pornography and poop jokes.

Bruno, however, was a different animal entirely. Whereas I got Borat and kind of understood the message being imparted, Bruno just left me feeling confused about what I was supposed to be getting out of it. The setups are mostly the same, as Cohen has perfected "ambush comedy" by trapping people in a room with him and then forcing them to react to whatever antics he comes up with. The best examples come when he simply provides the straight role (pardon the irony) and lets the stupidity of his targets act as the punchline. In Bruno, Cohen’s eponymous fashion reporter loses his job and decides to travel to LA to become "uber-famous", giving him an excuse to run into a variety of celebrities along the way. His "interview" with Harrison Ford is classic, for instance. Others felt more like comedic entrapment than legitimate criticism, however. Interviewing politician Ron Paul and then setting up a situation where Bruno comes onto him to provoke a "homophobic" reaction is more unsettling than hilarious, as there’s no "right" answer for what behavior would have been acceptable. Paul is presumably not gay, so he had every right to storm out of the room when a gay man was making unwanted sexual advances towards him. It’s basic human rights! Ditto for the hunting scene, where Cohen is so desperate to provoke a reaction from a group of redneck hunters that he strips naked and throws himself at one of the group at 4 AM. Was the guy SUPPOSED to let this weirdo into his tent?

I think that’s the nature of being on the edge like Cohen is, however. Sometimes the reason for your actions isn’t entirely apparent, and there’s going to be some bits that offend people. That relative minor criticism is balanced out, I think, by how fucking hilarious the rest of the movie is. Yeah, there’s more misses than Borat featured, but the sheer brilliance of his TMZ-style celebrity show pilot justifies its own existence without any problem. Similarly, the series of interviews with parents desperate to make their babies into celebrities, while only having a slight connection to the rest of the movie, is jaw-droppingly great and provides some of the movie’s best lines. Really, the biggest problem I had with the movie is that it’s more like 20 little awesomely funny character skits attached together with a rivet gun and kinda-sorta formed into a cohesive movie. There’s really no other way to move between ideas like Bruno interviewing a terrorist (and barely making it out alive) and Bruno terrorizing a black talk show audience. It’s blunt force comedy at its best, and when it works it really works. When it doesn’t (like the surprisingly misfiring adventure with the military), at least it’s never boring. I don’t think Bruno will have the cultural impact that Borat did, but it was a worthwhile attempt, even if I have to wonder how long he can fool people until everyone knows who he is.

funny people

Funny People

From the hilarious cutting-edge we go to…Adam Sandler. But at least this movie is self-aware enough to know that Sandler is the kind of guy whose career has descended into making easily-digested box office garbage like "Merman" or "Redo". Sandler’s melancholy portrayal of a formerly-edgy comedian who now lives alone in his giant mansion longing for human companionship might be a bit too close to home for some Hollywood bigshots. In fact the movie was apparently inspired by a meeting that director Judd Apatow had with Steve Martin, so take what you will from that.

This of course is a much different movie than Apatow’s two previous directorial efforts (The 40 Year Old Virgin and Knocked Up), veering more into the Punch Drunk Love side of Sandler’s acting experiences than the hacky comedies parodied within the movie. And I guess that’s immediately part of the problem, because you see Apatow and Sandler together and you’re thinking "wacky bromantic comedy" and that’s not what you’re getting at all. Seth Rogen is Ira Wright, a struggling comedian who makes jokes at the expense of George Simmons (Sandler) one night at a comedy club and finds himself bonding with the millionaire comedian as a result. From working as his assistant, Ira finds himself working up the ladder of comedy, opening for Simmons on tour and writing jokes for him, but sometimes getting too close of a look at the darker side of Simmons’ life. There’s actually a ton of different subplots running at once here, from Simmons’ apparently fatal disease to Ira’s roommates (Jonah Hill as another struggling writer and Jason Schwartzman as the star of an NBC-style sitcom called "Yo, Teach!") to the girl down the hall who Ira has a crush on but is unable to ask out. There’s a lot of funny stuff going on, but this is definitely a movie that could have used some editing down. Most notably, the second half of the lengthy movie screeches to an unfunny halt when George decides to reconnect with his lost love, putting the characters (and us) in an awkward stretch of more than a hour where they’re all cooped up in the house together as George tries to live a life of domestic bliss that he could never have before. It’s a weird choice and seems like it belongs in a different movie.

However, while it’s not the comedy that it was made out to be by the trailers, it’s still a very good movie. Dramatic Sandler can be very effective, and the love story with Leslie Mann is very well acted by everyone involved, including the underrated Eric Bana as the jerkass Australian husband who turns out to be a really decent guy. I just wish that they would have cut out a bunch of the extra stuff and just focused on “The Wrestler for Comedians" aspect of the story. But hey, sometimes you take chances and they don’t work. It happens. Hopefully Judd will go back to the wacky comedies next time out, at least.

Recommendations: Probably rent both of them before buying. Both are very worthwhile for different reasons, though.