Weekend Movie Forecast: The Cove or Funny People

As you surely know by now, Judd Apatow's Funny People stars Adam Sandler as George Simmons, a comedian whose brush with near-fatal illness teaches him a lot about life, love, and laughter. Manohla Dargis at the Times writes, "George reaches out to an old lover, the laughs give way to tears and this promising comedy bloats, sags and dies... There’s something irritatingly self-satisfied about Funny People, which explains why, though it glances on the perils of fame, it mostly affirms its pleasures... Mr. Apatow seems to have become uncomfortable with or perhaps immune to the messiness of life. This, he seems to be saying, is as good as it gets, and man, is it ever good. He’s sentimentalized himself. That’s nice, I suppose, but nice can be murder on comedy and drama alike."

The New Yorker's David Denby, on the other hand, calls it "Apatow’s richest, most complicated movie yet—a summing up of his feelings about comedy and its relation to the rest of existence. The movie has passages of uneasy brilliance and many incidental pleasures."