Funny People
Director: Judd Apatow
District 9
Director: Neill Blomkamp
Writer-director Judd Apatow has more finesse than he is given credit for. His first two movies, The 40 Year-Old Virgin and Knocked Up, were the decidedly tempered successors to the gross-out comedies of the 1970s, with a bite that bore little relation to their foul-talking bark. Funny People, a real achievement, is a movie with a heavyweight comedic cast, Adam Sandler, Seth Rogen and Jonah Hill, that looks with some insight into the world of stand-up comedy – albeit one conspicuously free of drugs and alcohol.
“Funny Men” would be a more appropriate title, since most of the practitioners are guys – but you can see the marketing people wincing at that one. The film captures the mentality of men for whom doing stand-up is about expressing their masculinity, disrespecting those bigger and more successful than they are and talking about the worst excesses of male behaviour as if they are above them. Being acclaimed is a short cut to sex. The film is also about the way money changes relationships. For Jason Schwartzman’s character, it is about showing off his $25,000 pay cheque to Ira (Rogen), who does not want to be reminded that he works at a delicatessen.
Ira’s fortune changes when he follows the highly successful comedian turned movie star, George Simmons (Sandler), on stage. George has just learned that he has an incurable disease and performs a set full of self-pity. He offers Ira and his other roommate (Hill) the chance to write for him, which Ira takes, excluding his pal. He becomes George’s executive assistant, talking him to sleep, making him breakfast, even opening for him at a My Space party. “Do you ever get tired playing the same songs?” he asks James Taylor at the gig. ‘”Do you ever get tired talking about your dick?” is the curt reply.
Gradually, Ira becomes a better comedian, dumping routines about farting and masturbation on George’s advice. He tries to prevent George from giving into his worst excesses, in particular his threat to break up the marriage of his former girlfriend, Laura (Leslie Mann) now a mother of two with a philandering husband, Clarke (Eric Bana).
Because of the highly competitive nature of stand up, you understand why George has no comedian friends and how he is alienated from his employees. We see his inability to share in other people’s moments. Watching a DVD of Laura’s daughter singing “Memory” from Cats, he checks his phone.
George is a genuinely repugnant character, yet he is always plausible and his actions are governed by logic. There are plenty of incidental pleasures – a cursing match between Eminem and the entirely innocent Ray Romano at a party, for instance. The film reminds us of the curious attraction-repulsion of comedy, which selects its own. As Hill observes: “Who would want to see Lance Armstrong doing stand up?”
District 9 has parked itself in multiplexes like the spaceship featured in the film’s poster. We approach it with curiosity. What’s with the Johannesburg setting? Why do the aliens inside the ship – dubbed prawns by the South African public – allow themselves to be escorted to Earth without a fight, even with all their advanced weaponry? Why do they put up with their poor treatment for several decades, living off cat food and trading with unscrupulous Nigerians eager to become powerful like them? What, in short, are they waiting for?
I’d like to tell you, but we never find out. My son reckons their spaceship ran out of fuel, but the fluid the aliens search for comes from their own detritus. You sit through the film anticipating some huge revelation. Apparently, the visitors just want to go home, although they do not act as one unit.
Once you get past this disappointment, what’s left? Mainly, a version of The Fly with a bit of Terminator thrown in. Our anti-hero is Wikus (Sharlto Copley), the subject of a mock documentary, who leads a mass eviction on behalf of Multi-National United, the South African equivalent of Group 4. He goes about knocking on the doors of the ramshackle accommodation inhabited by the aliens and getting them to sign permission slips to agree to be moved to District 10, several hundred miles from Jo’burg.
The political analogies with South Africa under apartheid are obvious. Alas, they have no depth. The aliens were displaced to begin with. They aren’t being directly exploited. Indeed, they are more powerful than the people who provide them housing. In the course of his inhumane – and anti-prawn – action, Wikus is exposed to the fluid and becomes partly alien. The company who employs him wants to experiment on him, but Wikus goes on the run, enlisting the help of the alien who gathered the liquid.
This is a fairly pacy science-fantasy action drama, with Wikus, slowly changing his appearance, becoming sympathetic. It does not in any sense reinvent the alien invasion movie. In refusing to give the aliens much personality, writer-director Neill Blomkamp, adapting his short film, Alive in Jo’burg, leaves a hole at the centre. Still, Copley is an engaging screen presence. I expect he’ll get the call from Hollywood shortly.
Patrick Mulcahy
