By Ray Pride

The more I think about “Funny People,” the more it seems that Judd Apatow has made precisely the (reported) $75 million home movie he meant to make.

It’s an ungainly gosling, epic with surfaces and, as over its two-and-a-half hour duration, out of its depths with depth. For his third feature, the veteran stand-up-gagman-TV producer-writer-director at times barely channels autobiography. The first three people thanked in the end credits are Garry Shandling, Paul Thomas Anderson and James L. Brooks: three godfathers that offer some notion of the turf he’s hoping to claim. First, there’s the bitterness, passive-aggressiveness, hostility and penis-obsessed humor of Shandling, for whom Apatow wrote on the piercingly harsh classic “Larry Sanders Show.” Shandling’s disappearance from the public eye is often chalked up to questions about mortality like those faced by Apatow’s lead character, George Simmons (Adam Sandler). Secondly, he’s attempting to go beyond the gag-charged confines of “The 40-Year-Old Virgin” and “Knocked Up,” attempting the tonal range, swooping from comedy to pathos, as in Anderson’s more expansive canvases, as in “Magnolia” or “Boogie Nights.” Third, there are James L. “Spanglish” Brooks’ equally elephantine epics that swoop from pathos to bathos with intermittently brilliant verbal gags. It’s a catalog of well-upholstered influences. Read the rest of this entry »

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This is one seriously fucked-up movie. “Travis Bickle, Mall Cop”? Almost. Nearly. Consider two types of return: The return of the prodigal, the return of the repressed. In writer-director Jody Hill’s “Observe and Report,” as Ronnie Barnhardt, a heavily medicated, prone-to-delusion rent-a-cop, Seth Rogen captures vainglorious delusion in a comic style that steadily grows from a disenchanted cipher to something far more paranoid and cruel. Read the rest of this entry »

A vanload of pals since fifth grade drive halfway across the country in 1998 to break into the editing room of George Lucas’ Skywalker Ranch so they can sneak a preview of “Star Wars: Episode 1—The Phantom Menace.” One fanboy has cancer. Another is a girl. They battle Star Trek fans along the way. Director Kyle Newman and writers Adam F. Goldberg, Ernest Cline and Dan Pulick are at fault for this inane, inert road movie. In a self-incriminating instance of it-takes-one-to-make-one, these off-screen fans of “Star Wars” can only offer onscreen counterparts as nitwit nerds. In 1916, Hugo Munsterberg warned of moviegoing youth harmed by “the trivializing influence of a steady contact with things which are not worth knowing.” “Fanboys” only shows that distributors build shelves for good reasons. If only bad films like this would molder there longer. Wasting your time and theirs: Billy Dee Williams, Carrie Fisher, William Shatner, Seth Rogen, Kevin Smith and Jason Mewes. With Jay Baruchel, Dan Fogler, Sam Huntington, Chris Marquette and Kristen Bell. 90m. (Bill Stamets)

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Class and cash remain at the center of Kevin Smith’s latest, the epigone of scat-chat called “Zack and Miri Make a Porno.” The material sings because of his casting of his two leads, with Seth Rogen and Elizabeth Banks as the platonic Pittsburgh roommates who hatch a quick-cash scheme to make amateur porn to get out of debt and discover the feelings they’ve been hiding. (Their giddy rapport almost makes up for the glimpses Smith provides of Jason “Jay” Mewes’ junk.) Smith starts with the idea of the ickiness of thirtysomething poverty, of a sense of not being able to get ahead in the modern workplace. Rogen’s timing is complemented by Banks’, as well as her seraphically deranged laughter at embarrassing moments and brightly pointed passages of frank japery about sex. To put it one way, Smith starts at “snowball” and snowballs from there: the cascade of everyday-vulgar verbiage in “Zack and Miri” is unmatched. And there’s something sweet about the two characters who banter, “Anybody wants to see anybody fuck”; “Who the fuck would want to watch us fuck?” And leave it to Banks: “Fuck you. I have dignity.” Advisory: “Star Wars” porn, clumsy sex and scatology ensue, as well as a joke saying the word “DreamWorks” sounds like “an underground fuck club.” “Rated R on appeal for dialogue, graphic nudity and pervasive language.” Yum. With Justin Long, Tom Savini, Traci Lords, Gerry Bednob, Jen Schwalbach, Brandon Routh. 102m. (Ray Pride)

This well-made animated kid pic opens with a clever kick-ass dream sequence where obese fanboy Po (voiced by Black) fantasizes his kung-fu destiny. Mocking verve is shelved for blander fare when he wakes up to his chores at the noodle stand run by his single parent. Why Po is a panda and his pop is a goose is anyone’s guess. Rigging fireworks to a chair, Po makes an aerial entrance to the big rite for anointing the next kung-fu defender of the kingdom. Can scripture err in making this underachiever and overeater the savior? Po will learn a secret whose secret is that there is no secret. Believe in yourself and you’ll become who you wish to be—a morsel of wisdom ingested by our erstwhile ursine hero. The daddy issues in the screenplay by Jonathan Aibel and Glenn Berger (co-writers of eleven episodes of the dad-fixated “King of the Hill”) are in sync with a Father’s Day opening. Co-directors Mark Osborne and John Stevenson deliver likeable characters, with Jack Black especially in character reprising with the act that pays off time and again. With the voices of Dustin Hoffman, Angelina Jolie, Ian McShane, Jackie Chan, Lucy Liu and Seth Rogen. 88m. (Bill Stamets)