The current cinema, "He wrote WHAT?" edition

7 Comments

• Scott Lemieux says:

  May 14, 2011 at 1:02 pm

  It’s good – by far the best product from the Apatow fact­ory since Freaks if not Larry Sanders, and the lack of sex­ism isn’t what makes the movie good (and does­n’t stop many of the oth­er products from being good) but is a relief.

• Chris O. says:

  May 14, 2011 at 10:41 pm

  Nice review, Glenn. I dug it as well. I’ve been read­ing com­par­is­ons lately of Wiig to Gilda Radner, but, per­son­ally, Madeline Kahn comes to mind as well.
  According to either the NYT or TIME (or both) pro­file on Wiig, Apatow was the one who insisted on the over-the-top gross-out moments and jet­tisoned a quieter dia­logue scene telling the writers “No, we’re not going to sit and talk.” So, I won­der what kind of tone the ori­gin­al draft had and what Mottola would’ve defen­ded had he dir­ec­ted, since you men­tioned him (and he worked with Wiig in “Adventureland”).

• christian says:

  May 15, 2011 at 4:54 am

  The Apatow shit jokes are stu­pid and at this point, does any­body think they’re funny? It’s like mass hyp­nosis: oh yeah, here’s the shit gag.

• copperykeen says:

  May 15, 2011 at 11:39 am

  Christian, you seem like the sort of fel­low who might go broke over­es­tim­at­ing the intel­li­gence of the American public.

• christian says:

  May 15, 2011 at 12:42 pm

  Sad and so tewwibly twue.

• mark says:

  May 15, 2011 at 4:02 pm

  @christian: I felt sim­il­arly about the “shit” scene; its pres­ence felt more like an oblig­a­tion, a com­pon­ent neces­sary for the film to earn its status as a “raunchy” com­edy in reviews and mar­ket­ing material.
  But one inter­est­ing thing about that scene is how vis­cer­ally it cap­tured the phys­ic­al­ity of being ill (bey­ond just vari­ous flu­id erup­tions). Everyone in the scene is pale and sweaty and appears to be in actu­al pain–in addi­tion to being abso­lutely hor­ri­fied about the cir­cum­stances they are in. It got really uncom­fort­able to watch, and made it hard for me to enjoy any jokes/scenes for the 10 minutes or so fol­low­ing it.
  I guess what I’m say­ing is that I give them points for actu­ally put­ting the char­ac­ters through the wringer implied by such a scene, instead of just show­ing someone puk­ing and then mov­ing on.

• Stephanie says:

  May 16, 2011 at 2:21 pm

  Painfully crude and mostly unfunny, and I thought it would nev­er end. So sorry to see Jill Clayburgh for the last time in this thing. At least she was able to pre­serve some dignity.