Funny People II

I saw just the end of this movie a few weeks ago, but last night I just happened to catch it from the start.

I misjudged it; this was a great movie.  The basic premise is that a superstar comedian (Adam Sandler) lives a very wealthy lonely life-been there, seen that.  When he is diagnosed with a form of leukemia he reflects on the empty lousy life he has been living and bumps into a chump that is trying to get a comedy career started (Seth Rogen)--oh really, did we need this movie again?  This was my initial thought without seeing the whole thing, but I have to say it fought out from the trite package it wrapped itself in with the casting.  I think mixing Adam Sandler into the Apatow-pack worked great. 

I don't want to ruin it for you, so that's it for plot outline, but Jonah Hill and Jason Schwartzman play actors that are doing whatever needs to be done to climb the B-list Hollywood ladder and the level of unspoken self-reference was great there and I laughed pretty hard at some of the back-and-forths they were in because of that.  This film is a lot more substantive than the Judd Apatow flicks you might have seen and I highly recommend it.

Real life it is not--however, the dialogue and the characters seemed very natural to me and if you can suspend the need for realistic details and meet them halfway to try and relate despite the odd situations, you will enjoy it.

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Hotel Rwanda vs. Sometimes in April--two films made reasonably close together both about the genocide in Rwanda--I suggest watching both, but there is a major difference in them and I want to discuss it.

I actually took a 1/2 year social studies elective at my public high school, junior year, called 'Holocausts'.
The majority of the course was of course spent
discussing the Nazi Holocaust of WW II.

There was also a portion of the course about Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia.  And we discussed more broadly how holocausts come about and what could cause societies to kill a group of people. 

Movie Review
     Religulous - Bill Maher

It was funny.  Probably you aren't watching unless you are already kind of anti-organized religion anyway; that being the case, you'll find at least some of it very funny.  It stars just Maher and the people he finds around the world to interview.  It was directed by Larry Charles that directed Borat, and that was evident--it has a little of the guerilla-social media feel where the participants really don't know what they're signing up for when they agree to appear.