4. Judd Apatow Tells The Story Of A Man-Child Learning To Grow Up (And Vice-Versa)
Quite possibly the director who changes the least from film to film, Apatow has a litany of tropes that populate his films, the least (or most, depending on your preference for affable-ish man-children) of which is Paul Rudd, the most being an inability to contain a semi-sophisticated story without resorting to toilet humour at least once every five minutes. Granted, Rudd doesn't appear in Funny People, but that's one out of the four films Apatow has written and directed and all share many other common traits. One of the more obvious tropes is the story that revolves around a man who didn't grow up when he should have and decides to grow up,usually with the help or hindrance of his similarly maladjusted bonehead friends. Examples: Steve Carrell hasn't had sex in The 40 Year Old Virgin, he also collects toys - and then when he finally looks like he's about to have sex, he sells all his toys. Seth Rogen lives with his buddies and smokes pot in Knocked Up: he has sex with Katherine Heigl, gets her pregnant and decides to get a job and move into an apartment so he can be a responsible adult. In Funny Games... well, Adam Sandler pretends to be grown up but reveals, to no-one's surprise, that he's still an adolescent-minded little twerp. And the whole trope comes full circle in This Is 40, where Paul Rudd starts out grown up and decides his life would be better if he devolved on an emotional level. It's rather a sad decline when you look at it like that. But who cares about being disillusioned by false change when there are so many HILARIOUS overlong improv sequences to laugh at for two and a half hours until there's no joy left in your body and you wish you'd left the cinema half an hour ago or at least started reading some classic literature?