George Simmons [Adam Sandler] is a popular comedian and actor who just found out that he has a rare type of cancer and will probably die.  This forces him to look back on his life and realise that he has become lonely and unable to connect with another human being.  He decides to employ Ira Wright [Seth Rogen] to help write him jokes for his stand-up and be his personal assistant as he tries to go back on stage.

This is Judd Apatow’s third film that he has written and directed himself – the first two being The 40 Year Old Virgin and Knocked Up.  I love this movie.  It features such honesty about the idea of celebrity and dealing with death and loneliness.  We are treated to so many moments that you can’t help but shed a tear and then laugh hysterically.  Since we’re dealing with a film about a batch of comedians there is no lack of joking in the film, and it kind of shows you how much you love seeing friends just sit around throwing ideas around and bullshitting around trying to be funny.  There is absolutely no topic that is off-bounds with these people which allows them to be really funny and even when they end up not being funny you laugh anyways.

The film tackles so many characters and their personal and professional development.  Adam Sandler’s character has to deal with attempting to create this personal connection with Ira.  Ira is trying to break into the business.  Laura [Leslie Mann], who is the love of George’s life and his ex-girlfriend, tries to figure out her feelings towards him which are resurfacing as she finds out about George’s illness.  We also have Leo [Jonah Hill], Daisy [Aubrey Plaza] and Mark [Jason Schwartzman] all playing characters who are all at different stages in their professional comedic careers helping ground the leads in the film by giving us these intermediate positions that we can only imagine George was once and Ira will become after the credits start rolling.

I found that looking around the internet most people were either okay or loving this movie, but most had the same grievance – which is that the end was drawn out.  However, what I think is that the last twenty minutes was really the serious piece of the movie with the least amount of the comedians ‘shooting-the-shit’ mainly because it was a really serious moment for our main characters where George and Laura try to fix things up and Laura and Clarke [Eric Bana] start to deal with their marital problems and George and Ira’s relationship finally has a truly tense moment and all of these three things are resolved almost immediately.  Therefore forcing the film to slow down and take it one at a time and at times even deal with it in a really immature way since we’re watching comedians.

I am hoping with all honesty that Judd Apatow gets some real credit for this movie.  This is leaps and bounds better than The 40 Year Old Virgin and definitely a big step up from Knocked Up.  This is already in my mind as a must-buy for my personal DVD collection and I want at least an award for writing for this movie – at the very least a nomination.  Judd Apatow has always been the funny man that’s entertained us but he’s never really dealt with a real issue in his movies and this is the perfect example of how you can get the audience in with an entertaining movie and at the same time deal with a character study of the status and life of a celebrity.  The cancer factor takes a back seat in this movie.  Please don’t go into this movie thinking you’re going to need a tissue to deal with the cancer pieces of the movie, if you take tissue you’ll need it to deal with the fact that you’ll be laughing yourself into a hospital bed.

Overall this is a must watch for fans of stand-up comedy and fans of any of the actors in the movie.  If you think you like to laugh watch this movie.  I’m nominating it as my favourite comedy of 2009 so far, and I don’t think there is much left to compete with it.

IMDB says 7.3/10

Rotten Tomatoes says 68%

I say 9.0/10