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Cinematic labors of love are difficult to assess - on one hand, they tend to manifest a singular passion and vision on a filmmaker's part, yet more often than not, when a director has free reign to mine the dramatic and emotional territories in her/his mind, the end result is a hard nut to crack. Michael Cimino's Heaven's Gate, Paul Thomas Anderson's Magnolia, Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut - these are movies that are boldly noble in shape and form, but definitely don't hold widespread appeal to a mass audience. They're legitimate works of art, but they have as many detractors as devotees: Projects where a filmmaker has full creative control rarely allow viewers a chance to have a ho-hum reaction.

Funny People falls into this category, and boy howdy did I hate it.

I'll bring up later in this review the fantastic Funny People Diaries included on this Blu-ray Disc that was so good and exciting that it inspired me to watch the film a third time (I first caught it in cinemas this summer), so I have no problem attesting that director Judd Apatow (The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Knocked Up) is a wonderfully accomplished artist and that with Funny People, he takes the nearly death-defying act of really putting himself on the line for dramatic effect. Sure, Funny People is a fictional film, but its emotional core comes across as intimately lived-in, as though Apatow is dissecting the conflicting emotions in his head on screen.

And this dramatic volatility is Funny People's greatest asset. This story revolves around a comedian (Adam Sandler) who finds out that he has a rare disease that could in fact kill him, and follows his journey from hiring an aspiring writer (Seth Rogen) to both write gags for him and act as a de facto nurse/sounding board for the comic's death's-door freak-outs to going back to try to woo the one that got away (Leslie Mann), who left him behind years ago to pursue a new life with a new husband (Eric Bana). And Apatow affixes a nostalgic, morose truism to Sandler's character's presence on screen - as this character assesses the world he's created for himself and comes to terms with its pros and cons, we're there to see every awkward aspect of it. Funny People refuses to pussyfoot around anything.

That being said, I'd add a subtitle to Funny People: Rich People Whining. For folks who have participated in the whirlwind of comedy success and failure, there is maybe a degree of nuance that Funny People manifests that this simple writer doesn't fully acknowledge, but the film takes place in a kind of super-glitzy pseudo-world that this writer found icy and hollow. The up-and-coming comics here aren't suffering through tough lives - they live in wonderful apartments, wearing designer clothes. And Sandler's and Mann's characters live in Xanadu-style homes (yes, even Mann - who in the film is not a mega-millionaire - lives in a house that Martha Stewart could live in) that make them seem so detached from the world at large that there is honestly no narrative in-point to latch onto them.

This is the grand push/pull of Funny People: For a film that is so unavoidably earnest in terms of Apatow addressing his own issues, as a film, it's prissy and stand-offish. Apatow is a solid filmmaker - as much as I loathed Funny People, I honestly feel he has a classic film or two in him - but this film deserves its 'flop' status from this summer's box office season.

But I'm not kidding - Funny People Diaries on this Blu-ray Disc is everything Funny People is not. At 85 minutes, it's over before it starts, and it is a sensational documentary as well as a cool appendix to this package. It's the best making-of doc of the year by far.

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