Wednesday, August 08, 2012

1757 - The 40 Year Old Virgin (commentary)

I've been getting my studio space set up for editing my new film Sex After Kids, so I threw this on in the background with the commentary which includes a ridiculously large amount of people.  It's interesting listening to commentaries with actors because you very quickly get a sense of who are interesting and fun people, and who are very desperately trying to be as interesting and fun as the people whom it comes naturally to.  It's goddamn awkward to listen to sometimes.  As I'm going to be working around the studio for the next few days in the evening there's a good chance I'll check out the commentaries on the other Apatow films as well.
Part of the issue with watching an Apatow film on DVD is that you never get the theatrical cut, you get his bloated version - which isn't a bad thing - but it's tricky to make a comedy really work after it's pushing two hours.  It's interesting to hear them on the commentary talking about how most of the crew had no idea how they were going to possibly string this thing into a film in the end.  A large part of what Judd does is he slaps down two cameras and just has the actors throw a bunch of stuff out and see what happens.  I can see how this could work quite well, but it's also a reason that the visual style of the film is pretty damn ugly.  It looks like a badly shot three-camera-sitcom in some scenes - which I'm not sure if I noticed before. 
The commentary doesn't offer a whole lot of insight into their productions, but it is entertaining if you like this group of people.  If you don't, then steer clear. 

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