‘Trainwreck’: Taking the local to comedy

HollywoodandFine.com

Let me start by saying two things:

I think Amy Schumer is one of the funniest humans around.

I also think Judd Apatow is one of the most overrated comedy directors of our time.

To my mind, “Trainwreck” is both a very funny movie — and yet another example of Apatow’s inability to edit himself. Like every movie he’s made, this one has several big laughs — and could easily be 20 minutes shorter.

Like all the films that hail from Apatown, “Trainwreck” offers a heady mix of the romantic and the vulgar. Working from a script that Schumer wrote, it’s a female-oriented tale of the inability to commit, with a dose of low self-esteem as the subtext.

Schumer plays Amy, a hotshot magazine writer in New York who likes sex, but not the touchy-feely emotions that accompany it. She has a strict “no sleepover” rule for the men she hooks up with and can’t quite fathom what her younger sister Kim (Brie Larson) sees in her doofus husband (a very funny Mike Birbiglia) or marriage in general.

Then her hilariously shallow boss (an unrecognizable and wonderful Tilda Swinton) gives her an uncharacteristic assignment: a profile on a sports-medicine doctor to the all-stars. His name is Aaron (Bill Hader) and he not only can claim LeBron James as his best friend, but he’s a genuinely sweet and funny guy who falls for Amy.

This review continues on my website.

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