And yet just a few hours after that conversation, I found myself seriously debating getting up and walking out of It’s Kind Of A Funny Story, an agonizingly phony piece of work that struggles to be a sort of One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest for teenagers, but which ends up regurgitating platitudes in place of any genuine insight or emotion. There’s a musical number about 2/3 of the way into the film… seriously… where the patients of this mental hospital imagine themselves doing Under Pressure, complete with Zach Galifianakis done up in glam rock gear and lip-synching to David Bowie… seriously. And I was so embarrassed, so uncomfortable with the total lack of recognizable human behavior in the film that I strongly debated getting up and leaving. I even considered writing a whole piece about the idea that I don’t walk out of films, but I had to walk out of this one.
The reviews of It’s Kind of a Funny Story coming out of the Toronto Film Fest are, uh, not great. Written and directed by the folks behind the great Half Nelson and featuring Zach Galifianakis as a mental patient with a heart of gold, it…well, I’ll let Drew from HitFix tell you with his own words:
Yikes. And there’s plenty more where that came from. Well, at least Zach still has the higher-profile Due Date coming out this Fall.