A screenwriter friend has heard that Judd Apatow‘s Funny People is either based upon or partly inspired by “a profound crisis of some sort that changed Garry Shandling and sent him into the pursuit of Zen and other pursuits/remedies. He’s one of Apatow’s closest friends and was a major shit during the making/ heyday of HBO’s Larry Sanders Show. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.”

You can love, like, worship, dislike, piss on, wrestle with, admire or kvetch about Judd Apatow‘s Funny People (Universal, 7.31) but you have to give it this — it’s a major Apatow brand-changer. It darkens, challenges, deepens, reboots and broadens the definition of those cereal-box ingredients that people think of when they refer to Apatow-brand entertainment. It’s not a “great” film but for me it’s a stunningly brave (by which I mean exceptionally candid and self-revealing) one. And funny as shit.

It really is the best Apatow movie so far. Not the warmest of friendliest or feel-goodiest, but unquestionably the frankest and ballsiest. A genuinely funny, corrosive, uncliched, agreeably smartass thing. Not perfect but close enough to what I wanted that I came out delighted. I believed each and every line and attitude and plot turn. I had a few minor beefs but no major ones.

This is very close to the Apatow flick I’ve been waiting for, and which frankly I had begun to think might never come from his workshop. Hats off, smart salute, balls of steel, etc. This is a significant leap forward.

A present-day Hollywood story about a selfish and not particularly lovable comedian (Adam Sandler) going through surges and regressions due to the emergence of a fatal disease, Funny People is an intimate and revealing and self-critical film about what selfish shits comedians can be. And what it is and what it takes to be a mensch. For the first time Seth Rogen plays a fairly interesting and layered character with seriously believable chops. Congrats also to the great Jonah Hill, Jason Schwartzman, Eric Bana, Leslie Mann, etc. — everyone’s game surges with this thing.

Funny People is much more of a Billy Wilder film than a James L. Brooks or Cameron Crowe one because it’s a film about values and decency and — you have to at least respect this aspect — a frank look at the selfish, uber-competitive tendencies of many comedian types.

“Take no notice of anyone who says Funny People is too long or doesn’t work,” I wrote/twittered this morning. “What they really mean is ‘where’s my Big Mac?'” They want, in other words, their Apatow meatloaf-and-mashed-potatoes fix — a yawhaw stoner/slacker comedy in the vein of The 40 Year-Old Virgin and, to a slightly more realistic extent, Knocked Up.

Funny People is consistently funny but in a low-key, casual-fuckall “if you get it fine and if you don’t so what?” sort of way. It’s unquestionably Apatow’s finest film. He’ll never go back to the sandbox of The 40 Year-old Virgin after this. At times last night I was telling myself, “Jesus, this is amazing.” Everyone’s game really does go up a lot in this thing. I know, I know — I’m repeating myself.

You know what’s great in this thing? A cameo scene with Eminem. It’s worth it for this bit alone.

Funny People poses a a bit of a marketing problem because it’s about show business types but also because it’s very real as occasionally cold, fuck-off-dickhead, slapdown, take-it-or-leave-it. It’s about a famous and wealthy guy having to deal with the fact hat he has no life and nobody to turn to. It winds up being a kind of love letter to having a family. Ballsy, mean-funny, honest, straight from within.

Most fans of Virgin and Knocked Up, I suspect, are going to have qualms, but that’s what happens when you deepen and darken and expand the brand — people go “hey, this doesn’t taste like the others! Gimme my comfort food!” Most people just want to kick back and watch fucking Seinfeld. Good God! Is there any once-legendary TV series that feels lamer by today’s standards? The fans used to brag about it being “a show about nothing.” Not any more. The let’s-lie-around- and-jerk-ourselves-off easy money days of the ’90s are over.

A voice is telling me, in any event, that the Seinfeld people — a good portion of them — are probably going to complain or feel uneasy about Funny People, and when they do they’ll only be taking their own game down.

This morning’s New Moon/Comic-Con press conference began at 9:54 am — almost a half-hour late — inside a super-sized meeting hall within San Diego’s Bayfront Hilton. The film’s three stars — Kristen Stewart, Robert Pattinson and Taylor Lautner — posed for photos and took questions from a throng of about 75 or 80 journalists. It was my first Comic-Con event, but I have to say that the most heartening aspect happened before it began.

The heart moment happened when MSN Movies’ James Rocchi told me he completely agreed with my Twitter post this morning about Judd Apatow ‘s Funny People being “stunningly good” and “a kind of epic in the realm of selfish, scabrous, pissed-off comedian movies.” I’ll get into this in a subsequent post, but we both agreed it was a ballsy, mostly realistic and darkly funny film that never once took the manipulative, emotionally soothing way out.

Summit will open the Twilight sequel, a romantic triangle piece focusing on the mortal Bella Swan (Stewart), the vampire Edward Cullen (Pattinson) and a hottie werewolf Jacob Black (Lautner), on 11.20.

Lautner is clearly the most ambitiously press-friendly among the three. While Stewart and Pattinson did their usual usual — i.e., giving answers that suggested they’re a lot more complex and aloof and thoughtful than their participation in movies based on the Twilight series might suggest. It’s the age-old “I’ll do this but only if I can answer questions like Marlon Brando” routine. But Lautner, who has a bee-stung Beagle Boy nose , exhibited the personality of a publicist or a glad-hander. He clearly enjoys smiling and wants everyone to like him. He could be the next Regis Philbin if he wanted to go there.

If I was Lautner I would have the schnozzola re-shaped. I’m sorry but it’s an On The Waterfront longshoreman’s nose, or a nose belonging to a Russian wheat-farmer. If he’d come up through the ranks of old 1930s Hollywood studio system the moguls would have said “cute kid but fix the nose.”

(l. to r.) Kristen Stewart, Taylor Lautner, Robert Pattinson

Stewart was wearing her Joan Jett haircut (for her currently filming The Runaways) and looked, frankly, kind of rock-and-rollish herself with a kind of cigarettes-and-booze attitude with stress bags under her eyes. She’s a fascinating actress, but clearly not someone who’s looking for peace as much as truth, even if it scalds.

Pattinson also looked vaguely seedy and grubby, like he took a shower the day before yesterday. He was in a pleasant-enough mood with a grinning, self-effacing attitude and nice white teeth.

The Summit publicists made the photographers stand back from the talent table about twelve feet or so. Apparently they didn’t want the actors to get all freaked out by a too-close physical proximity to the mongrelish paparazzi. (I’m certain it was the reps for Stewart or Pattinson who asked for the push-back; it sure as hell wasn’t Lautner.) This isn’t the way things are done at the Cannes, Sundance and Toronto press conferences but no biggie.

12:35 pm: In the hour since I posted my video of the New Moon kidz, my inbox has lit up with notifications that dozens of YouTube watchers around the world have watched it.

I’m sitting in an air-conditioned Super Shuttle van on Wilshire Blvd., and I can feel the inferno-like heat baking the sides of it. It’s like we’re cruising down 111 in Palm Springs or Palm Desert. You could fry a bloody egg on the sidewalk. Oh, yeah. Bloody hell. I’m sweatin’ here. Roastin’, bakin’, boilin’…and San Diego will probably be a tad hotter, I won’t arrive until midnight or thereabouts. Seeing Funny People first at the Arclight this evening.

Tina Brown‘s enormous media-changes thought #1, as passed along by the Chicago Tribune‘s Phil Rosenthal: “This particular wilderness that we’re in will change,” Brown says, “but it’s a very difficult time for people in old media.

“It’s most difficult, I think, for the people in their 50s who are part of a big media organization where they’ve spent most of their lives. They see it all changing around them and there isn’t time for them to make the adjustment, or they fear making it.”

And quote #2: “We’re in a transitional period that I think will only last another few years in which [journalists are] not paid the way they were. That’s the scary part. If you’re up to seeing the opportunity and recognize it as a transition, [and if] you have enough put away to ride this wave, it’s going to be fantastic. I think it’s a big liberation of every kind of talent.”

“What is cinema?,” writes Matt Zoller Seitz in a piece about a mesmerizing Michael Jackson tribute site called Eternal Moonwalk. “André Bazin published a book of essays that tried to answer that question. But if somebody asked me for the short answer, I’d advise them to visit EternalMoonwalk.com. Seriously.

“On first glance, the site seems little more than a poignant goof: a tribute to the late Michael Jackson that draws its inspiration from the John F. Kennedy memorial in Washington, D.C., with its eternal flame — but instead of a flame that never goes out, it’s a video loop featuring variations on the Gloved One’s signature move.

“But it’s more than that. In addition to being diabolically mesmerizing — between the array of clips and the faintly Billie Jean-like backbeat, one tends to lose track of time staring at the damned thing — Eternal Moonwalk is also an incidental tutorial in the basic properties of cinema. It returns motion pictures to their origin point, when the medium’s core appeal was the chance to watch strangers performing, their bodies moving from Point A to Point B, their familiar or amusing actions serving as an emotional connection point, a reminder that we’re members of the same species inhabiting the same small world.”

Tweeting about your arrival at LAX — hardly any kind of big deal — should suffice, but I may as well make it official by HE sights.

Delta flight to LAX was supposed to leave at 8:25 am, and we’re only just now pushing off. Delightful experience. Did I just hear something about wifi above 10,000 feet? HE’s six-hour dark period hereby begins.

Everett Sloane‘s finest acting moment was in Citizen Kane when his “Mr. Bernstein” character talked about the vagaries of memory. “A fellow will remember a lot of things you wouldn’t think he’d remember,” he said after William Alland‘s reporter dismissed the likelihood that Charles Foster Kane might recall a minor anecdotal event that had happened decades earlier.

“You take me,” Sloane/Bernstein began. “One day back in 1896 I was crossing over to Jersey on the ferry, and as we pulled out there was another ferry pulling in, and on it was a girl waiting to get off. A white dress she had on. She was carrying a white parasol. I only saw her for one second. She didn’t see me at all. But I’ll bet a month hasn’t gone by since that I haven’t thought of that girl.”

We all have a few odd but lasting moments that have stayed in our heads. But the most interesting ones are those that don’t (or didn’t) involve someone we once saw and felt attracted to but never made a move on. That’s because they all refer to the same thing. The ones that are worth mentioning are those that have lingered for decades but defy interpretation as to why. But which contain or reflect some sort of metaphor that obviously matters.

Here’s one from my late teenage years. It happened on a late summer night in Wilton, Connecticut. There were two or three of us drinking beer on a bench in a small green area next to Route 7, the town’s main drag. And we were just gazing out at the road when two guys we knew drove by in a souped-up something or other, going 45 or 50 mph. We knew it had to be one of our friends because respectable citizens didn’t wail around town in muscle cars at midnight.

Anyway the guy riding shotgun — his name was Chip — opened the door, leaned down and dragged a beer can along the pavement as they sped by. And it created a small but beautiful shower of sparks. I don’t recall reacting all that strongly but I remember the shared contentment the three of us felt from watching this. “That was good,” one of us said without making a big deal out of it. And that was it. But I’ve never forgotten that lightshow. And I’ve never wondered why. It’s just a keeper and that’s that.

Tomorrow’s JFK-to -LAX flight leaves at 8:30 am, requiring a pre-dawn wakeup. A few errands to attend to when I hit town and then a 7 pm screening of Funny People , which I’m told is an in-and-out, up-and-down, 145-minute ahem thing. In a respectable/honorable way, some feel. (Universal guy to journalist friend: “It’s real, and some people don’t want real.”) Then then I’m driving down to San Diego and Comic-Con around 10 pm. I’ve rented a crappy little Craig’s List cottage with a futon on the floor.

There are all kinds of parties and events, and starting early is key. (I wonder what time the press room opens?) There’ll be a New Moon press conference at 9:30 am Thursday in a Gaslamp-area hotel. And I’ve already reported that I’m safely okay to attend the Avatar presentation, which happens Thursday afternoon from 3 pm to 4:125 pm. There’s an Entertainment Weekly poolside soiree around dinner hour. And a private little Peter Jackson gathering for 40 or so fans on Thursday night (9:30 pm to 11 pm) so the Great Genius can expound about District 9, The Lovely Bones, Tintin and The Hobbit . There’s also an Avatar gamer party going from 8pm to midnight.

The inside-the-big-hall events are well covered in this Luke Y. Thompson/ Deadline Hollywood Daily summary. I’m just going to play it like it lays. Expecting a lot of chit-chat, cruise-throughs, hey-ho’s, photos and videos. One trap I’m not going to fall into is partying too much in the evenings. I’m planning on filing in Starbucks for hours on end.

In any event, HE will be unrefreshed and all-but-dead starting tomorrow morning and lasting until God knows when tomorrow afternoon.

I’m so delighted with the new Criterion Repulsion Bluray (out 7.28) that I’ve played it twice start to finish, and I only opened the package last night. I didn’t sit there like a bowling pin and literally watch it twice. I watched it once and I ran it a second time as a kind of white-noise sideshow in the corner of my eye, tuning in and out and half-listening as I worked on the column.

It doesn’t seem to have been de-granularized in the slightest and I still love it. Just goes to show that people like me are fine with a natural grain look as long as it’s been done right. For all I know the grain has been toned down, but it looks amazingly sweet. It’s there but it’s fine. The monochrome tones are pleasingly vivid and soothing, and the sharpness of the picture is just right in an unforced and untweaked way.