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50/50: Half Funny, Half Touching

Seth Rogen movie manages to be both funny and poignant

By Matt Cantor, Newser Staff

Posted Sep 30, 2011 12:30 PM CDT

(Newser) – With a current 92% rating at Rotten Tomatoes, 50/50 gets praise for its blend of comedy and drama about a young man diagnosed with cancer.

In Salon, Mary Elizabeth Williams calls the movie “poignant, funny and profane”: It “understands the woozy terror of a life or death crisis,” she notes—though “unsurprisingly,” Seth Rogen et al., “like true students of the Judd Apatow school of filmmaking, never quite get a grip on their female characters.”

The movie “needs to be serious enough to be real as well as light enough to be funny,” observes Kenneth Turan in the Los Angeles Times. “Though it falls off the wagon at times, it maintains its balance remarkably well.”
Colin Covert, writing in the Minneapolis Star Tribune, calls the film “50% affecting medical drama and 50% first-rate character study.”
And in the Philadelphia Inquirer, Carrie Rickey says lead actor Joseph Gordon-Levitt is “the definition of nuance, is touching, funny, and fierce—an unusual combination of moods, but deeply affecting.”

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In this film image released by Summit Entertainment, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, left, and Seth Rogen are shown in a scene from "50/50." (AP Photo/Summit Entertainment,Chris Helcermanas-Benge)

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50/50: Half Funny, Half Touching

Seth Rogen movie manages to be both funny and poignant

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