| FORGETTING SARAH MARSHALL |
 2008 - USADirector: Nicholas Stoller
- Reviewed by Vickie
Thankfully, FSM was much better than I thought it would be. Still flawed, and still missing stuff, but a generally decent film all around. Jason Segel (How I Met Your Mother, Freaks & Geeks and many an Apatow film) penned the screenplay and stars as Peter, a Hollywood composer and boyfriend of super-popular TV actress Sarah Marshall (Kristen Bell), who stars on a well-known crime-drama. But she dumps him in the film’s opening scenes and he dives headlong into grief, depression and desperation. He decides to get away from all things Sarah and heads to Hawaii... where, OH MY GOD WHAT ARE THE ODDS?!, he winds up at the same resort as his pint-sized ex and her new, swarthy, rock-star boyfriend, Aldous Snow (Russell Brand, in a brilliant turn). Think Liam Gallagher meets Colin Farrell. AWWWK-ward! Fortunately, there’s a comely front-desk clerk named Rachel (Mila Kunis) to take Peter’s mind off Sarah, and a gaggle of quirky resort guests and staff (including Jack McBrayer as a sex-phobic newlywed, Jonah Hill as a sycophantic waiter and Team Apatow MVP Paul Rudd as a surf instructor who’s perhaps spent one too many hours in the sun) to keep everyone—on- and offscreen—entertained. What follows are all the shenanigans you’d expect. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out what the plot machinations will be, since they follow a fairly established pattern: boy loses girl, boy wants girl back, girl doesn’t want boy back, boy finds new girl, first girl suddenly changes her mind, and so on. Segel is a lovable and likable oaf of a guy, and much of the film’s success should be owed to his character’s basically genial nature. He’s kind of a screw-up and he knows it, which is endearing. Similarly, Kunis—in the Natalie Portman/Rachel Bilson role typically seen in a Zach Braff movie (the beautiful, dark-haired savior who appears at Just The Right Time)—is striking enough to make you sit up and take notice, and relatable enough to make you believe her. Russell Brand was fantastic, and his was my favorite character by far. I don’t know if he was meant to be appealing or repellent, but I was quite happy with him. Unfortunately, the woman at the center of it all gets kind of lost in the fray and, as my movie-going pal pointed out as we exited the theater, it was very hard to determine whether the audience is meant to like Sarah or hate her. Her behavior veers back and forth between sympathetic and antagonistic, and it felt like her character needed to be more strongly defined. The other thing that needed a little more definition was the reason behind the break-up. At the outset, we don’t know why Sarah gives Peter the heave-ho... though, we assume, it’s because of her new beau. When she finally reveals her real reasons later in the film, it rings a bit false and the comments she makes made me wonder if part of the film had been left on the editing room floor. FSM has enough heart to appeal to women in the audience and enough bawdy humor to keep the 15-year-old boy demographic suitably entertained. In the same way that Superbad painted a utopian picture of hot girls all chasing geeky boys, this one did feel a little self-indulgent and a bit choppy, but left me smiling in the end... which counts for a lot. |
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It was with some degree of trepidation that I sat down to see
Forgetting Sarah Marshall. I’m not a huge Team Apatow fan, even
though I loved Judd’s TV assorted TV series and thought The
40-Year-Old Virgin was great. Their work, as Moviepie Linda cited
in her rather scathing 