Forgetting Sarah Marshall

What happens when you take your audience for granted, well Sting made a luth album, The Rolling Stones made disco albums, Schwarzenneger made a movie where he was pregnant, and these endeavours share one common symptom, they are not just mediocre, but they have a kind of an agressive mediocrity, a disrespect for fan's loyalty.

"Forgetting Sarah Marshall" is such an exemple, although not that mediocre anyways, Peter Bretter (Jason Segel) is a film musician whose girlfriend is the smoking hot Sarah Marshall (Kristen Bell) the star of "Scene of the Crime", a series that bears a ressemblance to a certain CSI, the couple is disequilibred but functional, until the day the inevitable happens, Sarah Breaking up with Peter.

Peter doesn't take it well to say the least, since he is basically a man boy, think couch potato with a vengence, so after trying everything, he follows his brother's advice and goes to Hawaii to forget it all, and guess what, Sarah is also there with her new boyfriend, the rock star Adlous Snow (Russel Brand) the leader of Infant Sorrow.

One thing leads to another, and all the clichées of the genre fall like the moussoun, Rachel (Mila Kunis) is the hot receptionist who has a little thing for Peter, Matthew (Jonah Hill) as a restaurant employee trying to break into music, Chuck (Paul Rudd) as the Surf instructor, and the old story of Peter trying to make it big in the entertainment business using his frustration as creative stimuli, until reaching a predictable ending that will make you wonder when did it cease to be an Apatow production, and became a Sandra Bullock one.

Now don't get me wrong, it's the summer, and if you have nothing to do, it's a nice afternonn movie, but it's below the Apatow standards, like "SuperBad" we reviewed days ago, it's a predictable plot, what make an Apatow comedy is it's unpredictablity, and it suffers some problems in the level of character building, some of them like the fundamendalist couple, or the yoga instructor are just fillers, they just occupy vacant screen time, a special mention indeed for Russel Brand who saves the movie with his exotic brand of comedy, and his onscreen wit, you won't forget his performance here anytime soon.

Apatow and Co are working on a new thing, "Funny People" with Adam Sandler, and the usual people, now will Sandler drag Apatow below to the level of "big daddy" or will Apatow drag him up to the level of "Punch drunk love", a low point in the body of work of this great funny Apatow family, but we shall be indulgent, because they made us laugh so hard, and so many times.