Forgetting Sarah Marshall (2008)
Directed by Nicholas Stoller
When actress Sarah Marshall dumps aspiring musician Peter Bretter for rock star Aldous Snow, Peter's world comes crashing down. His best friend Brian suggests that Peter should get away from everything and to fly off to Hawaii to escape all his problems. After arriving in Hawaii and meeting the beautiful receptionist Rachel Jansen, Peter is shocked to see not only Aldous in Hawaii, but also Sarah.
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26 films that influenced Forgetting Sarah Marshall
What critics say influenced Forgetting Sarah Marshall
The immortal writer/director Preston Sturges, responsible for such trenchantly hilarious comedic romances as The Lady Eve, The Palm Beach Story, and Unfaithfully Yours, held that sex was "Topic A." The movie output most closely associated with producer Judd Apatow The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Knocked Up, Superbad suggests that Apatow concurs.
The immortal writer/director Preston Sturges, responsible for such trenchantly hilarious comedic romances as The Lady Eve, The Palm Beach Story, and Unfaithfully Yours, held that sex was "Topic A." The movie output most closely associated with producer Judd Apatow The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Knocked Up, Superbad suggests that Apatow concurs.
The immortal writer/director Preston Sturges, responsible for such trenchantly hilarious comedic romances as The Lady Eve, The Palm Beach Story, and Unfaithfully Yours, held that sex was "Topic A." The movie output most closely associated with producer Judd Apatow The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Knocked Up, Superbad suggests that Apatow concurs.
It's a variation on a Buster Keaton gag from "The Navigator" (1923) and there's seemingly nothing to it -- just the perfect execution of an arc.
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He abandons Segel and doesn’t get a clearly defined performance out of Kristen Bell (from TV’s “Veronica Mars” and “Heroes”).
The overall feeling is that of a movie entirely overrun by third- and fourth-billed sidekicks (Jonah Hill and Paul Rudd are the special guest-stars, for crying out loud), where even Hawaii looks drab and the premise is stolen from Steve Martin in The Lonely Guy only to be buried under a wave of botched improv bits.
(It's a measure of society's attitude toward male nudity that the mere sight of the fully exposed Segel causes shocked, embarrassed laughter among moviegoers; compare this to the reaction that greeted a similar sequence in Robert Altman's "Short Cuts," in which the bottomless Julianne Moore became a figure of hushed yet prurient interest.)
The nude breakup scene that begins the movie is funny but also painfully intimate, like the moment in Robert Altman's Short Cuts when Julianne Moore confesses to a long-ago adulterous affair while naked from the waist down.
Think of the lame “Joe Versus the Volcano” (1990), with Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan; or of the shirtless Owen Wilson caper, “The Big Bounce” (2004); or of Anne Heche and Harrison Ford, eying each other warily, then snarling and scrapping, in “Six Days, Seven Nights” (1998).
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"Forgetting Sarah Marshall" will be familiar to anyone who has seen "The 40-Year-Old Virgin," "Knocked Up," "Superbad," etc.
Apatow ("The 40-Year-Old Virgin," "Talladega Nights," "Knocked Up," "Superbad," "Walk Hard," "Drillbit Taylor," the upcoming "The Pineapple Express" - when does this guy sleep!?) and writer/star Segel have whipped up a hilarious yet heartfelt look at relationships that generates real apathy for its pathetic lead even as we cannot help but laugh out loud as his life flies apart.
In the comedy empire of producer Judd Apatow (The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Knocked Up), many of the breaks have gone to people who toughed it out on his unsuccessful TV series Undeclared and Freaks and Geeks.
While it's hardly unforgettable, the latest raunchy rom-com from prolific producer Judd Apatow ("The 40-Year-Old Virgin," "Knocked Up," "Superbad") is a genial timewaster.
Like "Knocked Up" and "The 40-Year-Old Virgin," which established Apatow as the definitive comic observer of the perpetually adolescent American male—a clueless, slothful, hairy beast in desperate need of female taming—"Forgetting Sarah Marshall" focuses on a guy in the throes of romantic agony.
Apatow has, in the past few years, become a cottage industry unto himself, a postmillennial John Hughes, but with little (so far) of the increasingly strident precocity that Hughes evinced as his career devolved from the great (The Breakfast Club) to the banal and beyond (Baby's Day Out, the Home Alone films).