{"id":5095,"date":"2009-08-15T12:01:29","date_gmt":"2009-08-15T20:01:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/studentfilmreviews.org\/?p=5095"},"modified":"2009-08-15T22:32:23","modified_gmt":"2009-08-16T06:32:23","slug":"forgetting-sarah-marshall-nicholas-stoller-2008-usa","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/studentfilmreviews.org\/?p=5095","title":{"rendered":"Forgetting Sarah Marshall (Nicholas Stoller, 2008): USA"},"content":{"rendered":"

Reviewed by Richard Feilden<\/a>. \u00a0Viewed on DVD.<\/p>\n

\"forgettingI haven\u2019t watched a lot of newly release comedy in, oh, say the last five years.\u00a0 Is it a coincidence that 2004 was year that the Judd Apatow juggernaut rolled into Hollywood and changed the comedy scene?\u00a0 Well, let\u2019s just say that watching the trailers for films like Knocked Up and The Wedding Crashers made the thought of inviting a few friends to garnish my pizza with their own toe-nail clippings seem like an attractive prospect.\u00a0 It might surprise you then that over the last couple of months I\u2019ve worked my way through over a dozen Apatow era productions.\u00a0 Like a good little film reviewer I\u2019ve tried to leave my preconceptions behind, imagining a little puff of fresh air emerging from each jolly, red Netflix envelope as I\u2019ve torn them open and popped in the disc.\u00a0 So, was Forgetting Sarah Marshall<\/em><\/a> the comedy that convinced me that I was right to give these films a chance?\u00a0 No.\u00a0 It\u2019s a weary, overlong, mess of a film.\u00a0 I hated it.<\/p>\n

Peter Bretter (Jason Segel) is dating above his station.\u00a0 Overweight and unmotivated, he has managed to end up dating Sarah Marshall (Kristen Bell), a successful, glamorous, TV star.\u00a0 But reality bites hard when she dumps him.\u00a0 Falling into depression (you can tell, because he does exactly what he did before, only with added crying), he heads off to Hawaii, where, shock of shocks, he runs straight into his ex, as well as her new boyfriend.\u00a0 Will he end up winning back the girl of his dreams?\u00a0 Will the down to earth, yet ridiculously attractive hotel receptionist capture his heart instead?\u00a0 Will there be moments of random nudity designed to attract a young male audience, but from bit-part women actors who don\u2019t have the contractual clout of the stars?\u00a0 Well, I\u2019m pretty sure you can guess the last one, but you\u2019ll have to be desperate enough to watch the film to answer the others.<\/p>\n

Now, being the good little reviewer that I claim to be, I need to justify my disdain for the film, so I\u2019ll start with Segel.\u00a0 I\u2019m going to give him kudos for being willing to add some male nudity to balance out the ladies who get one line and fewer garments, but that\u2019s all I\u2019m going to give him I\u2019m afraid.\u00a0 He seems to be trying to fill the role as a poor-man\u2019s Vince Vaughn, but he lacks Vaughn\u2019s everyman charm and charisma.\u00a0 I just don\u2019t like the character as he plays him, and if I don\u2019t want to see the man I\u2019m supposed to be rooting for, the film really has lost the fight.\u00a0 Playing opposite him, Bell\u2019s acting range here isn\u2019t stretched much past pouting and orgasms, so she doesn\u2019t fare much better.<\/p>\n

Speaking of Bell and Segel brings me to another of this films (and many others in this \u2018geeks rule\u2019 era) problems.\u00a0 Apatow and co. have apparently been watching rather too much pornography and have foolishly brought into the fantasy that charmless, fat, unattractive men are the sexual equivalent of chocolate-covered-crack-cocaine for dysfunctional yet stunningly attractive women.\u00a0 Now, I\u2019m not going to suggest that looks are everything (because frankly, given my own features, it would just be depressing!), but I\u2019m closer to buying the idea that hookers look like Julia Roberts than I am to believing some the insta-attraction that happens here.\u00a0 Don\u2019t get me wrong, ever since The Breakfast Club I\u2019ve been waiting for the day that being a nerd would get you the girl, but this film just doesn\u2019t sell it.<\/p>\n

There are plenty of other things to hate as well, from the entirely superfluous scenes which needed cutting, through to the presence of the odious Russell Brand, but I\u2019m going to call it quits here and put this mess out of my mind.\u00a0 Positive comments?\u00a0 Well, it isn\u2019t the very worst of the Apatow era films that I\u2019ve watched and that\u2019s about all that I\u2019ve got.\u00a0 Maria Thayer and Jack McBrayer make an amusing, though completely irrelevant, newly-married couple who are trying to find a way to balance puritanical beliefs with nymphomaniac strength sex drives.\u00a0 Given that they are in the film for all of three minutes I can hardly recommend it based on that though.<\/p>\n

At the end of the day the cardinal sin that this movie is guilty of, at least in my eyes, is that it just isn\u2019t funny.\u00a0 It isn\u2019t that I don\u2019t have a sense of humor; I think that Dr Strangelove is one of the greatest films made to date.\u00a0 I\u2019m not a comedy snob either.\u00a0 Were I not too many to weep, Dodgeball would have had me crying with laughter.\u00a0 If a film doesn\u2019t make me laugh when it\u2019s supposed to, then there is little more that I can say.\u00a0 Avoid.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Reviewed by Richard Feilden. \u00a0Viewed on DVD. I haven\u2019t watched a lot of newly release comedy in, oh, say the last five years.\u00a0 Is it a coincidence that 2004 was year that the Judd Apatow juggernaut rolled into Hollywood and changed the comedy scene?\u00a0 Well, let\u2019s just say that watching the trailers for films like […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[67,3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5095","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-dvd","category-films"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/studentfilmreviews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5095","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/studentfilmreviews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/studentfilmreviews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/studentfilmreviews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/studentfilmreviews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5095"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/studentfilmreviews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5095\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/studentfilmreviews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5095"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/studentfilmreviews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5095"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/studentfilmreviews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5095"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}