Director: Nicholas StollerScreenwriter: Jason SegelProducer: Judd Apatow, Shauna RobertsonCast: Jason Segel, Kristen Bell, Mila Kunis, Russell BrandRuntime: 112 mins.Rated: R for sexual content, language, and graphic nudityReleased: April 18, 2008
Like a box of chocolate, “Forgetting Sarah Marshall” offers a delightful variety. It presents anything from romantic kisses, the triumph of the underdog, exemplary moments of heroism to full-frontal showcases of male genitalia.
The curtain rises as the towel drops from the waist of Peter Bretter (Jason Segel) when his TV-star girlfriend, Sarah Marshall (Kristen Bell), gives him the ‘it’s-not-you-it’s-me’ talk. Furious, broken-hearted, and teary-eyed while reminiscing over the cereal box Sarah bought him, Peter flies to Hawaii in a trip to get over the breakup where he meets, shockingly, his ex-girlfriend, her new lover, and a pretty hotel receptionist. The film develops as the four characters keep bumping into each other in awkward moments and orchestrated schemes.
The producer Judd Apatow (“The 40-year-old Virgin”, “Knocked Up”) certainly makes a significant part of the film better, as many of the jokes are hilariously Apatowistic in their exploration of male’s vulnerability.
Jason Segel also deserves a well round of applause for successfully capturing the I-wanna-kill-myself eyes of the zero appeal, couch potato Peter and for his confidence to flaunt his au naturale entirety when other characters enshrine their bodies with fabrics even in sexual situations.
But the best part really comes along with the freshness of the film’s bad writing and cheesy dialogues. Somewhere along the 112 minutes it runs, “Sarah” has a fair share of stale moments where the dialogues fail to ring true. Many lines are awfully written that ever so often even the solid acting of the casts fails to rescue the scenes from sounding worse than a bad high school romance drama. To top it all, the characters are flat, underdeveloped, and are clipped together from the library of overused archetypes. An immature loser protagonist with pure heart? Check. A demonized, lousy female canine ex-girlfriend and her new, sex-god boyfriend? Check, just to name a few.
But it is this brew of the two-dimensional characters, coupled with their kinky circumstances and humiliating situations in which they encounter each other that give “Sarah” its fresh, unconventional taste. It is like an opera with a lousy conducting, where every instrument plays different songs and every aria is dedicated to different lovers and is sung in different languages. It is a mess of an ensemble of little to no artistic merit that is still entertainingly fun to watch.
