Forgetting Sarah Marshall (2008)
Genre: Comedy
Format Viewed: Theatrical Release
Filmography links and data courtesy of The Internet Movie Database.
I won’t be forgetting this hilarious comedy for a long time!
Things actually are looking up for comedies these days, I’m certainly happy to profess, and although the bar was set undeniably high by Juno earlier this year and even by Superbad looking back as far as last summer, I think I can confidently say that Forgetting Sarah Marshall was the funniest movie I’ve seen in the last year. No, not Funniest Movie of the Year, like they plugged into all of the newspaper ads for Juno a month into the freakin’ year, but truly over the last twelve consecutive months, Sarah Marshall was at the top of the list.
Wait, even over The Simpsons Movie?! Ok, not fair, but definitely best live-action comedy in the last twelve months – hands down.
Anyways, I think one of the things that I respected the most about this flick was the fact that this is the second instance lately where we’ve seen a relatively young actor also show writing talents because Forgetting Sarah Marshall was actually written by Jason Segel, who also happens to play the lead as Peter Bretter in the movie. Last year started this trend with Seth Rogen co-writing Superbad, in which he also starred as Officer Michaels … not exactly the lead in that one, but by far one of the funniest roles along with Bill Hader and of course, McLovin’ (Christopher Mintz-Plasse). And it’s sort of a new aspect to enjoying these kinds of movies for me because if there were others that followed a similar trend in the past, it certainly never dawned on me as I was watching them, whereas nowadays these are guys my own age who are not only doing a bang up job on the screen delivering the jokes, but are also flexing their creative muscles off camera by writing these scripts as well – so I guess just given my own passions for writing, it’s a pretty inspiring thing for me to watch…
Not that I’m even remotely interested in acting myself, mind you, but hey – stranger things have happened!
But enough frightening talk like that – this movie was hilarious, from the opening scene that had us staring down the business end of, err, Jason Segel within the first minute and a half to my favorite scene in the entire movie that just so happened to paint a gentler side of Dracula, if you will! If I’d have made it through any more of our 32oz soda by that point in the movie, I have little doubt that I would have completely wet myself when Dracula himself began to pour his soul out to an unsuspecting crowd in that quaint, Hawaiian lounge. Jason Segel and Russell Brand (who played Aldous Snow, the sex-crazed rocker who steals our lead’s girl away) both deserve a bow for delivering some of the funniest casual humor that I’ve seen in a long time, not to mention a couple of great lines each from both Jonah Hill and Paul Rudd, whose performances could’ve only been better had they been given more lines … despite the fact that that would’ve likely screwed up the balance of the movie. Even the ladies had their moments of fun more frequent than most, with the female lead quite possibly being a toss up between Mila Kunis’ love for dessert, if you will, as the four stars enjoyed dinner and of course, the mother of all fake orgasm scenes shortly after that in retort lead by Kristen Bell! Yeah, so they’re both sexually charged moments that were frankly pretty hot, but hey – I’m a guy, I have my needs, what do you expect?!
Also, Muppets! Does it get any better???
Well, at least I can confidently say that if it does, we’re going to have ourselves some damn hilarious movies coming up because Forgetting Sarah Marshall was one of the best I’ve seen in quite some time. Just as movies like Ace Ventura and Dumb and Dumber defined the ‘90s, I think we’ve finally found ourselves a crop of humor worthy to represent these new times. Rejoice!
 |
|
|
|
|
|
 |
 |
 |
 |
|
|
