Forgetting Sarah Marshall
No need to look so worried, Kristen. I think you pulled it off.
Forgetting Sarah Marshall. I admit that I wasn’t expecting much from this movie*. The trailer was kinda uninspired, the comedy looked obvious and worst of all it had Russell Brand in it. I’m still only vaguely aware who he is (and I’m quite happy for things to stay that way) BUT he was one of the more unexpected surprises that the film offered up. The biggest one is that I never imagined I’d be writing this next sentence:
Go and watch Forgetting Sarah Marshall. It’s fucking funny.
I had the pleasure of taking a bunch of bloggers to a preview screening last week. I’d been looking to do something like this for a while after the success of the Juno screening last year, but had to admit early on that the wait for another Juno would be a long one. I hadn’t seen The 40 Year Old Virgin, but thought both Knocked Up and Superbad were decent enough comedies. I enjoyed that they weren’t as juvenile as most American comedy, but was a little put off by the trade off for overbearing sentimentality. Decent enough Friday night movies though so I figured hosting an advanced screening of the latest movie from the Judd Apatow stable would be an easy sell via Twitter.
It was a cool little screening of I guess around 30+ bloggers who had answered my shout out. Some of them were friends and some of them are now friends. That’s how Twitter works. The film was shown in the Soho Screening Rooms, somewhere I’ve never seen filled before. It’s usually just me and a handful of journalists at some early morning preview, drinking coffee and stifling yawns as expensive things explode in front of us.
The first thing that struck me was that this was not a romantic comedy. It was a comedy with a big C… and a lot of cock. That’s not another prod at Mr Brand. The plot is summed up in the trailer, but it’s the abundance of one liners that keep the thing going. There’s a feeling you’ve seen similar situations before but before you get a chance to over analyse anything ZING there’s a pubic hair gag to deal with. Which actually works quite well.
The main draw for me was seeing how a TV actress continues to cope up on the big screen. Not so much Mila Kunis who’s pretty good, but rather Kristen Bell who was the heart and soul of Veronica Mars before it became a huge mess and was put out of its misery. I’ve seen her in a couple of films before - most notably the horrible remake of Kairo, Pulse, which gets a damn good kicking in one delighfully uncomfortable scene here. Just as I’ve heard that the role of name was built around Russell Brand it’s startlingly obvious that Ms Bell’s career to date was a huge part of the character of Sarah Marshall. Which was a brave move and a damn funny one.
The UK marketing for the movie was luke-warm at best - horrible looking bus posters for one and a half hearted website that was a shadow of the American one. I liked the fact that the lead character kept a blog, but am already using this unfinished idea (obviously thought up late in the day, poorly executed and with no link back from within the movie itself) as a proposal for future blog and movie integration so thanks for that.
I’m actually looking forward to seeing Forgetting Sarah Marshall again which is kinda rare and it also made me go back and look up The 40 Year Old Virgin to see what I was missing. Be interesting to see if they can keep the ball rolling here…
* When Jess said she’d had a better offer to go to a sex shop anniversary party I could see her point.