Monday, April 21, 2008

Forgetting Sarah Marshall

Sunday, April 20, 2008

The Apatow family hasn't steered me wrong so far, but this one and Walk Hard are definitely a drop in quality from the earlier works. My hopes for Pineapple Express are still pretty high, though. Get it, "high"? That was an accidental pun.

Besides the fact that this movie just isn't nearly as funny as 40-Year-Old Virgin or Superbad or Knocked Up, it feels too much like a typical, contrived romantic comedy at times. You know, a lot of manufactured conflict, and a romance that you're expected to care about despite the fact that the characters barely know each other.

Seriously, though, what the fuck? The lovebirds know each other for all of four days, right? And only one of those days was there any romance. And then the guy halfway hooks up with his ex, who he was with for five years, and backs out because he feels bad. Then he tells the girl, and she gets all angry and tells him to never talk to her again.

I repeat: they have known each other four days. And she acts like he completely betrayed her. And the movie seems to think this is a reasonable reaction. I'm sorry, did I miss the fucking part where they got married and pledged their undying eternal love for each other or something? I'm pretty sure knowing someone for four days and sleeping with them one time doesn't mean that you have committed yourself to them for all eternity. Man, I hate stupid bullshit like that.

Anyways, there are enough laughs here to make it enjoyable, but I did not give shit-one about whether or not the couple got together at all. This movie lacked the insight and empathy of the other Apatow 'n' Co. movies. There's a lot of (attempts at) sentiment and emotion, but it feels less like they did it as an expression of true feeling, and more like they thought they had to put it in there.

4 comments:

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Shenan said...

wow...i wouldn't have guess you felt so strongly about this at the time. i mean, a lot of the stuff you said is true. but you seemed to enjoy yourself more when we saw it. haha, i had no idea.

Dan said...

Oh, I did indeed enjoy the movie overall. it made me laugh enough that I got my money's worth. but some of that stuff did bug me, and really drag the movie down at times.

I didn't mention it in the post, but this movie had the worst female leads ever. I mean, they tend to get short-shafted in all these Apatow-produced movies, but here they really had absolutely nothing to do except witness all the men being funny. at least in Virgin and Knocked Up and Superbad the girls got a couple of laughs, even if those movies are more of a boy's club. Forgetting Sarah Marshall didn't even bother to make them remotely funny or interesting characters, and then on top of it they try to make Sarah out to be a big bitch (I think he calls her "the devil") even though she objectively not much worse than any of the other characters.

hell, at least she never expects total monogamous committment from somebody after sleeping with them once.

Shenan said...

i thought that's what he was going for at first- two morally/in terms of fault ambiguous characters, both sort of not pulilng their weight in the relationship but feeling like the innocent victim anyway- but then he does have that "you're the goddamned devil" line where it seems like we're supposed to be like YEAH SHE FINALLY GOT WHAT WAS COMING TO HER! and i was like "...really?" THAT's what we're supposed to feel? okaaaay, but you didn't really pull it off very well.