Forgetting Sarah Marshall (Stoller, 2008)
Link to my review at Christian Spotlight on Entertainment.
I’m somewhat tired of defending this film, so for the most part I’ll just post a link to my review. Perhaps, perhaps, comedy is it’s own justification. You either laugh or you don’t. And I found the puppet Dracula musical funny. I found Russell Brand very, very funny. I found Jason Segel alternately sad and funny. Mila Kunis puts the movie over the top with a wonderfully real and self-assured performance.
The end of the film will probably annoy some people, but it struck me as being honest and true. Rachel (Kunis) tells Peter (Segel) to go away, and he does. She tells him not to call, and he doesn’t. She has a conversation with one of her friends that ostensibly makes her see things differently, but really, she just gets tired of being alone, I think. In some ways, the end of the film reminds me of the end of John Sayles’s Honeydripper. You wonder how the characters are going to extricate themselves from a particular situation, and then the truth is revealed. And some people just choose to look past the truth. Do they look to a deeper truth? To what they want to be true? Or do they just decide that the truth means less to them than what they can have. I like that Rachel puts her foot down, but I think the film is honest about the consequences of trying to have and maintain expectations.
Do I think people will be watching this film in school twenty years from now? Probably not. (Unless there is a unit on the influence of Apatow or a retrospective on one of the actors.) But if you ask me what studio film I enjoyed the most last year, this is it.
