Review: Forgetting Sarah Marshall

What a wonderful world the movies have become. To promote “Forgetting Sarah Marshall,” writer-star Jason Segal took to the august pages of the New York Times to advertise the precise number of frames in the comedy’s opening scenes during which we are obliged to contemplate his junk: seventy-nine, reports the Gray Lady. Another innately conservative “shock” comedy from the Judd Apatow production line, “Forgetting,” the debut from director Nicholas Stolelr (who wrote the script to 2005’s “Fun With Dick and Jane” remake and three episodes of “Undeclared”) is one of the shaggiest to date. Segal plays Peter, who writes murky music for a “CSI”-like series that stars his girlfriend, Sarah Marshall (Kristen Bell). She dumps him for a British musician, Aldous Snow (Russell Brand), which he discovers when he retreats to Hawaii to get over his bawling fits and fits of balling and checks himself into the same hotel. Rachel (Mila Kunis), the pretty desk clerk at the resort helps him beyond the call of duty and they meet-cute, screw-cute and break-up-cute. While other writers have noted Apatow’s fondness for stories about shlubby men who are honey to attracted women, “Sarah Marshall” is the first that approaches levels of misogyny, especially in the way Bell is shot, with inconsistent lighting and angles that accentuate how close her eyes are together, almost akin to the inexplicable tomato hues of Kirsten Dunst’s skin in “Spiderman 2.” Kunis is only slightly better served with her level gaze, big green eyes, superb timing and a fine, plush, pudgy nose. But the reverse angles on Segal are all static-camera stand-ups, the most advanced example of the “Stand there and say shit and say shit and say some more shit” until we run out of time. The camera can’t move while the guys in “Sarah Marshall” are riffing. (An unfunny Bill Heder plays a pal of Peter’s who’s seen almost exclusively on the screen of his laptop). Still, it’s the avowed comedy of the male frontal nudity in four shots and the many shots of the tall Segal’s pale chest that exposes the nakedness of the enterprise. I’m not an opponent of a pleathora of petseleh, but it’s almost as unfunny as Peter’s obsession with a puppet musical of “Dracula.” A nudist has to dream… There’s no double standard, though: there’s at least two sets of perky bared breasts, or mid-fucking midriffs covered with a bedsheet for every fifth glimpse of ample man-boobs. In a way, it’s a high-art homage to Peter Greenaway’s R-rating-buster, “Prospero’s Books,” which stymied the MPAA censors with its ample acreage of fallen man-flesh and Sir John Gielgud’s fallen knob. In another way, it’s a comedy with scattered laughs, myriad fetishes, fixations and no small amount of clumsiness. 111m. (Ray Pride)