The Bauer Confidential

Yesterday April and I went to our favorite theater to watch Forgetting Sarah Marshall, which turned out to be a fun and creative movie about a man who has lost all happiness and is striving to find it again. It is also an rated R comedy, which means that many (but not all) of the jokes are of an adult nature, with references to sex or male/female genitalia. Movies usually employ this maneuver for shock value, to distract you from a bad movie. Not this one. The writing is smart and funny. The characters are strong, and the acting was surprisingly good as was first time director Nicholas Stoller. The story is about a Peter Bretter (Jason Segel, who is also wrote the spec), a music composer for a popular T.V. series starring his celebrity girlfriend Sarah Marshall (Kristen Bell of Veronica Mars fame). The story begins with Sarah breaking up their relationship and Peter not taking it all too well, falling into severe depression and hiding his pain with a series on one night stands. Of course this doesn’t alleviate his despair, so his stepbrother (SNL’s Bill Hader) convinces him to take a vacation to Hawaii. Hopefully the relaxation and distraction will help him to get over his ex. Of course, that turns out to be difficult because at that same resort, Sarah Marshall and her new London Rocker boyfriend Aldous Snow (Russlle Brand) have also decided to vacation. To add to the story is Rachel Jansen (Mila Kunis from That 70’s Show), the potential new love interest if only Peter can move on from his ex. There are also many other unique and fun characters resulting in every scene being fun to watch. The story is predictable, and the ending we all hope for does happen, but as with life, it is about the journey, and our main character experiences a journey not often seen in cinema. This is the type of movie that we get exactly what we expect. If there is anything negative about this movie is that there are too many full frontal naked shots of Jason Segel. The first time, it was for shock value, but after that it became unnecessary.

On a broader note, since the release of The 40 Year Old Virgin, Judd Apatow has created a whole new niche in movies that is the male driven romantic comedy. Before Apatow, most romantic movies have an emotionally calm and controlled male lead with a female lead that wears her emotions on her sleeve (as the saying goes). This creates a story that explores the inner emotional workings of women. Judd Apatow movies are role reversals in which the story explores the inner emotional workings of men. This is good because a story can be created to explore something that has been mostly taboo previously, the emotional male. In another sense, this could be bad because women seem to have few quality roles in movies recently and these kind of movies dwindle that number even more, but these movies are fun and highly successful and we should expect many more of them.