Forgetting Sarah Marshall.

"From its raunchy, genitally obsessed dialogue to its tender heart, Forgetting Sarah Marshall is instantly recognizable as a product of Clubhouse Apatow," writes Newsweek's David Ansen. "Its director, first-timer Nicholas Stoller, and its writer and star, Jason Segel, are alumni of Judd Apatow's cult TV shows Undeclared and Freaks and Geeks.... The breakup scene is not one you're likely to forget, for Peter is buck naked when Sarah breaks the bad news, and remains that way throughout the entire scene. It's a new, and startling, use of full-frontal male nudity - one that makes his emotional vulnerability hilariously, uncomfortably literal."

Updated through 4/18.

For Scott Weinberg, writing at Cinematical, this is "a semi-romantic comedy that covers some of the same ground as The Break-Up and The Heartbreak Kid but does one thing differently: It delivers a lot of laughs."

"Segel's script frequently enlivens pedestrian scenarios with sharp verbal back-and-forths and sudden cutaways to bizarre gags, and in the story's bookending scenes of heartache and bliss, it also finds - via phallic money shots - a perfectly hilarious encapsulation of the vulnerability that comes from being in love," writes Nick Schager in Slant.

"The vacation-spot coincidence is so lame a plot turn that you groan over it, but there's a benefit here - the boyfriend, one Aldous Snow (Russell Brand), a Brit rocker and professional sex god, turns out to be the best thing in the movie," writes David Denby in the New Yorker.

"Aldous may be suffused by his sense of entitlement, but he's arguably the most honest and self-aware person on screen, and Brand's performance is marvelously droll and controlled," agrees Joe Leydon in Variety.

Dave Itzkoff profiles Segel for the New York Times: "[H]e insisted that the scene of him in the altogether appear in Forgetting Sarah Marshall in all its cringe-inducing glory, because it actually happened to him." More from Robert Abele in the Los Angeles Times.

Updates: Online viewing tip. Sujewa Ekanayake has Brand's BBC Four tribute to On the Road.

"Yeah, it's pretty funny," admits Premiere's Glenn Kenny. "And it's a pretty accurate depiction of a certain feature of male romantic humiliation. But it's also a little - and this is one of my two misgivings about the movie - expected. The Apatow formula hasn't curdled just yet, but there's a certain can-you-top-this? tone cropping up in its raunch."

"If there's a myth we cling to in America, it's that life is arranged in stages of "personal growth," and each one leads to a higher plane of enlightenment," writes Jim Emerson at MSN Movies. "But Apatow seems at least somewhat ambivalent about the idea, which is why his movies tend to end with reunions rather than the weddings or engagements that have concluded traditional comedies for centuries."

Patrick Walsh talks with Stoller for Cinematical; and Mallory Potosky talks with him for MovieMaker.

Updates, 4/16: "Lost in the quasi-backlash against Knocked Up and its questionable procreative politics was Judd Apatow's greater artistic crime as writer/director/producer/comedy godhead: his unabashed conformity, a middlebrowization of potentially subversive humor for the purposes of white, upper-middle-class hegemony," writes Michael Joshua Rowin in the L Magazine. "In this respect Forgetting Sarah Marshall is the least troublesome product to emerge from the Apatow factory."

"The smartest thing about Segel's script is its spirit of generosity," writes Sean Burns in the Philadelphia Weekly. "It's a pleasure spending time with these people, which is a rare enough feeling to have at a movie these days."

"Segel's willing to go to dark, weird places his contemporaries won't," writes Robert Wilonsky in the Voice. "[W]ithout Segel bravely channeling 'his own anxieties and obsessions into his clowning,' as Pauline Kael wrote about Woody Allen 24 years ago, Forgetting Sarah Marshall would have been easily forgettable and, one might even say, limp."

Updates, 4/17: "Sarah deftly mixes raunchy, R-rated comedy with an intelligent, humane look at the foibles of the heart that's almost like something out of an Eric Rohmer movie," writes Alonso Duralde at MSNBC.

"Forgetting Sarah Marshall has perhaps already earned the distinction of the funniest movie of the year," writes Neil Morris in the Independent Weekly.

Eric Kohn, writing in the New York Press, prefers The Palm Beach Story.

Updates, 4/18: "Forgetting Sarah Marshall does not entirely play by the established conventions of its genre," writes AO Scott in the New York Times. "Its willingness to explore states of feeling and modes of behavior that tamer romantic comedies never go near is decidedly a virtue, though this same sense of daring and candor also exposes its limitations."

With Forgetting Sarah Marshall, Apatow "moves one step closer to becoming a brand name rather than a breathing, thinking presence with a distinct sensibility," argues Salon's Stephanie Zacharek. The film "is less Apatow than it is Apatowistic. Behind every gag - and some of them are inspired, if poorly executed - you can hear the scratchy sound of a checklist item being ticked off or, worse, the not-so-faint jingle of cashing in."

"Forgetting Sarah Marshall could be pegged as yet another Apatow tale of arrested adolescence, but Segel has always played more a serial monogamist than a horndog, and his earnest, self-deprecating screen persona graces the film's crudest moments with a kind of innocence," writes Scott Tobias at the AV Club.

"If Forgetting Sarah Marshall lacks the heady mix of sheer exuberance and unexpected maturity of the granddaddy of the genre, Apatow's 40-Year-Old Virgin, it's more soulful than Knocked Up and more inclusive than Superbad," writes Carina Chocano in the Los Angeles Times.

"Peter doesn't bother to mask his insecurity with raunchy bravado, like Seth Rogen in Knocked Up or the foulmouthed seniors of Superbad," writes Slate's Dana Stevens. "The crying, like the nudity, is funny in itself—not because the audience is insensitive to Peter's suffering but because his baby-bird vulnerability so thoroughly subverts our expectations of how a male romantic lead should behave.... Like its hero, Forgetting Sarah Marshall is a little soft around the middle, but all the more loveable for that."

"Like most Apatow-influenced movies, Forgetting Sarah Marshall is, at heart, about forgiveness," writes Jim Emerson at RogerEbert.com. "We all do stupid, destructive and self-destructive things for which we're probably not going to forgive ourselves, so the best thing in the world is when somebody else forgives us. In the movie's moral universe, there are no irredeemably bad people - just those afflicted to various degrees with shallowness, immaturity, selfishness, obliviousness, ambition."

The film "navigates the indignities of a big breakup while providing enough romantic comedy elements to keep date audiences happy," writes Meghan Keane in the New York Sun. Also: "If our new crop of young male movie stars has anything to say about it, unsexy male nudity may be populating the Internet in years to come."

Will Lawrence talks with Brand for the Telegraph.

"Sarah Marshall is a very funny movie," writes Patrick Walsh at Cinematical. "But its faults - its sloppiness, its tendency to let improvisation roll past the point of laughter, its relationships that simply don't ring true - are what separate this Judd Apatow production from a Judd Apatow film." Also, Monika Bartyzel lists seven "Bad and Bitter Movie Breakups."

"This is a fairly low-keyed comedy, but a grown-up dropping in on it can appreciate its lack of frenzy, its fundamental good nature, as easily as its core audience will," writes Richard Schickel for Time. "It isn't exactly a gem, but as zircons go, it'll do."

Posted by dwhudson at April 14, 2008 1:06 AM