Apatow Productions

Forgetting Sarah Marshall: the slob romance goes to Hawaii

Forgetting Sarah Marshall
Directed by Nicholas Stoller. Written by Jason Segel. With Jason Segel, Kristin Bell, Mila Kunis, Russell Brand, Bill Hader, Jack McBrayer, Jonah Hill and Paul Rudd. (R)

More than nine months after its release, Knocked Up is still the number-one movie women ask me about. (Add men to the equation and it's Juno, but that's another story.) Knocked Up ticked off a lot of women, as much for its tale of a babe settling for a slob as for ignoring abortion, and producer Judd Apatow's follow-up, Forgetting Sarah Marshall, functions as a welcome corrective: Its protagonist, Peter Bretter, a TV-scorer with Broadway aspirations, has let himself go, so his girlfriend leaves him. If he's going to find love again he'll have to put down that giant bowl of Fruit Loops and start wearing shirts with buttons.

Jason Segel, who's been with Apatow since the TV series Freaks and Geeks, stars in, scripted, and even wrote the songs for this one, although as in most Apatow productions the dialogue was heavily improvised. Borrowing a page from Knocked Up, Billy Bush (in for Ryan Seacrest) kicks off the film, and for shock value (how do you follow Knocked Up's 30-foot-high vagina?) Segel goes full-frontal within the first few minutes and stays that way for an entire scene. By putting himself in a position usually reserved for women (cf. Julianne Moore in Short Cuts), Segel, who is no gym rat, announces with every uncoy posture that this is not your father's sex comedy. Or even your older brother's.

As ex-girlfriend Sarah Marshall and her new boyfriend, Kristin Bell and British comic Russell Brand essentially play heightened versions of themselves, Bell as a TV star trying to get into movies (how meta!) and Brand as a rock star who shares his well-tended tabloid persona—sexually omnivorous, in recovery and smitten with Eastern practices. He even wears leather pants in Hawaii, which I think would give some women pause.

Brand fits in seamlessly with the rest of the cast, which, even as it addresses Knocked Up's sexism, still leaves most of the comedy to the boys, including Paul Rudd as a surfing instructor, Jonah Hill as an obsequious resort worker and Jack McBrayer (30 Rock) playing another sheltered Bible thumper. The cast's crackerjack timing keeps this rambling comedy on the rails—like Apatow's other slob romances it feels epic, way longer than anyone's vacation.

As the film teeters between vulgar misfires and left-field brilliance, Peter has the usual movie adventures from which men are made. (Jumping off a cliff? Really?) But an eleventh-hour assist from Jim Henson's Creature Shop works wonders. That Segal and Stoller will next turn from reviving the romantic comedy to reviving the Muppets is no surprise.

The Forbidden Kingdom
Directed by Rob Minkoff. Written by John Fusco. With Jackie Chan, Jet Li, Michael Angarano, Liu Yifei, Collin Chou and Li Bingbing. (PG-13)

Jackie Chan and Jet Li, the Gene Kelly and Fred Astaire of martial arts, finally face off in The Forbidden Kingdom, a queasy hybrid of imperialist fantasy and The Wizard of Oz. Its inspiration, the Ming Dynasty?era novel Journey to the West, about a monk named Sanzang (the Sanskrit "Tripitaka" is used in English translations) who frees the Monkey King from a stone prison, has been placed in the service of fanboy wish-fulfillment, the monk character split into two so that a Westerner can save China.

Michael Angarano (Snow Angels) plays a Boston teenager named Jason Tripitaka who finds himself spirited away to medieval China (whichever dynasty it was when men wore blue eye shadow) with a magic staff found in the back of the pawn shop where he buys bootlegged Shaw Brothers DVDs. After moaning about how he just wants to go home (To what, the Southie bullies? The father he's never known?) he's given a crash course in kung fu by drunken fist master Lu Yan (Chan, the loose-limbed Scarecrow) and the Silent Monk (Li, the straightlaced Tin Man). Jason, still a Cowardly Lion cub, sets off to see the Jade War Lord (Collin Chou) where he frees the imprisoned Monkey King (also Li) and gets his wish to go home. Because there's no place like South Boston.

Unexpectedly, Li, given two showy parts and showing rare glimmers of personality in both, comes off better than Chan, who is hampered by long dreadlocks and a second character that only allows for comic twinkles. Angarano, who is no Ralph Macchio, adds nothing to the film—skinny white boys deserve better—and the charismatic Chou (The Matrix Reloaded and Revolutions) pretty much steals his part of the show, with campy assistance from Li Bingbing as the White-Haired Demoness (an interpolation from 1993's The Bride with White Hair), although she looks far too young to be seeking the elixir of youth. The fight choreography by Yuen Wo Ping (The Matrix, Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon) is about 20 percent wire work and 80 percent street fighting, which may give overprotective parents pause, although the humor is pitched directly at the 10-year-old-boy funny bone, and the film's opening scene, in which Jason falls asleep with the television on, is so evocative of Time Bandits one expects an army on horseback to charge through his bedroom wall.

Where in the World is Osama Bin Laden?
Directed by Morgan Spurlock. Written by Jeremy Chilnick and Morgan Spurlock. (PG-13)

Among first-person nonfiction filmmakers, Morgan Spurlock has carved himself a niche somewhere between Michael Moore's confrontational populism and Ross McElwee's autobiographical road movies. Spurlock's tactic, also deployed in his FX series 30 Days, is to immerse himself (or a willing victim) in an alien environment, whether it means eating nothing but McDonald's for a month or trying to live on $5.15 an hour. If Super Size Me was a 90-minute episode of Jackass, Where in the World is Osama Bin Laden? is Spurlock's approximation of one of those Hollywood action thrillers in which a lone hero saves the day. That Spurlock has as much luck finding bin Laden as he would Carmen Sandiego is hardly unexpected.

About to become a father, Spurlock finds himself possessed with the desire to take down bin Laden and thus make the world a safer place for his unborn child—a premise that becomes even flimsier if you read the companion book, in which it's clear that he's not exactly quaking in his dusty boots about the threat of terrorism. Abandoning his wife to her prenatal yoga classes, he's off to the Mideast, first heading for the more liberal countries while he grows out his beard. In Egypt he puts the U.S.'s funding of Hosni Mubarak's regime in historical context with a Saturday morning?style cartoon that concludes that "pimping freedom ain't easy." In Morocco he visits Casablanca, ravaged by a wave of suicide bombings orchestrated by bin Laden. In the West Bank, he asks Palestinians how they feel about al-Qaeda committing terrorist acts in their name, and in Jerusalem he's manhandled by an old Jew who obviously doesn't understand the power of the media.

Then Spurlock's off to Saudi Arabia, where he tries to interview a couple of students under their teachers' censoring eyes and visits bin Laden's deserted home, and to Afghanistan to visit his abandoned hideout in Tora Bora. "This is hearts and minds," says Spurlock in front of a school in ravaged Kabul that the U.S. has yet to make good on its pledge to rebuild. Embedded with the military, he's taken to a village heavy with Taliban, and finally winds up in bin Laden's presumed haven, Pakistan.

The "search" may be a mere pretext for talking to Middle Eastern men on the street, but Spurlock's innocent-abroad act makes his foreign policy lecture go down like a McFlurry. He may not have made the world any safer for his son, but by appealing to American hearts and minds, maybe he'll make it a little bit safer for those who are really in the crosshairs.