France to go

Wednesday night I went to a bloggers’ Forgetting Sarah Marshall screening. I loved The 40-Year-Old Virgin, quite liked Knocked Up, and think this is another win for Judd Apatow and crew. The movie got a lot of big laughs, a few cringes and had a pretty shocking amount of male nudity — apparently Jason Segel likes taking off his pants and doesn’t mind showing all his bits to the world.

The story’s premise is simple enough: guy gets dumped by his TV-star girlfriend and goes to Hawaii to try to get her off his mind. As fate would have it, the ex and her new beau are also vacationing at the same resort and all are too proud to leave. This recipe for awkward situations stands up quite well, and watching Jason Segel go from heartbroken slob to something closer to happiness as he makes new Island friends, meets a girl and tries to get over his ex is almost as sweet as it is funny.

Jonah Hill, Jack McBrayer and Paul Rudd all show up in funny supporting roles, but Russell Brand, the British comedian who I’m guessing most Americans, like myself, have never heard of, gives the standout performance. He’s smarmy and gross, yet intriguingly fun and likable. A little Jack Sparrow-esque, his too-cool, free-loving rock star character steals all the scenes he’s in, with plenty of exaggerated eye-rolling, hair flipping and suggestive singing and dancing.

The women don’t fare quite as well. I don’t know if it’s because I have typecast Kristen Bell and Mila Kunis as teens in my mind that they just don’t quite work as the adults they’re playing, or if it’s because though they have pretty big roles, they’re really secondary to the male characters. They don’t get as many laughs, and while they have some sincere moments, they seem more like caricatures of women than the real thing. Of course, all the characters in the comedy are  stereotypical, so maybe I’m just being a bit oversensitive.

The film also takes some funny jabs at the Brits, has a Bubba Gump-like bartender who likes to list things like names of fish, and even includes a short but traumatic pig-slaughtering scene. And its gorgeous Hawaiian scenery, which is replete with sappy newlyweds to torture the main character, made me really excited for my trip there this summer.

I’ll probably be going back to the theater to see this again since Evan hasn’t seen it and I know he’ll love it. It’s definitely a movie to see in a theater full of people, whose laughs only add to the hilarious two-hour experience.

Thanks, Annie Mole, for inviting me along!

Last weekend, Evan and I saw The Orphanage. I’m not a big fan of scary movies because, well, they scare me a bit too much, and I felt The Orphanage really went a bit above and beyond when it came to creeping me out. Though I think it was in a good way.

The story itself is great — it plays by its own rules, weaves the human and supernatural, and has a plot twist that makes you rethink the whole movie — basically, it has all the elements of a classic and cohesive scary movie. It always leaves you guessing what’s real and what’s imagined and you really feel attached to the main characters. It also has some incredibly eerie imagery.

The boy in the homemade sack mask that looks like it’s melting off his face (not a spoiler, he’s on the poster), is reminiscent of the twin girls in the shining, but scarier — the kind of character you imagine follows you home and could be hiding down any dark hallway or around any corner. At least I feel like he’s stayed with me since I left the theater. Honestly, I just decided against putting an image up here because I just don’t want to look at it. IMDb it if you must.

And I did like that once I got past the initial shocks in the first half of the movie I was able to relax a bit knowing that the scariest bits were most likely over and that it was heading toward a resolution.

So I suppose this is my cautious recommendation — it’s worth watching, but bring someone whose hand you can hold.