The plot of
Forgetting Sarah Marshall 
is simple: Boy (Jason Segel, a.k.a. Marshall from
How I Met Your Mother) meets girl (
Veronica Mars star Kristen Bell). Girl breaks boy’s heart. Boy takes a trip to Hawaii. Surprise! He ends up at the same resort as his ex, who is now canoodling with a shady, sex-obsessed rock star. Our sad-sack hero finds solace by hanging out with an attractive hotel clerk (Mila Kunis). Should he continue to pine after the smokin’-hot blonde, or does he succumb to the charms of the smokin’-hot brunette? Decisions, decisions.
Congrats if you’ve already guessed that this romantic comedy takes place in Judd Apatow Land—an alternate universe in which a schlubby, cereal-slurping man-child can score with impossibly gorgeous women. Unlike
Knocked Up, Apatow didn’t write or direct this love-stinks laughfest (he’s just producing); but the film’s celebration of the beta male is the comic Svengali’s signature stock-in-trade. Both director Nicholas Stoller and Segel come from Apatow’s usual circle of creative collaborators (Segel was one of Seth Rogen’s numskull roommates in
Knocked Up), and
Marshall has the same ingredients—foulmouth guys dropping pop-culture non sequiturs; a tone that strikes the right balance between poignant and wacky—that made
Superbad,
The 40-Year-Old Virgin et al. so charming.
So, is Apatow’s semi-sensitive gross-out approach in danger of turning into insufferable shtick? Undoubtedly, but the fact that
Marshall still wrings laughs out of male humiliation proves that the tipping point hasn’t arrived just yet. Bell and Kunis both have a knack for playing funny as sexy (and vice versa); surprisingly, it’s the supporting characters from the Apatow stable that are the weak links: Paul Rudd’s
whoa, dude! surfing instructor is a one-note performance, and Jonah Hill’s waiter is sorely underused. This break-up comedy belongs to Segel, however; his ability to combine lecherous, likable and love-burned is what makes this root-for-the-loser flick work.
The problems of one smitten doofus pale in comparison to the hassles suffered by the subjects of
Heavy Metal in Baghdad (
3 stars). Formed in 2001, Acrassicauda (Latin for
black scorpion) had the distinction of being the only metal band in Iraq. Headbanging during Saddam Hussein’s reign, however, was an exercise in futility, and trying to stage shows once Baghdad became a war zone was positively suicidal. Filmmakers Suroosh Alvi and Eddy Moretti tracked down the remaining members in Baghdad and later chronicled the reunited band’s 2006 gig in Syria. The film offers rare testimony from Iraqis who’ve seen their lives hijacked by both a dictator and wartime devastation. It’s just a pity that Alvi and Moretti, affiliated with
Vice magazine, keep turning the movie into their own gonzo-journalism travelogue. You wish they’d check their egos and focus more on the band’s will to rock by any means necessary.
Speaking of ego, mono-monikered director Tarsem’s
The Fall (
2 stars) is one of those monumental vanity projects intended as a grand artistic statement that ends up as nothing but a testament to its creator’s self-indulgence. A girl in a hospital spends her afternoon listening to a wounded stuntman spin a convoluted yarn involving swimming elephants, swashbucklers, dreadlocked shamans and Charles Darwin. A music-video director best known for R.E.M.’s “Losing My Religion” clip and the ultra-creepy J. Lo movie
The Cell, Tarsem presents some mind-blowing visuals—you’ve never seen a pachyderm-treading-water shot with such hallucinogenic flair before—but his out-there approach turns a simple story into an epic, incoherent mess.
Like Tarsem, Garth Jennings got his start directing music videos. His second feature,
Son of Rambow (
2.5 stars), brims with
I Love the 80s–style nostalgia: After two British kids find a bootleg tape of
Rambo: First Blood, the lads decide to mount their own lo-fi remake. The pleasure of watching Sylvester Stallone’s orgy of violence being performed like a school play wears off faster than you’d think, and the last-act nosedive into sentimentality leaves a horrible saccharine aftertaste. A perfectly choreographed set piece involving a French exchange student, a dance party and Depeche Mode’s “Just Can’t Get Enough,” however, comes close to redeeming all the coming-of-age sap.
Finally, for those who require last-minute "gotcha!" revelations in their movies, there's
The Life Before Her Eyes (
2 stars), Vadim Perelman’s follow-up to his much more impressive
House of Sand and Fog. Evan Rachel Wood plays a high school student who suffers through a Columbine-like massacre; Uma Thurman portrays the woman as a post-traumatic-stress-disorder-afflicted adult. There’s plenty of trippy imagery and oddball phenomena, but you’ll figure out what’s going on long before the big twist is revealed. The lead actresses do a fine job, but they can’t save what’s essentially
Jacob’s Ladder recast as a chick flick.