Forgetting Sarah Marshall

The Judd Apatow comedy factory has a new star: Jason Segel. You might know him from the sitcom How I Met Your Mother, a supporting role in Apatow’s Knocked Up or Apatow’s short-lived, yet critically-acclaimed TV series Freaks and Geeks. He now gets his close-up as writer and star of the Apatow Company’s latest instant classic, Forgetting Sarah Marshall.

Segel is Peter Bretter, a musician who pays the bills by composing the dark, ominous music of the hit TV show Crime Scene: Scene of the Crime. His real ambition is to complete his rock opera, which involves puppets and a horror classic. The star of Crime Scene (co-starring with William Baldwin—yeah, that’s right) is the luminous Sarah Marshall (Kristen Bell), Peter’s girlfriend of five and a half years. They seem an odd fit. Peter spends most of his days lounging around his apartment in sweat pants, eating cereal and watching Access Hollywood. Sarah often makes the headlines on Access Hollywood. When Sarah poses for photos on the red carpet, Peter is the guy standing in the background holding her purse.

The Forbidden Kingdom

Why is it that when martial arts icons Jackie Chan and Jet Li finally team up on screen the hero is a nerdy white kid from South Boston? If that doesn't raise your eyebrows, check this out: The collaboration comes in a Hollywood production from the director of The Lion King, Stuart Little and The Haunted Mansion (Rob Minkoff), and the writer of Young Guns (John Fusco). The most surprising part? The Forbidden Kingdom is a lot of fun.

For fans of the two stars, the plot is almost inconsequential. But, for the record, here it is: Jason (Michael Angarano) finds himself in the middle of a robbery of the Chinatown pawnshop he frequents to buy bootleg copies of obscure kung fu movies. He flees the store with an old staff and suddenly finds himself in ancient China. The staff, it seems, belongs to the Monkey King, who centuries ago lost his duel with the evil Jade Warlord (Collin Chou) and has been imprisoned in stone ever since. The staff has the power to free the Monkey King. The drunken kung fu master Lu Yan (Chan) explains this to Jason and soon they are on a quest to return the staff to its rightful owner. Along the way, they pick up the beautiful Golden Sparrow (Yifei Lui), whose family died at the Jade Warlord's hands, and the mysterious Silent Monk (Li). The deadly sorceress Ni Chang (Li Bing Bing) leads the warlord's lackeys against them.

The Great Paul Rudd

After seeing Forgetting Sarah Marshall and Walk Hard last week, and watching The 40-Year-Old Virgin and Knocked Up again this week, I have decided that henceforth Paul Rudd shall be known on this blog as "The Great Paul Rudd." More on this story as it develops.


Paul Rudd as John Lennon in Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story.

What I Should Have Said Was Nothing

"I have this habit of making awkward situations even more awkward. A few years ago, I was moving a new bed into my apartment and a woman who lived in the building opened the front door for me with her key. And she said, 'I'm not worried because a rapist would never have a bed like that.' This is how she starts the conversation. Now, what I should have said was nothing. What I did say was, 'You'd be surprised.'" — Mike Birbiglia
 
Storytelling is becoming a lost art in standup comedy. These days it's all about observational humor (Dane Cook) or being a redneck (any of the comics from the Blue Collar Comedy tours). In the right hands, the former can be brilliant (Jerry Seinfeld, Mitch Hedberg); as for the latter, well, I remember being told when I was younger that if you don't have something nice to say, don't say anything at all. Mike Birbiglia, then, is something of an odd duck on today's comedy circuit, an old-fashioned storyteller, with an affable, self-deprecating Everyman persona. Oh yeah, he's also one of the funniest comics around.

Smart People

Smart People, the debut feature from director Noam Murro and screenwriter Mark Jude Poirier, is filled with intelligent, urbane characters. They're smart all right but, with one exception, not particularly interesting or likable. Though not a bad film, Smart People is not as clever and sophisticated as it thinks it is.

Dennis Quaid lets his tousled hair and beard do most of his acting as Carnegie Mellon University literature professor Lawrence Wetherhold. He's a miserable, middle-aged curmudgeon whose lectures impress no one more than himself. Learning his students' names is too much trouble for a man of his intellect; instead, he passes out name tags on the first day of class. His arrogance likely extends to his writing, which would explain why his book has been rejected by so many publishers.

Street Kings

Now that he is entering middle age and has packed on a few extra pounds, filling out particularly in the face, I can buy Keanu Reeves as a haggard, broken down LAPD veteran, a man who might not be on a path to redemption but at least wants to prove he isn’t the worst of the city’s bad cops.

In Street Kings, Reeves is Detective Tom Ludlow. He has a Dirty-Harry-esque, the-end-justifies-the-means approach to his job. He chugs vodka on the way to crime scenes and doesn’t hesitate to put a bad guy down, even if said bad guy is unarmed and on the toilet. He rests easy knowing his influential captain, Jack Wander (Forest Whitaker), has his back. Killing four suspects during the rescue of two kidnapped girls draws the attention of Capt. James Biggs (Hugh Laurie) from Internal Affairs. Ludlow’s former partner, Washington (Terry Crews), has been ratting out his entire squad to IA. Ludlow follows Washington, ready to give him a stern talking-to, but two thugs get to him first, gunning him down in a convenience store.

Run, Fatboy, Run

It’s hard to tell what we’ll get when an actor takes a seat in the director’s chair. Just last year, Ben Affleck gave us the brilliant crime saga Gone Baby Gone. More often, though, we get something along the lines of Run, Fatboy, Run, which comes to us from David Schwimmer, better known to millions of TV viewers as Ross from Friends.

There are reasons to have high expectations for Fatboy. The story is from the mind of Michael Ian Black, best known as one of the talking heads from VH1’s I Love the '80s. He shares the screenplay credit with Simon Pegg, star and co-writer of Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz, two of this decade’s best comedies. Black’s original script had the story set in New York; Pegg was brought in to punch it up when the decision was made to move it across the pond to England. Pegg’s subtler, more natural comedic sensibilities are at odds with the movie’s Americanized sense of humor.

Leatherheads

Leatherheads chronicles the early days of professional football, but it's not really about sports at all. Though set in 1925, it's a throwback to the screwball comedies of the 1930s and '40s, films made by men with legendary names like Hawks, Capra and Sturges. Had George Clooney been their contemporary, we might now be saying his name in the same breath.

It's been obvious for some time that Clooney has a serious case of nostalgia. Just look at his meticulous recreation of 1950s newsrooms in Good Night, and Good Luck. (2005). Or take his choices as an actor: the old Hollywood glitz and glamour of the Ocean's series; the cerebral science fiction of Solaris (2002); the gritty '70s-style drama of Michael Clayton (2007). When it comes to Leatherheads, every frame drips with a longing for simpler days, when fewer rules made football more fun and, more importantly in this case, the strict Production Code imbued movies with an innocence rarely seen since. (The screwball comedy has been defined as a sex comedy without the sex.) Even the characters' names seem to cry out from the past: Dodge Connelly, Lexie Littleton, Carter "The Bullet" Rutherford.

The Ruins

I will never understand the decisions made by the folks in the movie studios' marketing departments. For example, about three years ago I attended a press screening of the Uwe Boll atrocity Alone in the Dark. (I hope by now someone has told poor Tara Reid it's not pronounced New-FOUND-land.) Advertising for blood-and-gore fests like the Saw and Hostel movies assaults movie-goers on all levels. But here we are with a horror movie that aims to do a little more and DreamWorks has dumped it into theaters with barely a whisper.

The Ruins comes from the mind of Scott Smith, the Oscar-nominated writer of the Sam Raimi film A Simple Plan (1998). He again adapts his own novel for the screen, so he knows the story and characters well. More importantly, he cares about the characters and wants us to do the same. Instead of treating them as pieces of meat to be slaughtered in disturbingly creative ways, he forces us to identify with them. We know they all won't make it out alive, but we hope they will. When someone dies, it has meaning.

Welcome to the party, pal!

Yeah. I think John McClane said it best. (If you don't get the reference, you probably will not be a regular visitor here.)

Welcome to my exciting new blog, "Maki at the Movies."

A little bit about me ... Since October 2001, I have been a reporter for The Star Democrat, a daily newspaper in Easton, Md., covering local government, schools, crime and whatever else needs covering. Since December 2001, I have contributed movie reviews to the paper's "It's the Weekend!" section. (My first published review was Ocean's Eleven.) A handy index of many of my reviews is available at Rotten Tomatoes.