Oz: The Great and Powerful (3/5 Stars)

Darth Vader, check. Wicked Witch of the West, check. All we need now is a movie that explores the past psychological trauma of Lord Sauron of Mordor.

James Franco stars as the titular Oz in Director Sam Raimi’s newest film, “Oz: The Great and Powerful” a prequel of sorts to “The Wizard of Oz” that focuses on how Oz got to Oz and became the Wizard of Oz. Like Dorothy he makes the trip via a black and white Kansas twister and lands in a country complete with color. This time though it’s a world of 3D digital construction and this leads to one of the more concurrent flaws in this type of movie. The characters don’t seem to be looking at what they are looking at. Someday I hope to see a character look upon a glorious digital landscape such as Oz and just be incredibly amazed by it. Like struck deaf and dumb for at least a moment or two. This doesn’t really happen to Oz, who acts more like he is a kind of bored James Franco walking around in a green screen room.

The “Wizard of Oz” is one of our odder modern fables. We know all the characters: the witches, good and wicked, the wizard, a charlatan all smoke and mirrors, the land inhabited by munchkins, yellow brick roads and emerald cities. But does anyone remember what all this is there for or why it exists at all? What’s the point of this magical land?

The most satisfying explanation I have heard is that the tale is meant to be not only a children’s story but also a work of political symbolism concerning the late 19^th century Populist movement. That would explain why Dorothy is from Kansas a bastion of populists and why the magical slippers are made of silver (not ruby red!) the free coinage of silver being a major platform of Populism. There are a multitude of other theoretical political symbols. The yellow brick road represents the gold standard. The scarecrow without a brain represents western farmers, the tin man with no heart represents the eastern factory worker, and the cowardly lion is none other than William Jennings Bryan three-time presidential candidate. Some symbols are kind of really obvious. The poppy fields that put all travelers under sleeping spells represent the scourge of opium and the inhabitants of the town of China are the actual Chinese. So when one of the wicked witches destroys the town of China (and this happens in this movie) it can and probably does represent the mistreatment of the Chinese immigrant labor force (at least in the book). And then there is perhaps the best wickedly satirical symbol of all, The Wizard. He represents the Gilded Age Presidents of the latter 19^th century, a series of forgettable not very influential or powerful men of seemingly great influence and power. Everybody thinks the president has power and can solve all their problems, but in reality it is all smoke and mirrors and the best he can do is hand out clever gifts like instead of a brain, a university degree.

It is a credit to the original author, L. Frank Baum, that adaptations can ignore the politics behind the book and still work on a basic though rather arbitrary level. But complete ignorance of the original politics, as the recent adaptations (Both Broadway “Wicked” and “Oz: The Great and Powerful”) illustrate, prevent these artworks from achieving greatness. This modern desire we have to humanize the Wicked Witch of the West is a huge mistake. The Witch in political symbolism is not human at all. It is a symbol of huge monopolistic corporations that terrorize the various constituents symbolically represented in the Land of Oz. The Populist movement put a lot of stock in the idea that the free coinage of silver (i.e. the magic silver slippers) would save them from these interests. More likely though, the end of a very long drought that swept the Midwest in the 1890s would actually be the key. There is a reason why water is the magical ingredient that melts the witch. But who cares about all this right? Who cares! Who cares! Okay I will get to my point. The Wicked Witch needs to be evil incarnate. Her character does not really work any other way. After all she will go on to enslave flying monkey minions and bomb the countryside with fireballs. To say the motivation for that type of behavior comes from a misunderstanding in a love triangle doesn’t quite fit. One recalls how Darth Vader decided to murder millions of people after Natalie Portman died. A tragedy for sure but I think it's fair to say that Darth overreacted. Some characters motivations are best left unexplained. After all, that is one of things that made Margaret Hamilton’s performance in the 1939 movie so memorable. The witch is absolutely wicked for no apparent reason at all other than that it is in her nature as a wicked witch.

I cannot imagine why someone thought Mila Kunis would be correct for this role. First of all, she does not look anything like the Wicked Witch. The Wicked Witch has an infamously angular profile. Mila’s face is way too round. Second, she fails to lend any acting bite to her performance. As a result she doesn’t sound or act evil in a convincing fashion. Weirdly, Rachel Weisz is capable of both of these qualities. Why didn’t anyone think to switch the roles around?

This movie needed to be more creative and ingenious than it is. I wasn’t too impressed with the Wizard who spends more time explaining to people that he doesn’t have powers than tricking them into thinking that he does. But hey it is probably the best movie out there right now so what else are you going to see. 

Ted (4/5 Stars)

People let me tell you about my best friend....

Comedy is like magic. There’s an explanation but you don’t need to know it to enjoy it. You may even enjoy it more not knowing it. I’m trying to give Seth MacFarlane, the writer/director of “Ted,” a serious compliment. The movie, “Ted,” looks and feels so simplistically drawn that one may mistake the whole thing for being an easy thing to accomplish. But there is plenty of good material, much it is rather edgy (R rated Teddy Bear style sex, drugs, racial humor, and violence), and it is a comedic accomplishment that the movie comes off as a simple, funny, and ultimately harmless movie. 

It starts with the Christmas wish of a small Bostonian boy named John. He doesn’t have any friends so he wishes his stuffed Teddy Bear would come to life and be his best friend forever and ever. And the Teddy Bear does and wants nothing but to be his friend forever and ever. The concept of a Teddy Bear stuns the nation and Ted becomes a minor celebrity. But as explains the kindly narrator of the story, “No matter how big a splash you make in this world whether you’re Corey Feldman, Frankie Muniz, Justin Bieber, or a talking teddy bear, eventually, nobody gives a shit.” 27 years later, Ted is still alive and still living with the now 35-year-old John, played by Mark Wahlberg. They are still the best of friends but Ted is no longer an innocent child’s plaything. He lives on the couch, smokes pot, and brings home hookers. This is why Lori, John’s girlfriend for 4 years, played by Mila Kunis, presents an ultimatum: The Teddy Bear from your childhood or the woman you met as an adult. 

This is Seth MacFarlane’s first feature film. You may know him a lot better from the TV show “Family Guy.”  Living proof of that is the voice of Ted, a perfect copy of the Family Guy himself, Peter Griffin (both are voiced by MacFarlane.) This is a masterstroke as that voice, with the very very strong Beantown accent, is one of the funniest voices I have ever heard. There is an inherent vibe of glee inhabiting every syllable that makes me smile every time I hear it.

Even better is what isn’t taken from Family Guy and that is the avant-garde style of crappy humor that makes it an inferior sitcom (I stopped watching halfway into Season 3). Family Guy had this repeated obsession with this thing I will deem, “the absence of a joke-joke,” where characters would setup a situation and then blankly stare at each other, the joke apparently being that this is where a punch-line should be but there isn’t a punch-line and isn’t that funny? Well, perhaps the first time it was. Then you start wondering if the blank stares are simply there because the writers couldn’t think of anything funny to say. Anyway the good news is that this does not happen in “Ted.” There are real jokes here and the movie is filled wall to wall with them.

One especially great thing the movie does is present situations that should feel awkward but somehow stay comfortable the entire time. A good example of that is how the movie presents Laurie’s employer, played by Joel McHale, who hits on her everyday at work. These scenes should be awkward but aren’t and I think it’s mostly because of the blunt kind of whatever way Joel McHale brings it up, the way he doesn’t particularly care when being rejected, and the way it doesn’t touch upon anything truly creepy like leering stares, demeaning remarks, promises of material rewards, or threats concerning Laurie’s status at work. Then once Laurie and John temporarily separate because of something really funny involving Flash Gordon in a previous scene, the boss asks her out again to a Norah Jones concert. The way he phrases the reasons why she should say yes to this should be framed and put on somebody’s wall because I was like nodding along and going, ‘okay, fuck it. I would go to the concert too.’

That brings up what happens at the concert itself, which in most other movies would be awkward, but here became the funniest scene I have seen in a movie all year. John gets backstage at the Norah Jones concert, due to Ted’s past romantic liaison with the singer, and gets permission to go on stage and sing a song to his ex-girlfriend in the crowd. Impromptu love songs in public places are ripe territory for stomach-churning embarrassing moments. But here because of the way it’s done, it couldn’t have been more enjoyable. For one thing, Norah Jones is totally cool with it and even puts on sunglasses and plays along with a saxophone. Second, the song being sung is the theme song to “Octopussy” which is not a love song and actually not even about sex. It just happens to be the theme song of the TV show they watched the first night they met. Third, and most important, is that the reactions shots of Laurie don’t show somebody who is embarrassed and to top everything off, when they get to Joel McHale’s reaction, he smirks and says “Holy Shit” as if he is about to witness the greatest thing in the world.  The result is this sense of safety because even if it goes terribly, the outcome won’t be awkward because none of the characters will feel terrible if it does. In the meantime enjoy Mark Wahlberg singing “Octopussy,” really really poorly and all the people in the crowd getting really really angry.

For the record, quite a lot of the jokes in “Ted” contain pop culture references to really old TV shows like Flash Gordon and Octopussy. You don’t need to know anything about these shows to find the jokes funny. Case in point, I’ve never seen any of these shows and found all of the jokes funny. Use your comedic intuition and you’ll be just fine filling in the holes.

Let’s talk about acting and what makes it “good.” Here, Mark Wahlberg is playing a 35 -year -old schlub working at a rental car agency whose best friend is a talking teddy bear. Cut all the prejudicial crap you may have that states only actors playing biographical men with incurable diseases or physical handicaps deserve to win awards. Now judge this performance on its terms. Ask questions like, was it as funny as it could have been? As a lead character, did Mark empower the supporting actors to be as funny as they could have been? And perhaps the best question of all: Was the talking teddy bear believable? The last question is the linchpin here, because if Mark had done his job poorly, it would be really obvious that he was actually acting against an invisible spot on the floor. Ted, a product of James Cameron-ish special effects, was added entirely in post-production. This includes all the scenes where the two get in fights. During shooting, Mark was pretending to fight with someone who wasn’t physically there, not exactly an easy thing to do. This type of performance always gets overlooked because the better it is done the less people notice it. But it is there and deserves recognition. Billy Murray will probably get the Oscar for portraying Franklin Delano Roosevelt, a biographical President of the USA who is paralyzed with polio, this year. I don’t even have to see that movie in order to predict he will get nominated for it. But that doesn’t mean I don’t appreciate actors that can pull off playing opposite to a CGI teddy bear an entire movie. I submit that takes just as much skill if not more. This is one of the best performances of the year.

One other thing that is noticeable in not this comedy but too many others. None of the women are funny. This is not simply just a problem in writing, but also in casting. All of the women here are supermodels, even the coworker that works at the rental car agency. I don’t particularly care about the realism of that, it’s just that if you hired an actual comedian, they probably could have done more with the part. I sort of got the sense here that MacFarlane’s imagination is limited in that respect and figured that all women are the same in the comedy department so why not just hire the most beautiful ones. Funny women exist! I have witnessed them in movies before. There are a million places I could go to look at incredibly beautiful women and their perpetually bored expressions. I paid money to see “Ted” in order to laugh. Hire funny women. If you don’t know how to write jokes for them, ask them to make something up.

Anyway good job on the first feature, MacFarlane. Now go out there and make another. 

Black Swan (5/5 Stars)

Excuse me while I catch my breath.

Suppose that you wanted to be perfect. What would it take? Nina Sayers, played by Natalie Portman, has just been cast as the Swan Queen in a NYC Lincoln Center’s production of Swan Lake. It’s an incredibly difficult role, one of the most challenging in ballet. The Swan Queen is simultaneously two characters at once, the innocent and pure White Swan and her evil twin the sensuous and seductive Black Swan. The story of Swan Lake is simple. An evil beast casts a spell on a woman that transforms her into a swan during the day. The spell can only be broken by true love. Her prince see her at night, learns her secret, falls in love, and promises to use his true love to break the spell. But before they elope, the evil beast presents the evil twin of the woman to the prince. The evil twin tricks the prince who pledges his love to her instead. Bereft of true love and left with no hope that the spell will ever be broken, the woman kills herself.

The only way I think to understand the horrific things that happen to Nina Sayers in this movie is through the prism of a performing technique called Method Acting. Method Acting is employed when an actor seeks a great performance by not acting at all. Instead of pretending to be character, they attempt to become that character. For example if an actor were to play a taxi driver, a method actor may actually get a license and drive a taxi for several months before the shoot (which is exactly what Robert De Niro did to prepare for his role “Taxi Driver.”) The most ridiculous preparer of all is perhaps Christian Bale, who was to play a thin person in “The Machinist,” and of his own initiative dropped his weight to an awfully unhealthy 110 pounds for the role. But lets say that you wanted to try Method Acting out for the role of the Swan Queen. Well, you would need two things. 1) You would need to be a Swan, and 2) You would need to be Split Personality Schizophrenic. How else are you going to be two people at once? And this is basically what happens to Nina Sayers. She goes insane. Nobody catches it in time because the deeper she descends into madness, the better a performer she becomes.

Helping her through the downward spiral of perfection are several other people. The first is Nina’s mother, played by Barbara Hershey. She gave up her own ballerina career to have Nina and now lives vicariously through her daughter. She makes sure Nina’s life is ballet and only ballet. Nina eats grapefruits, takes the subway to Lincoln Center, practices all day, goes home, eats dinner, and then goes to sleep. It is a workaholic life bereft of all pleasure. Then there is her tough instructor played by Vincent Cassell. He mercilessly informs Nina that her dispassionate perfectionism is perfect for the White Swan but terrible for the Black Swan. She needs to let go and feel the music. His idea of the best way to help her achieve this is through sexual harassment, both psychological and physical. The harassment doesn’t seem to bother her as much as the fact that her instructor doesn’t seem to be enjoying himself while doing it. All she wants is to be perfect. A fellow ballerina named Lily, played by Mila Kunis, has a much more common sense way of going about it. She invites her to dinner, gets her drunk, gives her a rufi (which Nina sees being put into her drink), and takes her to one of those clubs where you can’t see or hear anything but strobe lights and a rhythmic pulse. This works. The result is well, ahem, the result is a sex scene between Mila Kunis and Natalie Portman. There is heavy breathing...among other things. Meanwhile Nina keeps seeing a doppelganger of herself dressed entirely in black pop up in the most inconvenient places. First on the subway, then on a city street, and then in the mirrors of her dance studio. Seriously scary shit. 

The Director of this picture is Darren Aronofsky. If you’ve seen any of his other movies like “Requiem for a Dream” or “The Wrestler,” you will notice that no other director is so artfully mean to his characters. The same is true of “Black Swan.” There are plenty of similar techniques from both of those previous movies. Like “The Wrestler,” this movie shows the real physical costs of a performance. Nina breaks a toenail in one scene. In another she has to pry her toes apart. Weird scars start forming on her shoulder blades. And like the drugs in “Requiem for a Dream,” the scenes of ballet are shown in spectacular fashion, hallucinations included. The score was done by Clint Mansell, the same person who composed the Requiem, and like “Requiem for a Dream,” the climax of this story (the performance of Swan Lake on opening night) matches incredible visuals and super-emotional acting with a very powerful piece of music (Tchiakovsky played very loudly) that goes on for about fifteen minutes and left me emotionally exhausted. Truth be told, my heart rate and breathing had actually accelerated so much that I had to wait through half the credits in order to calm myself down. If the Great Intellectual Experience of the year was “Inception,” than the Great Emotional Experience of the year is “Black Swan.” It should easily receive nominations for Best Picture, Director, Cinematography, Makeup, Costumes, Score, among other things. Natalie Portman, who trained for an entire year and did most of her own ballet, has pulled off the performance of a lifetime. She would be a lock for the Oscar in almost any other year that didn’t also have Lisbeth Salandar lurking around in the background.

One thing people repeatedly tell me when I recommend movies such as “Black Swan,” is that they aren’t in the mood for a “good movie.” They would much rather just unwind on the couch and watch junk. In the past the best I could do was simply persuade people to not watch anything at all. For instance, I would argue that if you don’t want to hear a good story or be affected in any way, why don’t you just stare at a blank wall or meditate. Better yet, if you’re too tired to watch a good movie, take a nap. But that line of reasoning only stops people from watching junk. So let me rephrase the argument in this way. Lets say you are at an amusement park. Junk TV is like the merry-go-round, the Tea Cups, the bumper cars, etc. “Black Swan,” is the highest roller coaster in the park. Now you have a choice: You can take your good money and precious time and spend it all day on the merry-go-round doing something you’ve done a thousand times before or you can stop being a wimp and go see the ballerina movie. True the height of the drops should make any reasonable person apprehensive and true it may be “hard to watch” as you are racing toward the bottom at very high speeds but, come on, everyone said it was fun (Black Swan has a 88% rating on Rotten Tomatoes) and inside you know its just a movie. You will be exiting the ride alive and intact with but a sense of giddiness and awesome that is perfectly normal given the adrenaline rush. You may even want to experience something quite like that again. Perhaps skydiving next time. (Have you seen “Requiem for a Dream”?) If you’re embarrassed to be affected by something so deeply with other people around, I suggest you go and see the movie alone. And if it takes you awhile after the movie to compose yourself before exiting the theater, that’s fine too. That’s what the end credits of good movies are for.

Date Night (2/5 Stars) April 12, 2010

Somebody forgot to include jokes in their screenplay.

Money can buy you a lot of things that can make a movie better. Shelling out the top dollars will get you A-List comedians like Steve Carell and Tina Fey. It can allow you to cast great character actors like Mark Wahlberg, Ray Liotta, James Franco, and Mila Kunis in bit parts. It can allow you to shoot highly technical action sequences in primo New York spots like Times Square, Central Park, and FDR drive among others. It can get you fancy cars, gorgeous sets, and a stylized marketing campaign. It can get you perhaps anything you want in a comedy except the main ingredient: Jokes. You can’t buy laughs. This is because jokes have a very short shelf life. They can’t be told more than a couple of times before they lose all of their power. They have to be grown and cultivated. Some writer somewhere has to sit in a room, employ a little creativity and come up with something. This movie forgot that part of the process. It seems like it was built along a one-sentence pitch like, “Hey let’s put Steve Carell and Tina Fey in a movie together. Wouldn’t that be great.” Everyone agreed to make the movie way before the script was assigned to some schlub named Josh Klausner to crank it out over the weekend. It didn't need to be funny because the marketing campaign could capitalize on the actor's reputations for at least the first weekend gross. They aren't going to get me next time. Klausner’s next movie as a writer will be “Shrek Forever After.” I will remember not to see that one. 

This movie employs a variation of what Roger Ebert lovingly calls an “Idiot Plot.” An “Idiot Plot” refers to the series of stupid misunderstandings that a couple in a romantic comedy will go through before they realize they love each other in the last scene of the movie. The idea is that if they just took a moment to sit down and talk about it then everything would be sorted out and fine. They don’t do this because then the movie would be five minutes, not a long drawn-out hour and a half. The Idiocy in this Plot has mostly to do with the actions of some very stupid and incompetent hit men and the retarded police who can’t seem to connect some fairly obvious dots. Carell and Fey play boring married couple (The Fosters) that gets in a case of mistaken identity after stealing a dinner reservation. The hit men take them into an alley, pull out guns, and ask them to provide an incriminating flash drive. To avoid getting shot, the old married couple tell the hit men that they hid the flash drive in a floorboard in the Boathouse in Central Park. (Does that sound like a believable story to you? I personally thought it was retarded.) As the hit men stare at the wooden floorboards in the Boathouse Carell sneaks up behind them and hits both of them with an oar. They are incapacitated for about 30 whole seconds as the old married couple makes their escape across the Pond in a boat that can’t go more than a couple mph. The hit men stumble out of the Boathouse and unload about five or six rounds of ammo at the row boat no more than 20 feet away. Not a single one gets anywhere close. The Fosters go to the police. A simple explanation is all that is required. But no, the Fosters spy the same hit men in the station as cops. So the Fosters don’t tell the officer that is questioning them anything. They high tail it out of there because they think the entire police station has been compromised. (It hasn’t). This is completely ludicrous but is completely necessary to the story. After all, if they did the logical thing the movie would be over in a couple of minutes. 

Don’t get me wrong; I don’t usually require realism in comedies. (I just gave a good review to Hot Tub Time Machine.) What I do require though, is that a comedy be funny. If it isn’t funny, then it might as well be taken seriously. And if I’m taking something seriously, the unreality of the plot better not insult my intelligence. (If it’s funny it can do anything it wants.) But Date Night isn’t funny. I didn’t laugh more than three or four times the entire movie. It’s quite remarkable actually. Everything that ‘Hot Tub Time Machine’ the B-movie with the second rate cast did right, ‘Date Night’ the slick A-List movie gets completely wrong. For example, both movies employ a throw-up joke. If you want to know how to do that right, watch the former. “Date Night” does it all wrong. First of all it gives us plenty of warning. (Carell going “oh I’m going to throw up!) Then the actual throwing up takes far too long. (Carell does it once, then has to do it several more times). It wasn’t funny the first time because it breaks the 1st Rule of Shock Humor: The joke NEEDS to be UNEXPECTED. Otherwise there’s no shock. It’s just yucky. For the same reason it wasn’t funny the second or third time either. The whole thing lasts about thirty seconds, about 29 more than the audience needs to get the joke. This is not how you tell a throw-up joke. These people don’t know what they’re doing. 

This pattern screws up the majority of the jokes in this movie. They will be fairly obvious in the first place and then that joke will be endlessly repeated as if the movie expects a punch line to get funnier upon each telling. There’s this bit where various side characters react with disgust at the Foster’s stealing of the reservation as if it is a huge social faux pa. After the second time, I could basically lip-sync what the next person would say the third, fourth, and fifth time. The movie is just one vacant scene followed by another. It’s a good thing Mark Wahlberg is shirtless during his entire performance because nobody in those scenes can tell a joke about anything else. If he put on a shirt, they would have nothing to say. 

I will say one more thing. Action sequences can be funny if done right. Here they aren’t but yes theoretically it is possible. Sexy is never funny. I bring this up because the Fosters inexplicably find themselves in a brothel with a bunch of scantily clad strippers everywhere. Tina Fey has to get into a stripper costume and do some awkward dancing herself. I don’t recall laughing at any point. You know there is a reason that ’30 Rock’ goes to such incredible lengths to uglify Tina Fey when she plays Liz Lemon. It’s because it is very hard to laugh at someone who you are physically attracted to. Tina Fey is gorgeous. That’s why ’30 Rock’ puts her in glasses, has her walk funny, and gives her an eating disorder. It allows her to be funny because we aren’t thinking of other things. (For a very good example of this, take the SNL “Chippendales” sketch. Who is funnier: Patrick Swayze or Chris Farley?) For this reason, no comedy should ever present a truly sexed up scene. What inspires lust and what inspires laughter are completely different things. If your purpose is to make people laugh, then that scene will be a great yawning void in your movie. Welcome to Date Night.

A movie with Steve Carell and Tina Fey will never be all terrible. I liked the semi-serious scenes where they simply acted like the married couple that was trying in good faith to revitalize their marriage. These are the type of scenes that allow a critic to say the movie is a “comedy with heart.” Except here of course there is no comedy. Just a void with some heart. Anyway, those scenes allowed this movie to get a 2 star rating.


Added a couple days Later:

I have to add a caveat to what I said about sexy never being funny. There's always an exception to the rule, and that would be Marilyn Monroe. She had the ability to be sexy and hilarious at the same time. (Seven Year Itch, Some Like it Hot). I think the big reason for this is because she was always so oblivious of her effect on the men around her. In other words, she didn't know she was sexy. It's a very hard thing to pull off because it is so very absurd (and thus funny). As Marlon Brando in 'A Streetcar Named Desire" once quipped, "I never knew a woman who didn't know she was good looking without me having to tell her."

Forgetting Sarah Marshall 06/04/08

An Apatow schlub played by Jason Segal is dumped by his longtime girlfriend Sarah Marshall and to rid himself of his grief he takes a vacation in Hawaii only to realize that his girlfriend and her new beau, a lothario rock star, are staying at the same hotel. Hilarity ensues.
This is the 1st classic movie of 2008. The best and funniest of the year so far. I noticed three quarters of the way through this film that I had stopped laughing so hard. I thought about it and realized that it wasn't because the movie had become less funny, I had simply started to feel so much for the characters. I had become invested in how the story would turn out for the people in it. There was real suspense. I cared. I sincerely wished that the nice big schlub played by newcomer Jason Segal would end up with the nice pretty girl played by Mila Kunis. The last time I had cared so much about a romance I was watching "Pride and Prejudice." I think that says alot for an alleged crass, obscene, sometimes gross-out comedy.
Not surprisingly this superior comedy was produced by Judd Apatow the most prolific creator of great comedies in our time. He has an immense talent for scouting new talent and providing them with the proper vehicles. In this movie he gives writer/star Jason Segal his first chance as a leading man and screenwriter. And he strikes the motherlode. Jason Segal, you might remember, has played bit parts in other Apatow flicks (remember him stark naked on the sidewalk after the earthquake in "Knocked Up") and was part of the original cast of the one season wonder TV show "Freaks and Geeks." Apatow had tried to get him better roles before but apparently the studios balked. I think it had something to do with marketing. How do you sell a big softie with average looks who gets his biggest laughs by writhing on the floor crying. He's an original character and as Roger Ebert pointed out, marketing research is based on what has worked. It's very tough to market something that is new and original, no matter how good. 
And how original this movie is. I think it proves one theory I've had (but unfortunately did not publish before it got proven.) That shock humor works both ways. You can get as big of laughs by being super nice as you can being super mean. It's what's unexpected that makes us laugh. So many people in this movie are likable super nice characters. The employees at the resort , Paul Rudd's stoned surfer, the newlyweds he meets (Jack McBrayer), his pediatrician (Steve Landesberg). It was a master stroke to make his girlfriend's new lover played magnificently by Russell Brand a really cool guy too. Having him not be a complete jerk adds to the complexity of the movie a ton. Even Sarah Marshall (Kristen Bell) isn't all bad. She gets the 3-dimensional character treatment too. (She also gets jokes, most of which are clips of the TV show she's in aptly titled 'Crime Scene: Scene of the Crime' where she plays a hard boiled detective opposite a gruff Billy Baldwin.
The nicest character though comes from a truly unexpected source. It's the resort customer service rep/love interest played by Mila Kunis in the best role she has ever had. Mila Kunis, you may remember, has specialized in playing self-absorbed idiots (That 70's Show, Family Guy). This performance is a complete departure from everything I've ever seen her do. She is smart, she is funny, and she is super sweet. She gives perhaps the best performance in a movie with a half dozen great performances and reminds me once again how plenty of good actors are stifled and stuck in bad scripts.
Rounding out the ensemble is the always hilarious Bill Hader and Jonah Hill, who I think also gives his best performance (never has he been so subtle.) The ability of this screenplay to juggle so many characters and give each of them good material is impressive. It speaks to the skill of Jason Segal as a writer and his humility as the star. The director and editor also make good choices. Notice how many funny lines are actually said offscreen. ("Dracula!") An inferior editor would probably have shown it and rendered the dialogue less funny. 
Overall this is a great production of true warmth and comedy. There certainly is alot of sex but I have never been more comfortable in saying that it wasn't exploitative or gratuitous. (Jason Segal certainly shows the most himself.) The rest of this summer's comedies have had the bar raised high. I wonder if the heavyweights Adam Sandler, Steve Carell, Mike Myers, Jack Black, Will Ferrel, Pixar, Ben Stiller, and Eddie Murphy can match the newcomer.