A List Of Things Thrown Five Minutes Ago

THE LACK OF FULL-FRONTAL MALE NUDITY MAY BE A PLUS, HOWEVER: As someone who enjoyed Forgetting Sarah Marshall, I was looking forward to Get Him To The Greek. However, this winds up being more than a little misfire. The big problems with the film are two-fold.

First is the casting of Jonah Hill. Hill's a very funny guy, but the role, as scripted, is written as a somewhat uptight rock and roll snob who winds up letting loose. Hill is kind of the antithesis of that, maybe in part because of the baggage he carries from Superbad. He's not bad in the role, but I wonder if the film might have worked better with a dweebier leading man like a Michael Cera or Jay Baruchel.

Second, despite Katherine Heigl's "sexism" shout about Knocked Up, the best Apatovian films distinguish themselves with strong female characters. In particular, while it would have been easy for the title character of Forgetting Sarah Marshall (who makes a very brief appearance) to be a one-dimensional bitch, she winds up being fully formed. Elisabeth Moss seems to be nicely cast as Hill's girlfriend, a medical student who he never sees because of her schedule, but the role is so poorly developed that it can't work, and winds up calling for a naughtiness that she doesn't sell terribly well. Rose Byrne fares better as Jackie Q, Aldous' love interest, particularly by showing impressive singing chops, but the writing fails her, turning her into exactly the one-dimensional bitch that Sarah Marshall wasn't.

There's still a lot of funny stuff, particularly the songs, several of which are co-written by Jason Segel, who gets a "based on characters created by" and an associate producer credit, and a cameo from quite possibly the last journalist you'd expect to see cameoing in an Apatow film. It's also clear that there are probably a lot of very funny alternate takes, improvisations, and deleted material in the vault, as it's clear that the people involved had the time of their life making it. For that reason, wait for DVD.