Forgetting Sarah Marshall

(2008)

RATING:	60%
FORMAT:	DVD

(www.shelfheroes.com)

A better title would be “White Men Behaving Badly”. This is ridiculous rather than funny; the characters too old not to know better that faking intimacy gets you nowhere.

Need not love; sex not passion is presented but the work is not self-reflexive enough to understand its own theme. It is like listening to a mental patient still in therapy who refuses to move on. This is not a tale told from the tranquillity of the future and so lacks both hindsight and insight. It is as neurotic as the characters themselves and as dull as other people‘s problems always are.

We are invited to laugh at the characters – not with them – so where is the necessary comic empathy? This is gynophobic nonsense from men who do not like women very much because they cannot control them. Their orificial nature quickly becomes tiresome: A time passer not a time filler.

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