COMEDY
Within five minutes of the opening credits, Peter Bretter (Segel) lets it all hang out. By which I mean the gangly, freshly showered hero of Forgetting Sarah Marshall is naked and we're glimpsing him full-frontal. But this isn't gratuitous nudity. Nope, there's a point: Peter is exposed, both literally and emotionally, since his longtime girlfriend, TV star Sarah Marshall (Bell), chooses this moment to dump him. Marshall, a likable, lightweight romantic comedy written by Segel and produced by Judd Apatow (Knocked Up), is smart that way. There are a couple of things going on in every scene and the film eventually gives all of its characters—Peter holidays in Hawaii, only to find Sarah and her new squeeze (Brand) ensconced at the same hotel—the benefit of the doubt. The cast, including Kunis as a fetching hotel clerk, is personable, with Brand, playing a lascivious British rocker, nabbing the biggest laughs.
Al Pacino, Alicia Witt, Leelee Sobieski | R | [
THRILLER
It's only April, so the year is still young, but we just may have a winner for the worst movie of 2008. This laughably inept psychological thriller stars Pacino as Dr. Jack Gramm, a forensic psychiatrist in Seattle famous for helping to put away murderous psychopaths. He dates babes, lives in a spiffy loft and sports a pouffy hairdo that must take hours to maintain. When a caller on his cell tells him that he has only 88 minutes to live, Gramm spends the rest of the film rushing around trying to figure out who wants him dead and how they plan to do it. 88 gets sillier and more implausible by the minute—how is Gramm zipping from one place to another so quickly without wings?—until, mercifully, it ends after wasting 105 minutes of a viewer's time.
For Marshall, his first screenplay, Segel, 28, wrote himself not one but two scenes requiring full-frontal nudity. "After years of looking in the mirror," he says, "I realized me naked is hilarious." His mom disagreed. "She had tears of embarrassment streaming down her face. It was worth it."
• The Oscar winner, 44, makes her directorial feature debut in the dramatic comedy Then She Found Me.
WOW, YOU WROTE, PRODUCED AND STARRED IN THE FILM. WHY SO MANY HATS? It started out as a beautiful novel [by Elinor Lipman] and became a very personal story. It's totally autobiographical except that I'm everybody! This made it deeply mine [so] that it was a pleasure deciding how it was going to be done.
WHY HAVE YOU BEEN OUT OF THE SPOTLIGHT? My family came to life. I had my daughter [Makena Lei Gordon, 3, with producer Matthew Carnahan] and chose to spend time with her. It's the greatest pleasure I've ever known.
IS PARENTING HARDER THAN DIRECTING? Definitely the most challenging is being a mom. Your entire heart is running around in the body of a 3-year-old, so you want to do anything for them.
THE LIFE BEFORE HER EYES A woman (Uma Thurman) sifts through painful memories of a high school shooting and the role her then troubled 17-year-old self (Evan Rachel Wood) played in the tragedy. Despite a trick ending that's supposed to make it all mean something, Eyes' vision blurs. (R) [
THE FORBIDDEN KINGDOM Martial arts superstars Jackie Chan and Jet Li amusingly make like a rock 'em, sock 'em version of The Odd Couple's Felix and Oscar as they pair up for the first time onscreen in a pedestrian adventure tale set in a mythical, ancient Chinese kingdom (which owes a lot to Oz). (PG-13) [
• An inspiring documentary about a senior citizens' choir will have viewers laughing and crying, when they're not rocking and rolling.
1 YOU'RE AS YOUNG AS YOU SING The Young@Heart chorus, based in Northampton, Mass., enthusiastically performs rock songs by Bruce Springsteen, the Clash, Coldplay and others, even though many of its members—average age: 80—prefer listening to opera or musicals.
2 PRACTICE MAKES YOU "FEEL GOOD" Shot over seven weeks as the chorus learns new songs for a concert, a running gag shows two soloists messing up the lyrics and growling in James Brown's "I Got You (I Feel Good)." They're still shaky at the show, but they sing with such gusto, the audience goes wild.
3 AGE DOES BRING WISDOM When the chorus members visit a prison and sing Bob Dylan's "Forever Young" to the mostly young male inmates, see if you don't mist up along with the prisoners and find yourself thinking about what you're doing with your own life and whether you're making every day count.
• Susan Sarandon's daughter, 23, stars in the school shooting drama The Life Before Her Eyes.
WHAT WERE YOU LIKE IN HIGH SCHOOL? I was one of those neurotic kids who always did their homework. If I had an assignment due on Friday, I had it done by Tuesday.
YOU'RE A BROWN UNIVERSITY GRADUATE! I graduated last May and majored in Italian studies. I wouldn't trade it for anything. Four years is a long time to be away from your job, but in a lifetime I considered it a bargain.
ARE YOU CLOSE WITH YOUR MOM? We talk about everything but dating. At my age she was married and didn't date again until her 30s. So I create my own dating advice, which can be a recipe for disaster!
• The Manhattan festival will unspool 122 movies starting April 23. Here's the skinny on some of the most anticipated:
SPEED RACER Tribeca always tries to land a couple of high-profile Hollywood films to glam up its roster, and while this year's titles don't match the wattage of last year's Spider-Man 3, plenty of fans will still want an early peek at Speed Racer. It's brothers Andy and Larry Wachowski's (The Matrix) reworking of the Japanese animated TV show about a young race car driver. Emile Hirsch and Christina Ricci star.
I AM BECAUSE WE ARE Madonna turns activist, serving as narrator, writer and producer of a documentary about the plight of orphans in Malawi, the African nation where she adopted her son David, now 2.
WAR, INC. John Cusack wrote and stars in a satire about war, corporate greed and the Middle East. Hilary Duff (below, with scorpion) costars.
SAVAGE GRACE Julianne Moore (right) pulls out all the stops as a monstrous mother in a film about '60s socialite Barbara Baekeland.
Saved by the Bell Reunion
The hookups, the meltdowns, the memoires
The case reveals what was really going on what they think of each other now!
