Bryce Zabel's MOVIE SMACKDOWN!

Forgetting Sarah Marshall (2008) -vs- Knocked Up (2007)

Reality on the Side

Editor's Note:  Maybe with the stock market tanking, we need a little escape.  Tomorrow marks the release of "Forgetting Sarah Marshall: Unrated" on DVD and blu-ray.  Here's last April's Smack by critic Mark Sanchez to help you decide if it's likely to lift your spirits or drag you down further...

The Smackdown.  Goofy. Human. Hilarious with a large serving of sex. Using that recipe Judd Apatow produced or wrote a bucket of consistently engaging comedies the past ten years: Knocked Up, Freaks and Geeks, The 40 Year Old Virgin, Superbad, Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy and Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story. Each delivers human-scaled stories about quirky, imperfect men and women dealing with personal issues that assume oversize comic dimensions. Each is separately memorable, but Knocked Up may lead the pack. This movie is, by turns, silly and dead serious in telling us about a career woman, her unlikely boyfriend and the baby she's having. Knocked Up strongly connected with audiences: Its six-month box office approached $150 million and its DVD enjoys a strong rental life.

Now, a new comedy bearing Judd Apatow's fingerprints hits the big screen: Forgetting Sarah Marshall. That's our Smackdown! Does it offer the same mix of oddly endearing gifts that make Knocked Up so distinctive? Has the recipe gone stale?

The Challenger.  We  see  a lot  of  songwriter  Peter  Bretter (Jason Segel) and  Bretter's  peter in the first few minutes. He's just out of the shower when his TV-actress girlfriend Sarah (Kristen Bell) shows up to end the relationship with Peter. She's found someone else. It's funny and uncomfortable as Peter struggles with the aftermath, cruising the bars and melting down at work. He can't make any progress on his side-project: a Dracula musical featuring puppets. At this point Peter takes a trip to Hawaii to get over Sarah, only you-know-who is checked into the same resort with Mr. Someone Else (Russell Brand). Along the way Peter connects with members of the Apatow Repertory Players (Paul Rudd, Jonas Hill, Bill Hader) and resort hostess Rachel Jansen (Mila Kunis). All these recipe ingredients complicate the process of forgetting Sarah Marshall. The script Jason Segel wrote and Judd Apatow produced ties the loose ends plausibly while showing Count Dracula has a future in musical theatre.

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975) -vs- Cool Hand Luke (1967)

Fightin' the Law

The Smackdown.  With the passing of the great actor Paul Newman, let's pay tribute to the American anti-hero which he played so well, especially in the iconic "Cool Hand Luke."  We're talking about those leading men (or women, i.e. "Thelma & Louise") who often look heroic by doing out-sized or dangerous things, but use methods that aren't really all that laudable and, at their most interesting, are rebels who are doing battle with 'The System.'  The early versions in the 50s were generally just misunderstood stalwarts but then the strange brew of assassinations, drugs and war ushered in the 60s counter-culture. It took the position that 'The System' was bad so anybody who gave it the metaphorical finger was good. That gave us two classics: Paul Newman's Luke in "Cool Hand Luke" and Jack Nicholson's McMurphy in "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest." Both films have a biblical quality to them, as if they are parables for a modern-day Second Coming. If Jesus returned, they argue, we'd probably kill him or  at least lobotomize him.

The Challenger.  Jack Nicholson brilliantly plays Randall Patrick McMurphy, a minor troublemaker at odds with the law, sent from jail to a psychiatric facility in order that his ‘anti-social tendencies’ be studied. This film won all five major Oscars (Best Picture, Actor, Actress, Director, and Screenplay) and gave its fledgling producer Michael Douglas his big break. Besides being a loud-mouthed braggart, Nicholson's McMurphy is overtly sexual and openly aggressive and manipulative. His confinement is the result of a pattern of behavior that includes assault and statutory rape and, truthfully, even if he doesn’t belong in a psych ward, he probably still deserves to be in jail. The psychiatric patients are slowly being ‘killed by the cure' at the hands of a quietly sadistic Head Nurse, Miss Ratched, underplayed to villainous perfection by Louise Fletcher, and her Henchmen, the brutal “Black Boys.”

Ghost Town (2008) -vs- Ghost (1990)

Boo-Who?

The Smackdown. People like the idea of the dead communicating with the living. It’s comforting (if borderline creepy) to imagine that our departed are somehow lingering, intact-looking ghosts sticking around until they’re finished with their earthly (mostly corny) unfinished business. It’s romantic to imagine that love never truly dies, that somehow, even after death, we don’t part. Two films almost two decades apart interpret this sappy Halloween-worthy theme in remarkably different ways. Potters wheel in one corner, dentist’s drill in another.  May the best prop win.

The Challenger.  Ricky Gervais, the British comic genius behind classic series "The Office" and "Extras," joins forces with two other television comedy veterans, Tea Leoni and Greg Kinnear in surprisingly effective if convoluted romantic comedy, "Ghost Town."  After a brush with death, Gervais can see dead people, a fact made all the more remarkable since before his brush with death, he barely noticed the living.

World's Finest Smackdown: The Big Men of DC Comics

EDITOR'S NOTE:  With this Smackdown first posted in May 2008, we begin a series of "Classic Smack" reviews that deal with super-heroes from comic book origins.  There's a poll at the end of the review where you can vote for your favorite film that launched or re-launched a single-character comic-based super-hero franchise.  Express yourself!

Superman Returns (2006) -vs- Batman Begins (2005)

The Smackdown.  Before going with the solo projects "Superman Returns" and "Batman Begins," Warner Bros. teased fans for years with the idea of a "Batman Versus Superman" film.  It's a fanboy dream, of course, to see DC's two most iconic characters in the same movie.  Since it's not going to happen (at least in the immediate future), Smackdown puts the recent reboots into the ring.  Both of these superheroes had rather shameful pre-21st Century franchise histories and great care needed to be taken with their re-imaginings.  "Batman Begins" clearly believes that the path to success is its ability to shine a light (Bat-Signal?) on a new tone while "Superman Returns" obviously believes the fastest way (speeding bullet?) is to get back to what worked before and get that right.

The Challenger. Superman Returns blasted onto movie screens with more of a whimper than a bang, presenting a soft, character-driven story about a god-like alien's search to find his messianic place on Earth and an old foe's attempt to exploit the hero's alien heritage.  Under Bryan Singer, fresh off his success with the first two X-Men films, Superman returns to Earth after five years of searching for his destroyed homeworld to find an engaged Lois Lane with child and his old nemesis, Lex Luthor, scheming to recreate Krypton on Earth.  Although having a plane rescue that is arguably one of the best shot, scored, and realized action sequences in superhero history, Superman Returns seems more comfortable in the tense silences between its characters as they struggle to find one another in this somewhat overly long movie.

Leatherheads Tries to Score Again on DVD

"Leatherheads" is in the challenger's corner for this Smackdown because it's being released on DVD September 23.  It's made just over $40-million in worldwide box office compared to the champion "A League of Their Own" made sixteen years earlier which still managed to triple the take with over $132-million.  Remember, though, that in a Smackdown money doesn't matter.  It's all about the better film.  Here's how we called it in April 2008...

Leatherheads (2008) -vs- A League of Their Own (1992)

The Smackdown.  Here's your formula. Throw in some Americana about major league sports in times of transition, give us some of the money men who just don't understand the players' true love of the game, center the story with a leading man who plays a boozy ranconteur and then split apart the central players on each team so they can play opposite each other in a final climactic game. No doubt coming soon to a theater near you: the story of an NBA team in the 1950s... but that's another Smackdown...

The Challenger. "Leatherheads" is director George Clooney's homage to the great old days when football wasn't about money but about men getting covered in mud and bashing their brains in. He plays wise-cracking running back Dodge Connolly who conspires to get a college hotshot Carter Rutherford (John Krasinski) recruited to his pro team only to fall in love with the equally wise-cracking reporter Lexie Littleton (Renee Zellweger) who's following them with an eye to writing a tough investigative story about Rutherford. If it feels like two different stories, and if you know that hijinks ensue and a rom-com triangle has to be sorted out, you've got the movie down cold.