Forgettable Sarah

Rating: 3/10 (12 September 2009)

The reviews of this film were good, but not good enough to prevent me from waiting a year or so after its first appearance to rent it on DVD.
I should have waited until it hit Peachtree. What in the universe is happening to Hollywood comedy? Successful TV composer Peter is dumped by his live-in girlfriend, the even more successful TV actress Sarah Marshall. When the traumatized Peter goes to a Hawaiian resort to recover, he finds that Sarah is already there—worse yet, she is with her new boyfriend, the self-important rock star Aldous Snow.
This is where the film—up to this point not a bit funny—comes to a complete stop. Kind-hearted desk clerk Rachel—one sees this romance budding a mile away—takes pity on Peter and lets him have the hotel's best suite for free, enabling him to moon around after Sarah and her new love. Aldous, as it happens, isn't such a bad guy, but Peter resists all of his invitations to get to know him.
And there we sit. A half-hour into the film, there is an astonishing scene where Peter gets drunk in the hotel bar with the guy who plays Kenneth on "30 Rock" and a bartender who can name 200 local fish. Rachel enters. Next, Peter is playing piano by himself.
In these few minutes, all narrative stops. The film grinds to a halt. It is painful to watch, and in fact, the discerning viewer—by that I mean myself—at this point stops watching.
The how-to-write-a-great-screenplay teaching business is itself a multi-million dollar industry, but here we see deeply inept writing that has actually made it through what one assumes would be a rigorous vetting process to get to the screen. Although the critical reaction is equally amazing--how did this film get such good reviews?