One in the eye for Daily Mail reader

Rating: 8/10 (24 June 2010)

Aaron Green (Jonah Hill) works for a record company and is tasked with getting hard living but has-been rock star Aldous Snow (Russell Brand, playing the character first seen in Forgetting Sarah Marshall) from London to Los Angeles in time for a comeback concert, despite Snow's concentrated efforts to indulge in sex and drug fuelled rock'n'roll chaos instead.
As a Daily Mail reader of mature years I hate Russell Brand, of course, and I deplore the vast amount of recreational drug use and the constant bad language in this movie, of course, and I have hated Jonah Hill ever since I first loathed the character he played in Superbad. So there was no way I was going to enjoy this movie. Of course. How could I?
Thing is, this is a very funny movie. The humour ranges widely from character based, to verbal, to situational (and, yes, to unmentionable body parts, sexual matters and drugs) and is often laugh out loud funny. The mostly young audience I watched with laughed a lot, and so did I. Brand is a very talented man - he sings well, has an engaging screen presence, and knows how to use his face and body to excellent dramatic and comedic effect. I even warmed to Jonah Hill, playing a much more sympathetic character than usual. And Rose Byrne, usually so serious, was an absolute revelation, playing Snow's gorgeous (and more successful) ex, Jackie Q, with earthy and very funny gusto, and an occasionally dodgy gawd luv us cockerny accent.
The music is quite good, too, being peppered with songs in the same vein as Snow's videos in Sarah Marshall, ie. effective and enjoyable spoofs of their particular genres, with lyrics which are just overstated enough to be effective parodies of something which you would often think couldn't be parodied.
I enjoyed this film a LOT more than I expected to.