Don't Forget Sarah Marshall

To the extent there's a Judd Apatow backlash, it probably began, unfairly, with the April release of Forgetting Sarah Marshall. Yes, Apatow (Superbad, The 40-Year-Old Virgin) was a producer, but Sarah is entirely the spawn of writer-star Jason Segal. The reviews, including ours, were generally dismissive--just another movie about oafish boy-men who won't grow up.

New on DVD this week (Universal Home Ent., $34.98), Sarah is quite a bit better than that. What first draws comment--particularly on this unrated disc set--is that Segal's schlubby musician hero gets dumped in the buff by his TV star g.f. (Kristin Bell). And he gets naked again in this comedy of humiliation, after enduring the holiday humiliation of checking into the same Hawaiian resort where Sarah has shacked up with her new b.f., a louche, self-involved English rock star. (Comic Russel Brand is so good in this role that he and Segal have built a forthcoming movie around the character: Get Him to the Greek, scheduled for release next year.)

But our sympathies are always squarely with the tall dorky Segal as he mopes around paradise. He can't bring himself to hate his ex, or her new flame, and he remains ambivalent event about the hot hotel clerk (Mila Kunis) who takes a shine to him. Segal reminds me of Adam Sandler without the infantile rage, the simmering suggestion of misogyny. His character genuinely likes both women, and his nerdy fixations--like puppets--are innocent without being regressive. Segal, a musician who plays piano here and wrote Brand's lewd power ballads, is the kind of guy who weeps, heartbroken over the theme to The Muppet Show. And he has the kind of American decency to take affront at the Brand character's bed-hopping. "This isn't Europe!" he sputters.

Among the several DVD extras, Billy Baldwin is superlative--there's a sentence I'd never thought I'd write--in the cop show send-up of David Caruso on C.S.I. (where Segal apparently had a few small guest roles and took notes). Bell's character and Baldwin trade inane, steely eyed patter like pros. I'm surprised these fake teasers and scene grabs from Crime Scene: Scene of the Crime aren't all over YouTube.