Sunday, March 30, 2008

Forgetting Sarah Marshall


Hey y'all,

Well, I just got back from vacation! I didn't think I would be gone from the blogging world for so long or I would have posted something about it. Sorry! I went to New Orleans for five days and had a wonderful time soaking up the sun, taking in the history, smelling all of the beautiful perfumes, and walking around from sun up to sun down. Alas, it wasn't entirely peaceful because even in New Orleans, I kept encountering the horrific ads for the new Apatow production Forgetting Sarah Marshall. One of them looks like this:



And this:


I can't seem to find any decent pics of the more offensive ones like "You do look fat in those jeans Sarah Marshall" or "My mom always hated you Sarah Marshall." But I'm sure if you live at least close-ish to a big city, you've had to have seen one of their ads on a subway train, billboard or on top of a taxi at some point.

I've watched the trailer three times now and I can't seem to find any evidence as to why Sarah Marshall is receiving this kind of flack. Relationships end sometimes, ya know? People change, people grow, and sometimes they change and grow in different directions. You can see it here. Apatow and his affiliates are tring really hard to make it on my misogynistic shit-list. I appreciate the fact that their films center around "every man" issues and use "every day" looking fellows to portray them, but why do they feel the need to put women down in the process? It doesn't make the men look any better. Do they write the films this way as a conservative ploy? Say, if Seth Rogan gets his shit together then he'll end up with the woman of his dreams, Katherine Heigl? All of Apatow's women (and I say Apatow because he is regarded as the auteur of his productions) seem to suffer from The Philadelphia Story's Tracy Lord syndrome, except in the opposite direction - instead of being placed on pedestals because of their personalities and sheer ferociousness, they're placed in a rocking chair in the corner so that they're in a place where they can still be looked upon and admired for their beauty, but are still cast below their male counterparts and therefore, have to look up to them and react or just not react at all. I'd be very interested to see an Apatow comedy with a female protagonist.

I'll find out the real dirt about Forgetting Sarah Marshall on April 18th.

3 comments:

Lisa Draski said...
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Lisa Draski said...
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Lisa Draski said...

Good to have you back! Eek, sorry about deleting comments, I know it looks ugly on the page. I just wanted to start fresh. :)

I, too, was appalled by the "You do look fat in those jeans, Sarah Marshall" poster. What the hell? Number one, Kristen Bell would never look fat in anything, and number two, what a lousy, stereotypically misogynistic thing to say.

This issue has been troubling me - the ad campaign - so much that I'll probably blog about it myself. I'm not really against the idea of break-ups going sour. Yeah, relationships do end, but the film needs to have a conflict. In this case, he's angry and immature, thus the immature ads. It's just too much, though.

My real problem is really with the "You do look fat in those jeans, Sarah Marshall." It sickens me. It's just such a negative attitude to have out there.

All my love and respect always, and we should see Teeth together,
Lisa