Sex Tape Is the Funniest Movie About Marital Sex Since Eyes Wide Shut
A defiantly R-rated farce seemingly commissioned to plug the We’re the Millers-shaped hole in the summer lineup, Sex Tape is warmer and more amusing than its ads would lead one to believe. In fact, it’s almost good enough, leaning a little too hard on the innate likability of stars Cameron Diaz and Jason Segel. Reuniting […]
Jason Segel Struggles with Weather, Relationship in The Five-Year Engagement
There is exactly one unexpected moment in the otherwise drearily predictable The Five-Year Engagement that, though little more than a throwaway line, at least adds a bit of political reality to puncture Nicholas Stoller’s limp, hermetic comedy of deferred nuptials. Tom (Jason Segel, who co-scripted with Stoller), a sous-chef at an upscale eatery in San […]
Wake and Seek: A Stoner Goes After His Destiny in Jeff, Who Lives at Home
It’s obvious that Jason Segel has a face for comedy. He’s got a lumpy, sad-sack mug with a dozen inflections to register disappointment, confusion, and self-doubt. But as the basement-dwelling hero in the Duplass brothers’ new quest movie, Jeff, Who Lives at Home, Segel works his entire posture for laughs. He slumps expressively on the […]
Mahnahmahmeh: Muppets Reboot Can’t Quite Get Its Act Together
Desperately trying to appeal to not just the Gen Xers who grew up with Kermit, Miss Piggy, and Dr. Teeth, but also the tykes who’ve never even heard of Jim Henson, The Muppets has none of the easy confidence of the original TV show or the 1979 movie. Those Carter-era staples magically combined anarchic lunacy—how […]
Bad Teacher and the Downside of Equal Rights in Hollywood
From Tad Friend’s New Yorker profile of Anna Faris (which Jezebel.com reblogged under the headline “Hollywood Insiders Admit Hollywood Hates Women”) to the glass-ceiling-shattering pressure assigned to last month’s Bridesmaids (which has thus far outgrossed every previous Judd Apatow project since Knocked Up), a case could be made that 2011 will be remembered as the […]
A FINE BROMANCE
Call us slow, but before I Love You, Man, we had never witnessed the charm of Jason Segel, not on the TV show How I Met Your Mother or in the teen comedy Forgetting Sarah Marshall. But as soon as we saw him bond with the endearing Paul Rudd in this John Hamburg–directed film about […]
I Love You Man Reaches Bromantic Comedy’s Greatest Heights
Just as we thought the “bromantic comedy” had overstayed its welcome, the genre reaches its highest point with I Love You, Man. The subtext is finally the text—it’s right there in the title. The movie delivers an absolutely complete, fully realized, delightfully novel redo of the hoariest of forms: the meet-cute, love-at-first-sight, break-up-and-make-up, racing-to-the-altar slapstick […]
Forgetting Sarah Marshall’s Sad Sack Extraordinaire
Jason Segel is responsible for two of the most cringe-inducing, hands-in-front-of-your-face moments in the recent history of television, both of which occurred during the sole season of NBC’s Freaks and Geeks. On the episode “I’m With the Band,” Segel’s bright-eyed burnout Nick imagined himself an arena-sized drummer behind his basement-bound 29-piece kit, where, clad in […]