It's all Greek to me.By John DeSando, WCBE's "It's Movie Time," "Cinema Classics," and "On the Marquee"
Everything in Get Him to the Greek gets carried over: Director Nicholas Stoller steals broken-down Brit rocker Aldous Snow (Russell Brand) from Stoller's Forgetting Sarah Marshall, and producer Judd Apatow offers some homoerotic low jokes from Knocked Up with touches of bromance from The Hangover and I Love You, Man.
Greek is not funnier by far than any of the recent male-bashing, chauvinistic romantic comedies, but it has moments of rock-star bashing and music industry mashing that save it from true crashing. Russell Brand's Snow is believably degenerate while displaying some wisdom about the world for the innocents abroad with him.
Aaron Green (Jonah Hill), a greenhorn intern for a large music company, owned by Sergio Roma (a terrific Sean 'P. Diddy' Combs), is sent to London to bring back for a renewal concert bad-boy Snow in a concert at the Greek Theater in L.A. The mayhem has the usual wanton groupies, drugs in a scatological logistic, new even for jaded bromance mongers, and throwing up that is just not pretty or important.
Brand and P. Diddy save the movie from boredom, and the issue of doing what one loves gets some play both from rocker Snow and operative Aaron, whose medical intern girlfriend Daphne (Elisabeth Moss) wants to move for a residency to Seattle. The tension between her as an accomplished young professional and Aaron as a smitten Snow fan, and thus na?ve, plays out as a credible argument during the narrative. Snow's attempt to reconnect with previous wife Jackie Q (Rose Byrn) is less believable again because the man seems so much less mature than the woman.
That the attractive young Daphne could love the man/boy schlub Aaron is just one of many stretches that melodramatic bromance demands. Rock 'n Roll will survive as will Judd Apatow and immature men. I just hope Daphne becomes a doctor specializing in rock degeneracy. There's a future there.
John DeSando teaches film at Franklin University and co-hosts WCBE 90.5's It's Movie Time, Cinema Classics, and On the Marquee, which can be heard streaming at http://publicbroadcasting.net/wcbe/ppr/index.shtml and on demand at http://www.publicbroadcasting.net/wcbe/arts.artsmain