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Cast shows up at ‘Forgetting Sarah Marshall’ premiere
After “Harold and Kumar Escape Guantanamo Bay,” “The Promotion” and “Run Fatboy Run” — all of which drew massive crowds at the Paramount over the weekend — the big Hollywood comedy to beat at SXSW was “Forgetting Sarah Marshall.” It played to a packed house Monday at the Paramount.
The movie is another Judd Apatow affair, following the blissed-out screening of “Knocked Up” at SXSW 2007. Apatow produced, first-timer Nicholas Stoller directed, and lumpy, gangly mouth-breather Jason Segel wrote and stars in the movie. Segel’s best known for big parts in Apatow’s “Freaks and Geeks” and “Knocked Up.”
Segel, Stoller, co-stars Kristen Bell and rocker-haired Russell Brand and a couple of producers introduced the film. As always during bizarrely charitable festival screenings, the audience whooped it up, laughing so much that follow-up dialogue was drowned out, etc. People seemed to love it.
Segel, Brand and Bell
Guess what? It’s not that funny. Hilarious moments abound — Brand, Paul Rudd, Jonah Hill and Bill Hader get the funniest bits — but Segel is too slack a presence to hold the center of a feature-length movie. You’ll hear more about it when it’s released later this year.
Because it’s set in Hawaii, Universal Studios had young women drape floral leis on ticket-holders before the show.
One lei-taker was MC Frontalot, star of the droll SXSW documentary “Nerdcore Rising.” He’s a self-proclaimed geek rapper, bustin’ rhymes fo’ real with the whitest back-up band on earth. Here he is in all his fantastically dweeby glory:
The big SXSW/Chronicle party followed the hit screening at La Zona Rosa. There we met Jess Weixler, the award-winning lead in the Austin-shot horror-comedy “Teeth” that played earlier this year. She was hanging out with scandalously overestimated pornographer Joe Swanberg, whose latest juvenile swab “Nights and Weekends” premiered Sunday.
Weixler gave us the bad news that she will star in Swanberg’s next movie. Asked if she’s ready for the requisite Swanberg nudity, which rarely propels his half-baked plots, she was, like, Sure!
“I’m not ashamed of my body,” Weixler, who shows some skin in “Teeth,” beamed.
Weixler and filmmaker Margaret Brown (“The Order of Myths”) at Monday’s party
Bonus phot — Segel outside the Paramount:
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