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Here’s a Get Him to the Greek review that I missed when originally published — by Lindy West from The Stranger. I love this reviewer.

Don’t Knock Russell Brand. He’s the Most Beautiful Woman on Earth.

Hello. I know that in your small and extremely quaint island nation, Russell Brand is some sort of fancypants celebrity court jester to the stars, and you’re probably completely sick of him, or maybe you’re not, or whatever. I don’t care. Among my people (creepy Anglophiles aside), we hadn’t much heard of Brand until his smallish supporting role in 2008’s shockingly competent Forgetting Sarah Marshall. But with last week’s opening of Get Him to the Greek – a film that’s like a great big Brand-flavored adrenaline needle straight to the heart – America is getting acquainted with the man fast. And deep. And it’s giving me some feelings.

Apologies to that one Indian lady, but it must be said: Russell Brand is the most beautiful woman on earth. Slender as a willow wand, tall as a fairly tall human man, hair like corn silk if the corn had some sort of agricultural blight that turned its corn hairs black and curly, like a bearded Audrey Hepburn with a dirty mouth and an only slightly more serious sex addiction. Confidential to any eccentric fafillionaires reading this: I would like to touch Russell Brand on the mouth with my mouth. I promise not to suck out his soul like a witch, if that helps with the paperwork.

But beyond all that hey-let-me-rub-you-creepily-on-your-boday business (SERIOUSLY, THOUGH), Brand is an exquisitely bizarre and oddly affecting comedic actor.

In Get Him to the Greek, he reprises his role as Sarah Marshall’s caddish rock god Aldous Snow. One of that film’s deftest moves was to establish some humanity at the heart of this goofy caricature – Snow was an outlandish, serpentine, completely bonkers whirl of ringlets and wang juice, but he also turned out to be kind of a great guy. It was a big part of what made the movie work.

Greek catches up with Snow a handful of years later, now washed-up, alone, indolent, and waaaaay off the wagon. Aaron Green (Jonah Hill, not reprising his role from Sarah Marshall), a producer from Snow’s record label, is tasked with transporting the star from London to a career-salvaging comeback show at Los Angeles’s Greek Theater. Madcappery, high jinks, horseplay, grab-ass, whatchamacallits, nutrageousness, and monkeyshines (especially monkeyshines) ensue.

What the film lacks in consistency and narrative arc – it’s essentially just a series of vignettes in which Snow tricks Green into getting super-duper wasted, and then Green says some variation of “Hey, we should probably go to the airport now,” and then everyone falls down and barfs – it makes up for in being really really really really very very funny. First of all, entire earth, we owe Sean “P. Diddy” Combs (in a major role as a record exec) an apology. The man is a comedy giant, and one suspects that his entire career up until now has been some sort of performance-art long con. Hill’s mumbly, rattled schlub of a straight man is a flawless foil for Brand’s astral lunacy. And Aldous Snow’s aforementioned third dimension turns Greek from a string of cheap jokes about getting wasted into a strangely heartfelt buddy comedy about addiction and male friendship. Seriously. Seriously. Also, Paul Krugman cameos. Go see it.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 31st, 2010 at 4:45 pm and is filed under films, review. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.