Concessions

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 be-penised Audrey Hepburn with a dirty mouth and an only slightly more serious sex addiction. I know I’m a decade too old and also I do not have leukemia (yet!), but confidential to the Make-a-Wish Foundation: 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 funny comedic actor. In Get Him to the Greek, he reprises his role as caddish rock god Aldous Snow from 2008’s shockingly competent Forgetting Sarah Marshall. One of Sarah Marshall‘s deftest moves was to establish some humanity at the heart of this goofy caricature—Snow was an outlandish, serpentine, completely fucking bonkers whirl of ringlets and wang juice, but he also turned out to be kind of a great guy.

Greek catches up with Snow a handful of years later, now washed-up, alone, indolent, and waaaaay off the wagon. Like the wagon already made it all the way to Fort Walla Walla and Snow is still back by Chimney Rock, dying of dysentery and hunting a frustratingly large amount of bison meat (that’s an Oregon Trail reference, bitchez!). 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 reeeally goddamn fucking goddamn funny. Fuck. 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 fucked-up into a borderline-affecting buddy comedy about addiction and male friendship. Seriously. Seriously. Also, Paul Krugman cameos. Go see it.