Carefully catering to a specific audience, Hollywood has fabricated a fantasy comedy Team led by Judd Apatow that is not nearly as unified as the ad campaigns suggest.
From the guys who brought you Knocked Up and Superbad comes the next summer comedy smash hit blablabla. Forgetting Sarah Marshall is just the latest in an ever-growing string of films to be advertised as such. Is anyone getting tired of the way so-called “Team Apatow” is being marketed? Just who are these “guys” that keep “bringing” all of these great movies, anyway?
Judd Apatow's "Other" Films
It seems that the only requirement a film needs to satisfy to be marketed with the “from the guys who brought you Knocked Up and…” brand is that Judd Apatow be involved in someway, however loosely. Apatow himself has only producer credit on Sarah Marshall, and by his own admission, he only visited set a couple of times.
Sure, some will argue that all of the “Apatow” films, however little he may have had to do with them, have that similar gross-out teen comedy with a heart approach. However, that would be to willfully ignore the likes of Drillbit Taylor and Fun with Dick and Jane, the latter a film that Apatow had more to do with than he did with Marshall, but which is not usually not associated with him so as to not tarnish his name brand with such inconsequential fare. Even Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy and Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby, though both highly successful, share little in terms of subject matter and approach with what you might call the core Apatow films, The 40 Year Old Virgin, Knocked Up and Superbad.
The Case of Walk Hard
Consider Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story. Before release, it was heavily advertised as the next in the Apatow crew’s perfect sequential filmography. However, since the film was met with a lukewarm critical response and was a failure at the box office, the film has been left out in subsequent ad blurbs as if it had never happened.
Around the time that Walk Hard was released, catering to the controversy over the male genitalia featured in the film, Apatow jokingly promised that every film that he would write, direct or produce would from then on feature a penis. Whether he was serious or not, Forgetting Sarah Marshall delivers on this promise plentifully; writing on this point, popular online critic James Berardinelli writes “He’s two for two.” In writing this, Berardinelli willfully ignores the fact that Drillbit Taylor, a PG-13 Apatow film decidedly lacking in penis, was released right in between Walk Hard and Forgetting Sarah Marshall. The complaint is, of course, not that Apatow did not truthfully deliver on his promise. What is bothersome is that even such a knowledgeable critic as Berardinelli would willingly follow Hollywood’s inconsistent dictation as to what is an “Apatow film.”
There is no such thing as Team Apatow. It is unfair to such classics as American Pie and There’s Something About Mary to pretend that Apatow and his friends invented adult comedy with a heart. It is also silly to ignore all of the other types of films that he is involved with, such as the horrible looking upcoming Adam Sandler comedy You Don’t Mess With the Zohan, just as it is absurd to pretend that he had great creative input in films that he just didn’t, such as Forgetting Sarah Marshall.
