I'm not going to lie. I find Jonah Hill a little sinister. I'm aware that he's supposed to be the funny fat guy in the Frat Pack, especially now that Seth Rogen's slimmed down to start doing action movies, but I've always felt like there was something mordant, and not in a funny way, in the guy's manner, something that the trailer for Cyrus gets at really well. But I cannot, cannot resist Russell Brand, who managed to be funny in the otherwise dreadful Bedtime Stories (I saw it with a small kid, don't judge) and even though the trailer for Get Him to the Greek seems to rely pretty heavily on gross-out one-crazy-night cliches, I will see it anyway:
Given what a terrific character Aldous Snow was in Forgetting Sarah Marshall, I'm glad Brand's getting more screen time to play him. I'm not particularly worried that the character was a one-off. Rather, I think the real risk in Get Him to the Greek is that it relies heavily on the crazy-rockstar part of Snow, rather than the fact he's a multifaceted, funny guy, someone who is capable of hurting a girl a lot while also teaching a virginal young husband how to please his wife. Sure, Snow was callous, and pretentious and absurd in certain ways, but he was also a lot more fully alive than Peter. There's a hint of that in the trailer, when after one of said crazy nights, Hill wakes up and groans,"What time is it?" Snow, already dressed in exercise clothes, a "5am...shall we go jogging?" Clearly, this is a guy who isn't wasting a single minute.