A Tale of Two Jonah's

The trailer has come out for Get Him to the Greek, the sequel/spinoff of Forgetting Sarah Marshall and it doesn't look too bad. It helps, certainly, that I'm a fan of both Russell Brand and Jonah Hill; so I guess it's not a big stretch that this trailer looks pretty decent to me. But while I'm looking forward to checking this flick out, I'm definitely a little puzzled by the casting in this movie. Brand returns playing the character he originated in Forgetting Sarah Marshall, British rocker Aldous Snow, lead singer of the fictional band Infant Sorrow. This is a part Brand was born to play. I briefly saw Brand in Los Angeles a few years back when he hosted the MTV Video Awards and I was covering the event, and as he sauntered through the media tent - and I'm not choosing that verb to be cute, it's truly the only way to describe how he walks - he truly has adopted the rock star persona. I personally found his scenes to be the funniest in Forgetting Sarah Marshall and when word came of a spin-off featuring his rock star character I was on board. Shortly after it was confirmed that Jonah Hill would be co-starring as the put upon record label lackey taxed with the job of having to escort Brand's character from London to Los Angeles's Greek Theatre. This, to me, sounded like a good idea because the interaction between the two actors in Sarah Marshall was truly funny stuff; with Hill playing an awkward, adoring fan that Aldous Snow had little or no time for.

Here's where it gets weird. Hill, in Get Him To the Greek isn't playing the same character he played in Forgetting Sarah Marshall. For reasons that aren't entirely clear, instead of playing Matthew, his character from Sarah Marshall, he's now playing someone named Aaron Greenberg. It seems very odd to me to spin-off one character form the first film, but then cast the other lead with an actor from that same movie, but in a different role. It's even stranger when you factor in how easy it would have been to make them the same characters. Aldous Snow, in Sarah Marshall, never paid any attention whatsoever to Jonah's character, so it wouldn't have required much clever writing to make it like they'd never met before, and the Matthew character was a wanna-be musician so it wouldn't have been a stretch in anyway to suggest that he moved back to the mainland to get a job at a record label. Additionally, as a huge fan of Aldous Snow and Infant Sorrow, it also would have been pretty logical that he would have landed at the same label as his hero, and as you'll see in the trailer, it's his character that pitches the idea of a ten year reunion concert at the Greek Theatre for Aldous Snow. Literally it would have taken one very brief scene to set up his new job, and a comical moment where Aldous clearly doesn't remember their brief meeting in Hawaii. Seems very strange to me that they choose not to do this and went in a direction that will surely confuse fans. I suspect many will think Hill is playing the same character and will wonder why there's no mention of their previous interactions in Hawaii.

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