Do you know what you’re doing on April 18 yet? I do! You’re going to see Forgetting Sarah Marshall, and you’re going to LOVE it! It’s going to be your favorite movie of 2008 (at least until Pineapple Express comes out), and you’re going to have a horrible time deciding which of its hilarious quotes you’re going to use as your next MySpace headline. Then you’re going to spend the next few months checking Amazon for the DVD release date of the unrated, un-edited special edition that will include five discs of bonus features and twenty-seven alternate endings.

How do I know this? Well, actually, I don’t. I haven’t seen the movie yet, so I’m not exactly offering an informed opinion here. But a lot of critics have seen it already, including Film.com’s C. Robert Cargill (click here for his review), and I’ve yet to hear even a minor complaint about it. This same phenomenon also occurred with producer Judd Apatow’s other films, The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Knocked Up, and Superbad. Massive audiences seemed to buy tickets for those movies already knowing they were going to like them, and were never proven wrong. The only other producers in Hollywood with such a perfect track record are the team at Pixar. Part of me has to wonder, are we being fed subliminal messages through all those dirty jokes, or are Apatow and his cronies really just that talented?

And even without having seen Forgetting Sarah Marshall, I’m going to say the answer to that question is a definite yes. The Apatow gang has kept us laughing so steadily through the last few years, we haven’t had the time to start a backlash against them. And why should we? Are we so used to mediocre comedies by now that we automatically become suspicious when something doesn’t suck?

There are so many movies that are easy to write off as crap just based on their trailers, like Superhero Movie, or pretty much any movie with “Movie” in its title. It’s a nice change of pace to be in the reverse position. We already know this one’s going to be great. Writer Jason Segel is going to become as huge as Seth Rogen became last summer, and we’ll probably be quoting Forgetting Sarah Marshall and talking about it for months to come.

Or at least until Pineapple Express comes out.

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