"Get Him to the Greek" is funny. It's thoughtful. It's like "The Hangover" with more drugs, more money, more furry walls, and zero police (that's what happens when you're rich, the police lose interest in you). It's lead character, Aldous Snow (he who must be gotten to the Greek), is played by Russell Brand (who played the same character in a minor role in "Forgetting Sarah Marshall"). Interestingly, this character isn't a terribly far cry from Brand's own life. This isn't to sell him short, at all, he does a lovely job of carrying the show and the plot. It just must be odd to become a movie star in the United States by playing the character you were, in your drug addled years, prior to becoming a clean and sober stand up comic in the UK.

I wouldn't know this if I hadn't read Brand's autobiography in 2008. I had just seem him tear George W. Bush a new asshole on the MTV Music Video Awards and was impressed by his irreverence and ability to use a stage not intended for agenda setting, for well, political agenda setting. Shortly after this, I went to England. I found myself in Oxford, at a Waterstone's bookstore and saw "My Booky Wook" sitting on a shelf. I read the first page and was hooked. I bought it and read it two times before my trip was over and I returned to Los Angeles. I wasn't sure what it was that grabbed me so and wouldn't let go. Yes, he was funny. Yes, he was witty. Yes, he was interesting. And as he promised as a hook, the story was sad. But also, for the first time in my life, I was inspired by something other than my own brain. I was getting a bit tired of that thing, my brain, it was on the same god damned treadmill and I needed to be shoved off of it.

Brand shoved me the fuck off and I never once got back on.

His style and prose clicked with my brain, I suppose I'm not the only one, which is why the book is a best seller int he UK. I was a bit slow to admit it, but he had actually inspired me. 

Boy howdy, was this tough to admit. Prior to this, I was hell-bent on the idea of free will, controlling my own destiny, and blah blah blah. All of these semi-capitalistic kind of psychological threats to myself - none of which were sustainable. I thought that being inspired by another person, especially one that I didn't personally know, was bad bad bad and showed feeble-mindedness on my part. 

I was wrong. It's okay to have a muse. It's okay to be inspired. It's just what comes after it that matters.

So let's see, now it's 2010. About a year and a half since I first buried myself in "My Booky Wook". I have been writing this blog ever since. I wrote my own autobiography/memoir type literary attempt. I became okay with the use of the word "cunt". I've spoken at conferences in which I felt it okay to use my own brand of quirkiness and humor. I have learned that it is okay to be vocally quirky and weird. It's okay to say what you think, even if it's going to sound strange. I am all the better because of it, and it's all because of Brand's book.

But something occurred to me the other night. I was in a bar, one whiskey deep, waiting for my fiancee's band to play. On a television screen above the bar, Brand appeared to do an interview on Leno. I realized in that instant what that book had done to me and why it had really changed my life: it taught me how to make terribly sad things funny. You can talk about a death, you can talk about your promiscuity, your drug addiction, and make it hilarious. That made me come to terms with those things. To write about my problems, my missteps, and misdeeds. The only rule was: make it funny. 

Just like "My Booky Wook", this is what "Get Him to the Greek" executes very successfully. I'm sure that is without concidence and with much conscience.

Okay, so this wasn't as much a review of "Get Him to the Greek" but more of a prose dedicated to my muse, my inspiration, my big ol' limey life changer Mr. Russell Brand.

Post Script: I'd like to note that loads of the frames in the trailers were not in the actual movie. See it anyway. You'll have a jolly time.