A round-up of the top films, music releases and books heading your way this month
Text Matt Bochenski
Forgetting Sarah Marshall
Director Nicholas Stoller
Starring Jason Segel, Kristen Bell, Russell Brand
The Judd Apatow hit machine rolls on with the release of this sprightly, occasionally crude but warm-hearted comedy starring Jason Segel and the UK’s own hair-bear love bandit Russell Brand.
Apatow (the man behind The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Superbad and Knocked Up) here acts as producer, leaving Nicholas Stoller to helm the story of long-time loser Peter (Segel), who gets dumped by his smart, sexy and successful girlfriend Sarah (Kristen Bell) in a painfully embarrassing scene that leaves him literally exposed. To get over her, Peter takes a trip to a Hawaiian resort that Sarah always talked about, only to find that she, too, is holed up there – in the arms of her new rock star boyfriend (Brand).
Forgetting Sarah Marshall has all the elements of the Apatow oeuvre – arrested adolescence, butt-ugly guys dating hot girls and a tender, if somewhat sentimental approach to old-fashioned romance. Brand in particular keeps things lively with an outrageous turn. The juggernaut is rumbling on, for now.
The Happening
Director M Night Shyamalan
Starring Mark Wahlberg, Zooey Deschanel
Q+A
ZOOEY DESCHANEL
Zooey Deschanel, star of M Night Shyamalan’s latest chiller The Happening talks to b.there!
Can you give us an overview of The Happening?
It’s about a natural disaster that happens in Philadelphia and a couple that goes on the run. Basically it focuses on plants fighting back.
As a young actress do you feel pressure to show your support for green issues?
I don’t really feel pressure to do anything that I don’t want to do. I think to each his own. If you want to be involved with causes, then that’s great, and if not, I mean, for some people that’s not their thing.
What else are you into besides acting? You have an album coming our, right?
Yes! I wrote everything in my room and we went and recorded it. I wanted to express myself in that way.
Don’t you knit as well?
I actually started doing that when I was in high school. I haven’t been doing a lot of knitting lately, but for a long time it was something to do on set because you always have a lot of time where you’re just sitting around. So crafts and things like that are nice, and you can make people scarves and things.
Missy Elliott
Phenomental
Don’t like the title of Missy Elliott’s new album? Well you’ve only got yourself to blame. Missy ran an online competition in which anybody could enter and have a stab at naming this, her seventh studio album. Phenomental is the result, and if it sounds a bit ridiculous, well, at least the material wasn’t open to fan meddling.
America’s most eclectic R’n’B diva once again delivers the goods, with a series of tracks inspired by everything from Washington go-go funk to Timbaland’s ubiquitous jangly synth beats. Ching-A-Ling and Shake Your Pom Pom have already hit the streets as part of the Step Up 2 The Streets soundtrack, and the quality that they promised is more than matched by barnstorming tracks like the drum-thumping Hip-Hop Don’t Die and the mellowed-out Milk and Cookies, which sees Missy boasting some more about her private life.
But it’s not her private life that Missy should be boasting about, not when her professional career is so clearly going from strength to strength.
Phenomental is another massive hit.
Micah P Hinson
Micah P Hinson and the Red Empire Orchestra
If you don’t know the name Micah P Hinson then don’t worry – not many people do right now. But 2008 is going to be Micah’s year.
Raised in a Christian fundamentalist family in Texas, at the age of 19 Micah found himself homeless and penniless after a run-in with a local girl who turned him on to drugs. He got a motel room, a telemarketing job, and set himself to writing music. He got a break 
working with The Earlies, and though there have been further ups and downs since, the world is now starting to turn to his tune.
Those tunes, as exemplified on this, his fourth album, are blistering, lush indie-rock staples with a distinct twist. He conquered Austin’s South by Southwest festival, and the UK’s Camden Crawl in advance of this release, stealing the thunder of much bigger acts.
Micah P Hinson and the Red Empire Orchestra manages to mix quixotic dreaminess with hard-edged, bittersweet lyrics. It’s reminiscent of the likes of Tom Waits and Leonard Cohen, but it’s also uniquely, gloriously his own sound. Hinson is coming. The future is now.
Book club
Devil May Care
by Sebastian Faulks
Since the death of Ian Fleming in 1964, there have been dozens of books starring his most famous creation (well, after Chitty Chitty Bang Bang), James Bond. Sebastian Faulks’ Devil May Care, however, is the first for some time to tackle a brand new story for the adult Bond that fits into Fleming’s original chronology.
Faulks was chosen specifically by Fleming’s estate to mark the centenary of the author’s birth. As such, Devil May Care is set slap bang in the middle of Bond’s defining period – the Cold War, 1967 to be exact, some time after The Man With the Golden Gun, as Bond aficionados will almost certainly know.
Details of the plot have been kept tightly under wraps so as not to spoil the many surprises, but you can expect to see Bond crisscrossing the world’s most glamorous locations in the company of the world’s most glamorous women, on the trail of the world’s most villainous bad guys.
With Bond back on the big screen, and now in print, the resurrection of this modern icon is complete.
Sepulchre
by Kate Mosse
It’s not exactly that Kate Mosse jumped on The Da Vinci Code bandwagon with quite the same spring-heeled leap as some of her contemporaries, but her first novel, Labyrinth, certainly benefited from the upsurge of interest in historical novels rich with a sense of time, place and mystery.
After the resounding success of her debut, it’s no surprise to find Mosse beating a similar path in Sepulchre, another book that begins in the history-saturated enclaves of France before hopping across continents and generations to tell its epic story.
This time around, an elderly priest has been murdered and a young man is found floating in a river. The link that connects them, and two other protagonists, is the tarot cards each of them has, or had, in their possession. This simple thread grows to encompass ancient kings, forbidden treasure, and the Church’s unending battle against the forces of evil.
It’s heady stuff, and perhaps not to everybody’s taste, but if you’re not fed up of medieval mystery, there’s a lot to like.
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