I’d been looking forward to seeing Forgetting Sarah Marshall, since I’m a fan of “How I Met Your Mother,” and Knocked Up was one of my favorite movies of last year. I wasn’t disappointed; the movie’s hilarious, and I’d recommend it to just about anybody.

Anybody who’s not in my immediate family, at least, since the movie continues the trend of Judd Apatow-produced raunchy romantic comedies. This one is the most bipolar of the ones I’ve seen — the plot is about as straightforward as a romantic comedy gets, but the scenes and language are about as explicit as an R rating will allow.

Everything I’d read and heard about the movie makes a big deal about the scene at the beginning where Jason Segel appears naked; after seeing the movie, you’ve got to wonder what all the fuss is about. The camera keeps cutting away quickly, not for artistic effect but because there’s only so much they’re allowed to show, and the scene on the whole feels oddly truncated, like you get the idea of how awkward and pathetic it was supposed to be, but it doesn’t carry through. Besides, every major character appears naked — you don’t see as much, but everybody’s got a scene or two having sex with somebody else, in all kinds of positions, filmed from all kinds of different angles.

But the movie’s goofy, oddly romantic, mostly good-natured, and overall, sweet. It doesn’t even have the edge that Knocked Up has; it’s got a simpler, be-comfortable-with-yourself-and-you’ll-find-happiness mentality. You have to like Segel’s character to like the movie, but it’s not that difficult. He’s not just one of the crass, horny losers of Knocked Up and The 40 Year Old Virgin or worse, the execrable Superbad; he’s a big, goofy, earnest and kind-hearted guy disguised as one of those losers.

It struck me as a lot more daring and exposed to put on a rock opera about Dracula performed by puppets, than it was to appear on screen naked and sobbing. Ultimately he just comes across as a guy who’s comfortable with himself — laugh at him if you want to, but more likely than not, he’s in on on the joke.

The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters got a ton of attention from videogame sites around its release last year, as well as from the critics. It’s all deserved; it’s just a great movie.

Of course, to appreciate it to the fullest, you have to have spent a good bit of the 80s in front of an arcade machine, but it’s not the geek-core exploitation of nostalgia that I expected it to be. As it starts out, you think you know where it’s going — an hour and a half of “look at the funny videogame geeks!” And there is plenty of that. But as the movie spends more time with these people, the condescension and mockery fades away, and a genuinely compelling story develops.

Story’s the key word here; nobody’s going to accuse The King of Kong of being objective. They might as well superimpose a halo around Steve Wiebe’s head and show Billy Mitchell surrounded in hellfire. But it’s masterfully edited: gleefully manipulative without making you feel like you’re being manipulated. It’s a classic story filtered through 8-bit nostalgia, the plot of every other 80s movie superimposed on an 80s pasttime. You’ve got a comically arrogant champion as your villain and the straight-shooting challenger coming out of nowhere as your hero. And the movie keeps the right tone throughout, letting you laugh at the characters as much as you get caught up in the story.

Now I’m glad I didn’t see it in the theater, because the DVD is the way to go. They add a few updates on the big rivalry, and more importantly, include interviews done for promotion of the movie as well as extended interviews deleted from the final cut. Those give you the sense that the movie’s not entirely mean-spirited or purely manipulative, and remind you that the people involved are passionate about these games, but can still laugh at themselves.

Plus, it’s got a gallery of art from I Am 8-Bit, including a Donkey Kong painting by Steve Purcell. And the DVD has an alternate cover by Scott Campbell of Double Fine. The version I saw was a rental, but I’m going out to buy a copy as soon as possible to support the movie.