If you live in New York and have left your home since the middle of March - a safe bet unless your governorship ended then - you’ve seen messages everywhere. Harsh little missives scribbled in black on a white background. On bus stops and taxis, billboards and buildings. They’re everywhere. And they’ve blanketed Los Angeles and Chicago, Dallas and San Francisco, too. The petty taunts of a scorned lover.

“My Mother Always Hated You, Sarah Marshall.”

“You Do Look Fat in Those Jeans, Sarah Marshall.”

“I’m SO Over you, Sarah Marshall.”

“Wow!,” you think. “Someone really pissed off her boyfriend and, hoo boy, he is NOT shy about airing their dirty laundry! The claws have come out!! Also: he must have remarkable reserves of disposable income and a great deal of free time. Hey, wait . . . I have disposable income! Just about eleven dollars and fifty cents. I wonder if there’s an easy way to spend it, quickly and mechanically . . .”

Of course, that isn’t what happens. Among the sentient, or at least among those young, gorgeously media savvy who got wise when they got born, “mysterious messages” mean only one thing: a bit of viral marketing. I’ve seen cryptic things plastered on bus stops and subway stations. They don’t carry trademarks or even directions to a Web presence.

“Forgetting Sarah Marshall” is the latest movie to emerge from the Judd Apatow comedy industrial complex. To build buzz, Universal hit major cities with the signs. The goal: get people to ask, “Who is this freaky Sarah Marshall?” Read her official bio on http://www.sarahmarshallfan.com/. And then, presumably, to ask: “When will my local multiplex answer this question, as it has so many others for me?”

I’m going to see it, yeah. You know why? Because it’s Judd Apatow and I get his style. Also because most of the people I know will see it (again, ONLY because it’s Judd Apatow - not because it stars the dude from “How I Met My Mom” who strangely is NAMED Marshall on that show…). Anyway, you know that we all tend to see movies that other people see. I, like you, can predict the “Marshall” plot with 85% accuracy from the 2-minute trailer. I can also probably predict with 85% accuracy how much I’m going to enjoy it. There’s very little about the movie that can be described as intriguing. It’s a romantic comedy. There will be dirty jokes. It’ll be kind of like Knocked Up and Superbad, and then we’ll all wait for the next one and wonder what new “taboo” will be discussed (bro-mantic love? pregnancy between a beauty and a beast?).

Anyone who plops down in the stadium-style seating on Forgetting Sarah Marshall’s opening night does so after seeing “wacky, cutting-edge” buzz scheme and shrugged “Oh.” Its core audience is too “alternative marketing”-bombarded to pull double takes at a major motion picture studio’s carpet bombing of focus grouped ad copy, no matter where that copy shows up. And the people who see the movie on its second weekend do so merely because their friends’ kids said it was a riot.

And oh yeah if you go to SarahMarshall.com, you see an allegedly “self-made” Web page with YOU ARE THE 17280th PERSON TO HATE SARAH MARSHALL. We’re naive to believe it…. But at least it isn’t smacking us over the head like so much bad advertising.