Anchormen (Adam McKay 2004/2013)

[thirtyframesasecond]

I've not seen Anchorman, but I allowed myself to get dragged to Anchorman 2. Oh boy, I hated this film. I'm probably missing the context of the first film, and I'm probably unfairly swayed by my dislike of Will Ferrell. Burgundy's rise and fall is too obvious and is really sickly, its sideswipes at the decline of news journalism are obvious, its celeb cameos aren't funny and it drags out the whole thing for 2 hours. And you seemingly can't get away from it. You have to admire how much Ferrell is plugging this movie, which just seems to be a series of catchphrases with a lame plot in between.

[domino harvey]

I've not seen Anchorman

Don't bother! I finally watched it out of curiosity after Amazon had it for cheap and I could not believe how something with so many people capable of being funny could be so flabbergastingly unfunny. I chuckled, not even laughed, exactly once, and I can tell you that it occurred a little over 76 minutes into the film because I checked the counter out of morbid curiosity of how long I'd been sitting through a comedy without anything funny happening. It is kind of like bizarro-world Happy Endings in that that show is written and performed by skilled professionals who are making it for those who are smart, aware, and hip to comedic conventions, while Anchorman is as predictable, rote, and lowest-common denominator-slumming as humanly imaginable. There was never a moment where I couldn't predict the direction the film took, even with its love of alleged non-sequiturs, and there was never any attempt to offer anything more than off the cuff bro-humor. Ugh. Remember, Anchorman is everyone's favorite comedy like Avatar is everyone's favorite blockbuster: We're fucked as a society.

[knives]

Or just watch it and make up your own mind.

[flyonthewall2983]

I thought some of it was funny, but I found it really odd when people I knew were starting to quote it years after, mostly because I'd forgotten so much of it. I like some of the more left-of-center stuff Will does (like the beer commercials) and enjoyed him on SNL, but I from what I've seen it doesn't translate well into 90 minutes or 2 hours.

[mfunk9786]

*raises hand* I adore the first film and am looking forward to the sequel.

Whammy.

[Numero Trois]

could not believe how something with so many people capable of being funny could be so flabbergastingly unfunny.

Par the course for SNL alumni comedies, isn't it? In the majority of cases you'll have at most a small handful of funny scenes that wouldn't even fill half an SNL episode. Spies Like Us, I'm looking at you. Though granted that "flabbergastingly unfunny" is a far cry from "frustratingly uneven" or "intermittently somewhat amusing."

[flyonthewall2983]

I think The Blues Brothers is a great movie, but not a great comedy. The car chases and the music fill in the gaps.

[Professor Wagstaff]

I've always enjoyed the first "Anchorman" but thought the sequel to be pretty lifeless. It had a few chuckles early in, but Adam McKay, Will Ferrell, and company could stand to write a few more jokes than just rely almost exclusively on improv or however exactly this bloated Apatow format works (at the very least build from a situation). Some race humor about Ferrell's inability to accept that his new boss/lover is a confident black woman were in poor taste. I felt embarrassed for the actors who played the boss's family and had to be on the receiving end of a day's filming which consisted of Ferrell doing his racial schtick over dinner.

[mrmarbach]

Anchorman is for me only notable for two great moments with Steve Carell, as the proudly moronic weather forecaster who talks about the weather "in the mid west" and contrasts it with "the Far East" (pointing at NY). And his contribution to an argument where he simply shouts "LOUD NOISES". (And his expression for most of the film, which is priceless.)

Otherwise, Anchorman has merely increased my distrust of jazz flute.

[warren oates]

For me it's less about Will Ferrell and more about Adam McKay, who seems to always be willing to sacrifice everything for a joke and/or to have little to no interest in telling an actual story in any of his films. The first Anchorman is infamous for having such a godawful story that the only way to save the film was to jettison the narrative entirely in post. And McKay seems to have learned exactly the wrong lesson from that experience, doubling down on everything he already was comfortable with instinctively from SNL, ignoring the very different demands of feature length films.

This seems to have had the perverse effect of making some of his on-set improvs way funnier and more interesting than anything that ever makes the final cut (exhibit A, the line-o-rama from Talladega Nights, particularly all of Will Ferell's variations on saying grace). Because with so little semblance of a story to hang on to in the first place, the ad libs are all over the place and most of them, however funny in and of themselves, need to be thrown out for sheer irrelevance.* For me, the closest this pair has come yet to a good story idea was Step Brothers, but the execution wasn't anywhere near the potential, especially in the movie's final act.

*This is something most people I know don't grasp about improvisation: How, wiith very few exceptions, the better the script is, the clearer the story is, the better the improvs are and the more potential they have to feed back into the process and add something significant to the whole. Which is a key difference for me between the Apatow films Wagstaff mentions and McKay's work.

[knives]

Why does it need a strong story? Especially in the first Anchorman that willingness to make a joke without regard to the sort of lame storytelling that has strangled comedies since the late '70s. If anything McKay strikes me as a return to the pure comic silliness of the silent era (and Maybe the Marx Brothers).

[warren oates]

So McKay + Ferrell = Second Coming of Marx Bros? Huh. I guess it would matter less if all the jokes were funny, or were instead unified by something else. Or if the intentions of the films themselves were really to consciously eschew conventional narrative altogether instead of, as I'm arguing, partaking badly and half-assedly of exactly the kind of lame storytelling you're mentioning, maybe with an equally half-assed ironic wink to it, most especially by mistaking blustering caricature for character. Nobody in these movies ever really seems to want or need something badly enough for what happens to matter to them or to the audience.

[matrixschmatrix]

I don't know how many Marx brothers movies you've actually seen, but they pretty well all (particularly in the MGM era) partake badly and halfassedly of lame melodramatic storytelling, as the spine of the thing, and then shove that out of the way to make a bunch of jokes.

[warren oates]

Just one or two, but they were way more consistently funny and involving on their own terms than the McKay/Ferrell films. Isn't that the task of any narrative feature length comedy, though, to discover its own proper balance? Like I've been saying, if McKay imagines he's gone all-in for jokes over story, then, for me, he's certainly not succeeding. And I think it's in large part because his films still adhere pretty rigidly and perhaps vestigially to too many narrative strictures that he's refusing either to honor or completely dispense with. Step Brothers is the prime example of a project that, in the hands of a comedy hyphenate more interested in and skilled at storytelling, say somebody like Ben Stiller, could have been both much more compelling and way funnier.

[knives]

Funny is an extraordinarily subjective thing and not good to judge by (for instance I personally have never laughed harder and more consistently than with the first film, but I don't expect that to be true of everyone). As for your balance idea, I find that ridiculous. There's no one way to do a film and if McKay and co feel that just fitting as many laughs in a situation as possible is the way they want to do it that's fine.

[dustybooks]

I don't know how many Marx brothers movies you've actually seen, but they pretty well all (particularly in the MGM era) partake badly and halfassedly of lame melodramatic storytelling, as the spine of the thing, and then shove that out of the way to make a bunch of jokes.

I know this is blasphemous but I find the MGM Marxes more accessible because they are pushing back against terribly conventional storytelling, which makes their particular anarchy seem more subversive. Given completely free reign as in Duck Soup, it's almost too much for me. (That said, on repeat viewings I find myself more annoyed with the dross and more attuned to the chaos.)

[matrixschmatrix]

I think the first couple of them work pretty well, though Duck Soup is still easily my favorite. Certainly A Day at the Races compares favorably with The Cocoa-nuts, which is just as plot bound and far less fleet.