Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy (2004)

Director: Adam McKay

Cast: Will Ferrell, Christina Applegate, Paul Rudd, Steve Carrell

Have I Seen it Before: Seeing this film for the first time in the summer of 2004 was one of those special screenings. I don’t remember laughing that hard at a movie before, and I can’t think of a time since, either. 

Did I Like It: But that’s the thing about a comedy. It can age horribly, not just because the jokes are from a different time, but because the version of you that enjoyed the film so much is an increasingly dim memory.

Who would have thought that a review for a movie that insists “San Diego” means “a whale’s vagina”?

I watch the film now and I have some mildly positive feelings about it, but that’s still largely memories of that summer 17 years ago. Maybe the film is just a bit too quotable. With so many movies that land on the tips of the tongues of every frat guy in the western world, the film may have grown tired and old by New Year’s Day 2005. 

That’s a shame, because I remember this film delighting me beyond all measure. Now, it’s mildly diverting background noise. It’s probably not fair to judge the films on those terms. McKay and Judd Apatow probably didn’t count on the film being so loved in the instant of its release that there would be thousands of Facebook groups within the year called “I’m kind of a big deal”, they certainly didn’t bargain for a guy staring down the barrel of his 40th birthday occasionally feeling wistful for 20.

The soundtrack—where Ferrell, in character as Burgundy uncontrollably weeps throughout “Shannon”—has still got to be as funny as it was back then, right?

Step Brothers (2008)

Director: Adam McKay

Cast: Will Ferrell, John C. Reilly, Richard Jenkins, Mary Steenburgen

Have I Seen it Before: Yes

Did I Like It: Fuck it, yes I did. Don’t @ me.

People have been down on Will Ferrell forever. His humor is just yelling, they’d say. It’s just men acting like children with nothing more to show for itself, they’d groan. The only good movie Ferrell has ever made is Stranger Than Fiction (2006)*.

Well, they’re full of donkey shit.

Maybe this movie has me riled up 

There will come a time when I will somehow be compelled to watch Holmes & Watson (2018). It’s probably going to be when it shows up on some service I’ve already paid for. I also imagine that I’m going to hate it. That’s because the particular kind of party that Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly is over. But here, before McKay made the transition to semi-serious political satirist, the “let the camera run” semi-improv movie is still a delight. I’m laughing fairly regularly, and it isn’t like they are promising anything else.

Or, at least, it’s a delight for a little bit. This free association in this film isn’t really done anymore, and this might be the turning point of diminishing returns. Somewhere around the time Brennan (Ferrell) and Dale (Reilly) decide their best friends that I’m not sure the film even attempts any kind of believability. I think it’s reasonable to assume that the film isn’t interested in believability in the early goings, but the strange affectations of the characters keep things going for the first act. It’s a ten-to-one SNL sketch extended to 98 minutes. Kind of like how I’ve tried to extend the word count of this review to a reasonable length.

Maybe I’m not the same arrested adolescent that really liked these movies. That’s a pretty big maybe.

*That one is mostly my wife. For the record, she is not full of any type of shit up to and including donkey.

Vice (2018)

Director: Adam McKay

Cast: Steve Carell, Amy Adams, Sam Rockwell, and I shit you not, Richard Bruce Cheney, 46th Vice-President of the United States as himself.

Have I Seen it Before: No. I mean, I saw nearly all of the events indicated play out on TV as they did… But I never saw it like this

Did I Like It: More than I thought I would. Oliver Stone’s W. (2008) never quite came together because it felt like the events were too recent, and the examination of them was too shallow. This is a completely different movie. Richard Dreyfuss, eat your heart out.

We live in weird times. With a series of wacky poncho-related mishaps, becoming Michelle Obama’s refined sugar supply, and managing to join the rest of us in thinking that the clown in the White House needs to go, George W. Bush has increased his likability tenfold. He’s certainly not the worst thing that happened to the republic anymore, but more of a well-meaning idiot who couldn’t live up to the moment in history he inherited.

So, when Adam McKay’s frenetic, nearly schizoid film about the true President of the oughts unfolds, and I begin to respect—if not quite like—the second Vice-President in history to notably shoot a guy, it feels like the normal rules of the universe don’t apply anymore.

But then, McKay deftly pulls the carpet out from under us and reminds everyone that Cheney wasn’t an ironman who was willing to make the tough, yet perhaps, maybe necessary decisions to keep us safe, and has made absolute peace that he is a necessary villain, or to bother a line from a Christian Bale movie I saw once: He’s the hero we need, because he isn’t a hero, and he can take our hate.

Except, he isn’t. In truth, he slithers through the beginning of the movie with a chip on his shoulder, and after he gets his first taste of power, he barrels through the last forty years, wrecking everything along his way, even the things he might have claimed were more important than the power that lifted him from being a dirtbag in the first place.

Seriously, fuck that guy.

…wait, Christian Bale was in this movie? I didn’t notice him. I don’t know what you’re talking about.