A Quick Review of Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy

A friend of mine won a call-in radio contest for preview tickets to Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy at Waterloo Park last night. The Alamo Drafthouse was holding one of it's Movies in the Park Thursday night events, but my friend couldn't make it, so she gave her two tickets to her boyfriend and myself.

It wasn't too bad. The opening band was kinda lame. I might have been disappointed if I'd paid money to see the movie, but there were a few funny parts. Lots of cameos near the end added some fun to the film. We missed some of the dialogue because the sound cut out in the middle of the film for about 45 seconds.

Spoilers Below

The best parts:

• The News Team Brawl in the alleyway. Vince Vaughn, Ben Stiller, Luke Wilson, and Tim Robbins all have their own news crews. Vaughn's is in second place in city ratings; Wilson's is in third; Robbins is part of the local public TV station; and Stiller leads the Spanish channel crew. It quickly gets silly as they all suddenly whip out various gangland weapons and lay out one rule at the beginning: leave the face and hair alone.
  
• The opening and ending segments. The opening is shot as though the camera was running before Burgundy's newscast begins. He's stretching, drinking Scotch, hitting on female co-workers, and deliberately pronouncing words to loosen up. The ending consists of outtakes and redos, most of which are obviously takes that might have gone into the film but weren't preferred over what was screened.
  
• The sex scene between Will Ferrell and Christina Applegate. Very imaginative and visual. PG-rated but suggestive.

Scattered throughout are some decent jokes, but unfortunately a good deal of the movie is spent on what film buffs would recognize as flogging a very dead Saturday Night Live skit.

The basic plot has the setting in either the late 70's or early 80's San Diego. Ferrell is the lead anchor in a deeply misogynistic newsroom. I hadn't seen one advertisement explaining plot points, so I came into the film with an open mind. The bulk of the jokes either had something to do with the blunt stupidity of the news crew (Paul Rudd, Steven Carell, and David Koechner being the other members) or strongly un-PC sexist jokes and gestures.

Part of my weird feeling towards this movie is based on those jokes. There are a few scenes of outright sexual harassment that are only saved from being big eye-openers if it weren't for the steely determination of Applegate's character, Veronica Corningstone. She takes it all and dishes it back, hoping to be treated equally and promoted on merit. The sound was turned up damn loud, but I bet if I was able to hear the crowd clearer, there would have been some gasps. In one scene, Koecher's character, Champ Kind, walks up to Corningstone's desk and reaches for a pencil. As he does this, he quite blatantly gropes her breasts with his free hand. She nails him in the balls in response, but it's a culture shock to see this behavior, even in a comedy.

One of the better cameos was Jack Black's. He plays an unnamed biker who gets a burrito of Burgundy's in the face on the highway, losing control of his motorcycle and wiping out. He doesn't display any of the traditional hyper Jack Black acting quirks, even when he angrily drop kicks Burgundy's dog off the edge of a bridge.

The movie also drifts off far past Suspension of Disbelief Land. One example I already mentioned is the Burgundy-Corningstone sex scene. Other examples are when Burgundy talks to his dog and his dog talks back. We get to see what he says at the end...when the dog peacefully negotiates with a disturbed grizzly bear about to tear apart Burgundy and Corningstone. The fight scene among the various San Diego news teams was awesome, but didn't feel cohesive. Most of the bizarre scenes were like that; they felt modular and lumped in to lengthen the film and get quick laughs.

Overall, I'd rate Anchorman a B-. It's a renter rather than a buyer that occasionally rises above the standards set by other SNL cast-derived movies.

Posted by Drizzten at July 09, 2004 08:58 AM