Hello Everyone :-)
By the Beard of Zeus I love ‘Anchorman’! I think it’s brilliant. I quote it all the time but it’s one of those films I like to watch sparingly, about once a year, in order to preserve it.
My lovely family and I are all fans of Ron Burgundy and Co so with high hopes we took advantage of Odeon’s Cheap Ticket Tuesday and went to see ‘Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues’.
Several years after the events of the first film, Ron Burgundy (Will Ferrell) and Veronica Corningstone (Christina Applegate) are married and co-anchors for a news network in New York City. One day, Veronica gets promoted; making her the first female nightly news anchor in the history of television and Ron gets rather unceremoniously fired.
A few months later, Ron is back in San Diego
, but is recruited by Freddie Shapp (Dylan Baker) for a job with the Global News Network, the world's first 24 hour news network. He reassembles his news team (Steve Carell as Brick Tamland, Paul Rudd as Brian Fantana and David Koechner as Champ Kind) and the gang set about beating rival reporter Jack Lime (James Marsden) in the ratings.
As Adam Sandler has demonstrated many, many times, comedy is hard enough to get right the first time round, let alone in sequels. If you do manage to make a consistently funny comedy there are very few who manage to achieve the same level of quality on a second outing. Like a home hair-dye botch job, ‘Anchorman 2’ is a bit patchy.
It is great to be back in the company of Ron Burgundy. At this point Burgundy
comes so naturally to Will Ferrell it’s like breathing. In fact all of the characters from last time are back and as brilliant as they were before.
There are the obligatory cameos, all of which are bigger and more A-list than last time.
From the host of new characters the stand out is Kristen Wiig as Chani the most inept secretary in the world and kindred spirit for Brick. I loved their weird romance and wanted to see more of it.
Everything in this film is bigger than the last which sometimes works and sometimes doesn’t. I loved the New York
setting and using the advent of 24 hour news is a shrewd move. It pays off giving the film a bit of a satirical edge and a nice, thinly veiled dig at the Antipodean Voldemort of Media. Some things, however, don’t work as well when turned up to 11. Take for example one of the highlights of the original film, the barbershop quartet version of ‘Afternoon Delight’ the team perform in Ron’s office. There is a impromptu musical interlude in ‘Anchorman 2’ but it’s got a big backing track, massive sweeping tracking shots and cuts to here there and everywhere and yet it doesn’t have the same comic impact of 4 blokes in an office singing a song about funsies in the daytime.
The trouble comes when the film tries to recreate things from ‘Anchorman’ that seemed so organic first time round. Take the opening to this post ‘By the Beard of Zeus’ or any of the lines from the original film’s outtakes “Great Odin's raven”, “By the hammer of Thor”, “Sweet grandmother's spatula”, etc. Those lines, and countless other moments in the first film, are clearly improvised. There are a couple of incidences in ‘Anchorman 2’ where they try similar lines and it just sounds wrong. I could be completely off the mark and those lines may be improvised too but it just didn’t sit right.
Thankfully for every line that falls flat there’s a joke that gets it right and you won’t leave ‘Anchorman 2’ without your funny bone being tickled. There’s a brilliant ‘Muppets take Manhattan’/ ‘The Muppets’-esque sequence where Ron has to round up his news team (without the aid of a conch shell) from the various situations they’ve fallen into following the disbanding of the Channel 4 News Team. The laughs are fairly spread out which is possibly why ‘Anchorman2’ feels a little disjointed at times, but when it’s good it’s great.
You can’t be too hard on ‘Anchorman 2’. In spite of its flaws it’s still one of the funniest things I’ve seen in the cinema in ages and the characters make the film eminently watchable.
‘Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues’ is still in cinemas now.
Now for some…
Reasons to be Cheerful :-)
1. The National Television Awards were last night! Super happy for Doctor Who as it won both ‘Best drama’ and ‘Best Drama Performance’ for Matt Smith’s sterling efforts. Also chuffed for ‘Educating Yorkshire’ for best Documentary Series. The only weird thing is the fact that there’s a category called ‘Best TV Detective’ which is new and seems oddly specific and I’m sure was originally called ‘The Benedict Cumberbatch award for excellence in playing Sherlock Homes’…
2. This isn’t really a reason to be cheerful; in fact we should just call it ‘What’s Quentin Tarantino done this time?’ Oscar-winning director Quentin Tarantino has dropped his latest project, a Western called The Hateful Eight, after the script was apparently leaked to Hollywood
agents. Tarantino goes on to speak to Deadline and throw his toys out of the pram about how depressed he is. I mean it’s obviously a less than idea situation but ‘Django Unchained’ leaked in 2011 before it was released in 2012/13 and that went on to clean up at the box office, win a stack of awards and feature in pretty much every ‘Top Films of 2013’ list I’ve read in the past month. I hope he doesn’t shelve this project entirely, it sounds good and Tarantino’s last Western was great (if a little long).
That’s all for today!
Goodbye till next time :-)
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