Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy (2004)
Directed by Adam McKay
It's the 1970s and San Diego anchorman Ron Burgundy is the top dog in local TV, but that's all about to change when ambitious reporter Veronica Corningstone arrives as a new employee at his station.
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23 films that influenced this film
What critics say influenced Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy
The film gets weirder as it goes on and attempts to pay homage to a number of movies and TV shows, including Planet of the Apes and The Six Million Dollar Man.
By the time the Channel 4 team faces off in a West Side Story -style rumble with the city's other news teams -- a deliriously funny sequence that includes a death by trident -- you know you've fully entered a world that prizes over-the-top silliness above all else.
It's a movie with a few golden moments of out-loud hilarity (a "West Side Story" rumble between rival on-location news teams), with a healthy disrespect for the superficiality of local TV journalism (a pregnant panda is "the big story of the summer!"), and with a number of good laughs that don't translate well to print (Ferrell getting sex advice from his dog).
A scene that begins as a cute take-off on West Side Story quickly escalates into what can only be described as Battle of the Network Cameos.
Whether it's the news team breaking into song or getting involved in a "West Side Story"-inspired rumble with the other local newsmen ( Vince Vaughn , Luke Wilson, Tim Robbins and Ben Stiller in a short but sweet cameo), the foursome is funnier together than apart.
Those are easy targets to skewer, but not unlike “The Mary Tyler Moore Show,” “Murphy Brown” or “Broadcast News,” the movie is broad and harmless, mining more truth from its subject than some in the biz will want to admit.
Like Network and Broadcast News, the film turns a satirical eye towards the behind-the-scenes goings-on at a station.
Male chauvenisum at the onset of the sexual revolution is an easy target and the glibness of handsome faces delivering the daily events goes back to Broadcast News.
By 2024, it may be classified alongside Welles's "Citizen Kane" and Renoir's "The Rules of the Game" as one of the great film classics of our time.
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If the makers wanted it to be "thoughtful" then it shouldn't be a competitive romance but more like Ron Shelton's Kevin Costner sports movies, Bull Durham and Tin Cup, in which the hero competes mainly against himself.
This is unfortunate, since the movies, and Ferrell’s performances in them, are not nearly as brilliant as what we saw in Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me or Zoolander, where the comic had secondary but memorable roles.
And in a strange way, the movie sets itself up (à la "Austin Powers") with the possibility of a sequel that could outdo the original.
Anchorman is not likely to be as big a hit as Farrell’s last movie, Elf, but I think it has the potential, once it hits home video, to achieve Austin Powers-like status as a highly quotable movie.
Anchorman is Will Ferrell’s Austin Powers, here’s hoping he gets a sequel.
By 2024, it may be classified alongside Welles's "Citizen Kane" and Renoir's "The Rules of the Game" as one of the great film classics of our time.
For American audiences it takes a certain kind of masculine confidence to counterbalance it (like Bogart's in Casablanca and To Have and Have Not, for instance, or Bruce Willis's more recently).
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Last year's Bad Santa starring Billy Bob Thornton went so far with its travesty of holiday movies like Miracle on 34th Street that you could trust the moviemakers hadn't just tacked the unironic redemption on at the end to appeal to the audience.
This, in turn, led to more goofball roles in "The Producers," "Talladega Nights," "Blades of Glory," "Step Brothers," and "The Other Guys," interspersed with occasional warmhearted characters in "Elf" and, his best film to date, "Stranger Than Fiction."