Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy 20th Anniversary 4K

VERY good loopy character comedy
Re-watching this film is a far funnier experience for me, since the first time around, at the beginning of the heyday of this kind of movie, I didn’t quite ‘get it’. Now, after having adjusted to the quirky nature of the ‘Pineapple Express’ and ‘Zack and Miri Make A Porno’ new generation of comedy which is all about bizarre characters pushing the taste boundaries with bizarre and funny behaviour and dialogue, I finally get it, and so viewing 2 was hilarious. Ron Burgundy is a terrific creation into which Ferrell pours his heart and soul, giving a performance of tremendous effort and humour. All of the cast work similarly hard, but Ferrell’s scotch loving, dog infatuated chauvinist is a fully rounded walking creation, as sweetly befuddled and charming as he is monstrously egotistical and childish. Great laughs are wrung from the vastly inappropriate behaviour of him and his peers in the male dominated ‘playground’ of the ’70s newsroom.
A sense of unreality pervades the whole film, with Newsreader Gang-on-gang violence a daily event, and Fred Willard’s studio head trying to cope with a son who seems to be trying to go postal on half of San-Francisco in an amusing off-screen running joke.
Paul Rudd is very funny and the butt of one fantastic aftershave gag, and Steve Carrell is great as the man-child weatherman who blindly follows everyone else due to an almost brain-dead but sweet lack of IQ.
But this is Ferrell and Christina Applegate’s film, and she gives an amazingly sassy performance as a newswoman fighting to be a national station ‘anchor’, and giving as good as she gets in many astoundingly barbed comedy lines and even a few crazy punch-up scenes. Much of the dialogue goes WAY beyond what you’re expecting its boundaries to be in an attempt to shock, and many of the laughs come from the leads saying things that are so far over the boundary of unacceptable that you gape somewhere inbetween laughing and astonishment, but luckily it’s all framed within a scenario of such absurdity that it’s clear it’s not meant to be taken seriously or offensively, since nothing else is meant to be taken seriously either.
The plot is also unexpectedly sweet at times, and you can’t help rooting for even the villains of the piece. It’s a great effort in screenwriting, which is funny, endearing, ludicrous, fantastical in the most bizarre way, and heart-warming.
“You stay classy, San Francisco.” “And thanks for dropping by.”