Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy (2004, Adam McKay) (Patreon)

57/100

More hits than misses, flipping the ratio of Step Brothers (the only other pure McKay comedy I've seen; Big Short doesn't really lend itself to that metric). Here's the thing, though: Having waited almost 20 years to watch this movie—which I guess is now considered a modern classic, so I'll remind folks that its contemporaneous reviews weren't great, hence my lack of interest—I'd discovered the funniest bits piecemeal, as they got quoted and memed and tweeted and reddited and so forth. "Afternoon Delight," for example, is delightfully absurd, less for the rendition conceptually than for the way that Ron's colleagues listen to the first couple of lines and then collectively join in, harmonizing perfectly (until Brick goes falsetto, anyway). I'm grateful both to this film and to Arrested Development for keeping that particular piece of '70s kitsch alive. (Now if somebody could resurrect Gilbert O'Sullivan's even creepier "Clair.") But finally watching the scene in context added nothing whatsoever. It doesn't need an entire movie surrounding it. That's pretty much always the case with these fundamentally riff-based comedies, which rely on the improvisational skills of guys like Ferrell and Carell to a degree that makes a screenplay largely optional. Crafted jokes here tend to be hackwork; when Ron tells Veronica (re: their affair) "Tasteful discretion is the name of the game," you can mutter "Cut to:" aloud, and the film will not disappoint you, which is to say that it will. (Though I was caught slightly off guard by McKay's odd decision to pan across the newsroom for two seconds before we land on Ron bellowing the details to everyone within earshot. It's poorly timed hackwork.) Admittedly, some of this is a matter of taste—I'm much more inclined to laugh at a reading-the-TelePrompTer-error-verbatim joke ("You stay classy, San Diego. I'm Ron Burgundy?") than at a trouser-tenting boner gag. The series of "alts" that play alongside the end credits, though, reveal just how much of Anchorman involved actors lobbing potentially funny grenades while the camera rolled, with all of the duds elided (and we're not even seeing the real duds). It's an approach that can generate some priceless moments, but I still prefer good old-fashioned writing. 

A first-rate script also ensures that some cast members won't be left to fend for themselves. Paul Rudd can be hilarious working with nothing at all—Andy's hyperbolically put-out body language when ordered to pick up some crap he knocked onto the floor is easily my favorite part of Wet Hot American Summer—but his wardrobe, haircut and mustache do most of the work for him as Fantana. David Koechner's trapped in the somehow-then-still-lingering conviction that closeted male homosexuality is inherently amusing—"Champ secretly desires Ron" is the whole character/joke. And Christina Applegate, while entirely game, simply isn’t someone who can be funny without funny lines to deliver or funny actions to perform, per a screenplay. Granted, Veronica's meant to stand in stark contrast to all the doofuses around her, but there's something regrettably ironic about her comparative blandness, with the movie itself seeming to treat Applegate with the same amiable condescension that KVWN initially exhibits toward Veronica. It doesn't help at all that Kathryn Hahn, then known primarily as a grief counselor on the TV crime drama Crossing Jordan, can be seen standing uselessly in the background of many shots, and that when her character finally gets a quick scene with dialogue, Hahn somehow wrings a laugh from the utterly banal line "And when I say anything, I mean anything," by turning the second "anything" into a four-syllable word (or really four one-syllable words). Maybe that wouldn't be right for Veronica, but it's the kind of comic agility that even the designated straight-lady role demands in a film this aggressively silly. Thankfully, there's plenty distributed among the fellas, and I'm glad to have caught up with the one superlative exchange that I hadn't stumbled across over the years: Ferrell, Fred Willard and Chris Parnell debating, in the midst of what's theoretically a tense scene, what people from San Diego should be called. McKay's talent lies in orchestrating stuff like that, and I imagine he hopes we won't notice that the station manager is introducing Veronica to the newsroom while she's still emerging from a cab on the street below, as seen via nonsensical cross-cutting. It's a movie, though, not a YouTube clip. I noticed.