I am not the Robot Tourist

I know some people who can recite all the dialogue in Anchorman and have even met a few who could nearly say it all backwards. Personally I don’t think it is worthy of that much adoration, but it is still a tremendous film.

First, my only problem with the film was that the lead woman, Christina Applegate was too ‘normal’ looking for her role compared to the caricatured look of all the men. Andrea Parker of Less Than Perfect fame is definitely not strange looking (far from it), but to me she has a larger-than-life glamour that would have fitted in better alongside Will Ferrell, and I think she would have been funnier.

Enough of my fascination with Andrea Parker and back to Anchorman. Ferrell wasn’t just as good as Steve Coogan’s Alan Partridge, but who could be? Otherwise his performance represented the entire film, overblown, yet somehow just right. As a film, Anchorman The Legend of Ron Burgundy achieves the rare feat of not needing you to suspend your disbelief. On the one hand, when wacky things happen they are often part of the film’s universe. On the other hand, there were many totally insane scenes, like the news team vs news team vs (I think there were eight teams) rumble or when Ron cleaned himself up from his tramp-like state in 30 seconds and then assembled his news team with a blast on a conch shell. These situations were intentionally so weird and played as just another part of the film that the viewer wasn’t asked to suspend his disbelief, but merely to just laugh at the impossibility. That in essence is the film’s real strength - complete weirdness that’s laugh out loud funny no matter how implausible. That and some groovy jazz flute.

For me, the weakest aspect of the film though was Steve Carrell’s weatherman character. Carrell himself as the incoherent loon was brilliant, but in the story his character never developed like the others. While Burgundy was actually good at reading the Teleprompter, Champ was popular at sports coverage and Fantana did all that a roving reporter ever has to do for any station: go outside. Brick the Weatherman only showed his weather presenting skill for 10 seconds. It would have been far funnier if he had been able to contrast his imbecility off camera with an uncanny sure-footedness around a weather forecast on camera.

Learn the lines, get the suits, grow the moustaches, but remember that the best news parody, including Chris Morris’s The Day Today (which launched Steve Coogan’s Alan Partridge character) is The Fast Show’s Chanel 9 Neus.