The Way Back - Sometimes it isn't "all about the journey"

I allowed myself to get talked into watching this last Sunday evening, the warning signs were there for me, but I didn't take heed.  Here is a film that apparently only came out in 2010, starring Colin Farrell, Saoirse Ronan, Ed Harris and Mark Strong, directed by Peter Weir (The Truman Show, Gallipoli) - but that I had never heard of.  You would think that I would have heard of a film with such an interesting cast and director?  But no.  I usually assume that films I've not heard of by now are probably rubbish, sadly this time I didn't trust my instincts and sat down for a dreary 2 hour slog.

The Way Back tells the 'true' story of a group of men who broke out of a Soviet gulag during the second world war.  Realising that to stay put would mean recapture, torture and possible death, their only way out was to escape the USSR completely.  Reasonable plan I'm sure you'll agree, but knowing that travelling west would only put them into the hands of Nazi Germany and that to the east lay endless wilderness, they decided to walk to India.  Seriously.  They crossed Russia, Mongolia, the Gobi desert and the Himalayas to eventually end up in British-controlled India and freedom.  This is an astonishing story of hardship and perseverance, it's hard to believe that it really happened (and according to the internet, there is some dispute over the truth of the claims).

So how on earth does a story that sounds this epic end up being a lame duck of a film.  Well there are a number of reasons, the main one being that the screen-writer seems to think that the old adage "It's all about the journey" provides a carte-blanche to ignore all the trappings of traditional storytelling. All the moments of the film that should either be set-pieces or dramatic turning points are glossed over.  We never actually get to see them escaping the gulag, they're just talking about it then in the next scene they're on the run through the snow.  We never get to see them crossing the Himalayas, they're approaching it, then they talk to some Sherpas, then they're in the Indian foothills.

That wouldn't be the end of it though if the characters were at least a little interesting.  But everyone's far too busy trying to stay alive to be bothered with social interaction.  The addition of Saoirse Ronan to the cast is a very obviously an attempt to shoe-horn in a female character.  Usually she's excellent, here though you can hear her Irish accent slipping through the Russian façade.  "It's all about the journey" is being taken far too literally here.  With very little in terms of character development, the journey isn't that interesting.  Then if you skip over any potential action scenes and have no romance or inter-group dynamic going on, you lose any drama.  Once you've done that all you've got left is a bunch of weary people trekking through the hills, plains and deserts of central Eurasia.  It's like a really boring Michael Palin travelogue.

In my opinion it's never a complete waste of time to watch a film, so I guess by that logic I made the right choice in deciding to watch The Way Back.  But apart from that there isn't anything else good to say about this film.  It'll get no recommendation out of me.

12 Years a Slave - Outstanding

Clear the front pages, hold the press and take a deep breath - this year's first Michael Fassbender film is upon us.  Finally, even the Academy has felt the need to recognise the Irish actor by giving him a nomination for best supporting actor at this year's Oscars.  Sadly though it already looks like the bookies have written off his chances.  If he doesn't manage to win then it will be a shame, but the Fassbender will surely be back - for me he's this generation's Robert Deniro.

Clearly though, to suggest that 12 Years a Slave is a Michael Fassbender film would be to miss the point.  12 Years a Slave is only Steve McQueen's third feature film, but with it he has rocked the American film establishment with his uncompromising portrayal of industrialised slavery in the deep south of the USA in the mid 19th century.  The story is an adaptation of a memoir that was written by Solomon Northup in the 1850s about his decade-long ordeal of being kidnapped by slavers in Washington and being sold into slavery in the southern USA, where the practice was still legal.  Here Northup is played by East London's very own Chiwetel Ejiofor (pictured), and Fassbender plays the sadistic slave-owner Edwin Epps who owned Northup for the best part of 10 years at his cotton plantation in central Louisiana.  These two are supported by an outstanding cast that includes fellow Academy Award nominee Lupita Nyong'o - she plays fellow slave Patsey whom Epps sexually abuses - Benedict Cumberbatch, Paul Giamatti, Brad Pitt and Sarah Paulson.

Northup was a free and educated man who lived in New York state in the 1840s.  He was kidnapped and sold to slavers where he endured 12 years of his life fearing that to tell anyone his true story would mean death.  This is not only the story of one man's nightmare, but the story of countless others who suffered the same fate without eventually finding their escape.  It's a film that's a history lesson, but it's also the most engaging and heartbreaking tale of suffering and loss.  It's a story about what people are capable of doing to others, and why we as a civilisation must never allow ourselves to forget that these things went on.

Some have levelled moderate criticised at the film for its lurid and unflinching depiction of violence and suffering.  A number of scenes stand out in this regard, scenes that either linger on suffering and goad the viewer into turning away, or that shock in their insistence on treating the horror of what's happening as if it were normality.  Of course at the time this stuff was happening all over the place, it was normal.  Slave owners really did whip slaves to death.  Groups of white men really did form lynch mobs and murder black men who's crime was to have no good reason for being somewhere.  That it took a British director to pay this much attention to the detail of slavery in the USA says something about the deep historical legacy the practice has left on the States.

For me, the film is fully justified in doing what it does, and it does it superbly.  The acting, the choice of locations, the ambience and feeling of terror you get from seeing Soloman Northup's life in the hands of sadistic slave-drivers; the film is outstanding in every way.  One scene, filmed without cuts, in which Epps forces Northup to whip Patsey before then whipping her himself is particularly hard to watch - but no less powerful for it.  Just a shame that the scene was somewhat spoilt in the cinema by one woman's insistence on tutting as if she were slightly irritated by what was going on.  Either cry out in anger or shut the hell up; no one wants to hear you make your noise of mild annoyance!

If there is any justice, then this should get showered with Oscars come March.  If it gets beaten in any category by anything from American Hustle it will be a complete travesty.  Don't be put off by the warnings of pain, suffering and violence, go and see 12 Years a Slave.

Lovelace - not as interesting as I had hoped

This is a film that got a very small release when it came out last year.  Despite starring several very well-known Holywood big names (eg Amanda Seyfried; Peter Sarsgaard) it seemed to come and go very quickly.  Only through the grace of Mark Kermode's obsession with the porn film industry did it come to my attention at all.  Lovelace tells the story of Linda Lovelace (Seyfried), star of the legendary porn movie Deep Throat.  This film shows us her upbringing, how she become involved in the porn industry and then how that industry chewed her up and spat her out when she was no longer required.

Watching all this prompted me to look up the real Linda Lovelace, because at the end I wasn't really sure how much of what I was told was real.  The film breaks itself into two parts, each of which tells the story of Lovelace's time in the porn industry quite differently.  Firstly we see her having a great time and been sexually liberated, the second time we see her forced into doing things she doesn't want to and beaten up for her trouble.  This mirrors the way that the real life Linda Lovelace appears to have changed her mind about those experiences as she got further away from them.  Lovelace seems to have initially bragged about her time in the industry, then at various times afterwards has campaigned against the porn industry and made accusations that she was abused within it.  It seems that no one really knows which version of Linda Lovelace's story to believe.

In that sense this is a film that sums Linda Lovelace up extremely well.  The film gives you a lot of the stories that surrounded her, her life and her times without telling you exactly what to believe.  It's all sort of interesting, but I'm not that interested really so I can't sit here giving it a glowing recommendation.  I'm sure that anyone sufficiently interested in her story has already seen this film or read so much about her that there's nothing new for them here.  I wish that there had been more in the film that told me about the randomness with which Lovelace lived her life after finishing with the porn industry, since having read about all that in Wikipedia now it sounds much more interesting.  Having seen Lovelace I now see why it didn't get a bigger release - it just isn't that interesting a film.

One last thing, I dare you to watch this film and work out who is playing Linda's mother.  I will be very impressed if you can can.  The actress is utterly unrecognisable from her more well-known roles and when I looked at the cast list after watching the film I could hardly believe it.  I guess make-up, age and costume make a huge difference!

Mandela - Long walk to freedom

Another Saturday evening another film.  Kept up my excellent record of cinema attendance last weekend with my third cinema trip of the year in less than 2 weeks.  I wanted to go and see 12 Years a Slave, but some of my friends were but off by the overly stressful nature of the material therein (I have since seen 12 Years a Slave - review later).  So we made a compromise and decided to watch the new Mandela biopic, starring Idris Elba as Nelson Mandela.  Idris Elba isn't exactly the first person I think that many people would have thought of as an ideal candidate to play Nelson Mandela.  Elba is most well-known as his role as Baltimore gangster Stringer Bell in the critically-lauded The Wire.  He has also played a number of 'hard men' in other TV and film.  Most of us think of Mandela as a kindly old man gently seeing South Africa through a period of peaceful transition, but as his recent death has forced many to recall, he was once a determined activist who took up arms to fight his oppressor.  By all accounts it seems that he was a big guy, who was a boxer and something of a lady's man in his youth.  Perhaps Elba isn't such a bad choice after all eh?

Mandela - Long walk to Freedom provides an astonishingly accurate overview of the life of Nelson Mandela, from his early activism through his incarceration, finishing with him becoming the president of the nation that once jailed him as a terrorist.  Despite being only just over 2 hours long, the film packs in a hell of a lot of modern South African history.  And though its attention to accuracy and neutral portrayals of events is to be lauded, the fact that so much is being crammed into such a small amount of celluloid means that sometimes events get a little brushed over.  This is one of the only bad thing I can think of to say about this film, a film in which Idris Elba puts himself firmly on the A list of actors on the world stage with his superb portrayal of Nelson Mandela.

Elba steps into the various stages of Mandela's life with ease.  In his early life he is bombastic, strong and vocal.  In prison he is reflective and stoic in his political views.  After his release he is wise and father-like to a nation.  Equally Naomie Harris does the same with her portrayal of the different stages of Winnie Mandela's life.  From the wide-eyed youngster who allows herself to be swept off her feet to the stern activist fostering the armed rebellion that forced the South African government's hand towards the end of the 1980s, she's outstanding.

Aside from the acting, the thing that the film does really well is to present the fight by ordinary South Africans against Apartheid as a complex struggle that had and continues to have factions within it with conflicting objectives and ideals.  It asks questions about that fight, and asks about what factors were really responsible for causing change in South Africa.  Though history readily remembers Nelson Mandela's sacrifices and calls for peace after his release, history can sometimes be quick to forget the violence in the South African townships that precipitated his release.  Revolutionary change like happened in South Africa is never a matter of simple good versus evil.  Taken as either a historical documentary or straight film about a man who many consider a hero, Mandela - Long Walk to Freedom is excellent.

The Act of Killing - The Ordinariness of Evil

I am very happy that I decided to watch this film before I put together my list of my favourite films of 2013, because if I had ended up leaving this out it would have been a crying shame.  I'm sure there are several other films made last year that I've not seen yet and could have made it into my top 5 (Gravity I assume is one), but none of them will be as sad or as moving as The Act of Killing.

This is a documentary that establishes its premise quite simply in its opening shots.  A film crew from a university in London went to Indonesia with the intention of talking to a group of men who were involved in the purges of the Suharto government's rise to power and subsequent communist coups of the mid 1960s.  The men were members of groups of self-styled 'gangsters' who went around terrorising and murdering anyone they suspected of being a communist, communist sympathiser or Chinese.  These gangsters (the word gangster is used in the film, translated from whatever the Indonesian language equivalent is.  Clearly 'gangster' has a negative connotation in English, but given the men's claims to have modelled themselves on Mafiosos they saw in American movies I think the translation is reasonable) are now old men, and are asked by the film crew to firstly tell them about what happened, then to re-create some specific scenes.

What happens next is astonishing, as these men eagerly recount and recreate terrifying scenes of physical torture and murder.  Things start out small, with one of the men convincing women and kids in the streets to stand as extras while he demonstrates how he would threaten people and burn their houses down.  Another man demonstrates on a friend how he would murder suspects in as clean a manner as possible, by strangling them using metal wire.  The recreations begin to escalate though, as the men begin to take the idea to heart.  They clearly believe that they're making a documentary for the western world about what happened, and so are eager to go to extraordinary lengths to carry out the recreations.  Sets are built, extras are brought in, costumes are designed and prosthetic make-up applied.  As the recreations grow in size and elaborateness, eventually the documentary is able to pick up hints of truth, humanity and terror in the eyes and words of those who were on both sides of the conflict.

To what extent we are to believe any of this is up for debate.  Clearly terrible murders were committed in Indonesia in 1965/66, but one wonders how much of what is being said to camera is being mixed and muddled through the goggles of history.  How much of what we are told is true and how much is being created out of a sense of sick bavado is open for debate.  Perhaps even the men are desperate to tell their story as a type of sick catharsis for what they've done.  The film is very keen to depict the modern political forces in Indonesia that were born out of the gangster movement, a sort of proto-fascist gang with millions of members, strict dress-codes and adherence to a code of macho behaviour that traces its routes back to the Suharto days.  When you see all this, it isn't hard to believe what the old men are saying.

The film's final scenes are nearly indescribable, as Anwar Congo (self-described as a sadistic killer) recreates one final act from his past, but with him playing the victim.  It is here that we get a view into the ordinariness of evil, as the ageing Congo struggles to breathe through his smoke-induced coughing fits we see a brutal and sadistic murderer as an ordinary doddering old man finally understanding what he has done.  Congo and hundreds of other gangsters like him are just ordinary people, but for some reason they were turned into murderers.  They never had to pay for their crimes, never even had to admit that what they did was a crime at all.  It's something that has clearly sent some of them mad, small punishment for the murder of thousands.

The Act of Killing is an extraordinary documentary.  It's bleak but at the same time it's all about humanity.  It's a warning to everyone that killers don't come has a sign over their head and an evil-looking scar on their face.  These killers are ordinary people, people with families, people who have convinced themselves that the bad things the did were ok because they were for a righteous cause, people perhaps like you and me.

Flims of the Year - 2013

I've waited for a week before putting this up because I wanted to see The Act of Killing.  I've not reviewed it yet, but it was easily good enough to go into my top 5 films of 2013.

5 - The Stone Roses - Made of Stone

Bit of an indulgence for me at number 5 here.  Shane Meadows' documentary following the reunion of the Stone Roses is a film made by a fan for the fans.  As a film it's not that much, it's mainly a lot of behind the scenes footage of the Stone Roses practising edited together with fans telling the camera how much it means to them to be able to watch them live again - so many years after they split up.  I am a fan though, and so it was a film for me, which I bloody loved.

4 - Captain Phillips

A film that certainly has no difficulty establishing itself as pro-America, Captain Phillips is a brilliantly-made action thriller.  The performances from Tom Hanks and Barkhad Abdi were outstanding.  Expect it to do well at the Oscars when they roll around in a few weeks' time.

3 - The Act of Killing

Only watched this last night, but looking back over the films I saw last year I've got no problem putting this straight into my top 5.  It's a documentary that invites a group of men who were self-confessed murderers during the Suharto purges of 1965/66 to recall and re-enact their murders.  The results are incredible, as the men go into shocking details with very little apparent regret or remorse.  They even go so far as to recreate entire episodes of them burning.  The film is a terrifying look into the realities of a civil conflict born from the cold war, it invites us to look at the humanity of serial murderers, and wonder how our society might react if similarly provoked.

2 - Stoker

Definitely the most interesting film I saw in a cinema last year, Stoker is a film I have since re-watched on DVD and it left me just as bewildered.  From the moment I saw the trailer I was entranced by what the movie would be about, having now seen it twice I'm still convinced that something of the undead is being hinted at in the subtext.  Park Chan Wook needs to make more films, and Mia Wasikowska needs to do more horror.

1 - Silver Linings Playbook

A close call between the final two here, but in the end I decided that Silver Linings Playbook deserved it.  Not only is it a film that's entertaining and deals with an often-overlooked subject matter, it showed us that Bradley Cooper can do proper acting, gave Jeniffer Lawrence a stage on which to win a deserved Oscar and provided Robert Deniro with a good role to play (so rare for him these days).

American Hustle - quite a caper

Second cinema experience of the year already on Saturday, and with a few decent-looking trailers beforehand I think there might be a few more trips coming up.  The trailers for American Hustle did a good job of making me interested without giving any substantial clue on what the film was actually about.  Aside from it being some sort of hustle of course, I wasn't really sure what I was going to watch.  The reviews are pretty good all around though, and with that cast it didn't really seem to matter too much.  So it was that American Hustle became my second cinema experience of 2014 - only 4 days in!

Before we go any further, the most important talk about in American Hustle is the cast.  What a great cast!  Even though Christian Bale and Amy Adams play the lead roles, it's very much an ensemble with Bradley Cooper, Jennifer Lawrence and Jeremy Renner all giving captivating performances of very weird characters.  It's a film that's very much about characters, the deceptions they're each trying to pull on themselves and others and the effect that deception has on their lives.  The plot itself is about Bradley Cooper's federal investigator Richie DiMaso forcing the scamming duo of Irving Rosenfeld and Sydney Prosser (Bale and Adams) into working for the feds to entrap an increasingly large group of high-powered politicians who are on the take from shady businessmen and organised criminals.  As the circle of people DiMaso is trying to entrap becomes ever-wider, our scammers realise that it will be them rather than the FBI whom the mob come after when they find out they've been the target of an FBI sting.  So they'd better do something to cover themselves...

It's a film that's part crime-caper and part straight comedy set in the 1970s.  The opening scene invites us to watch Christian Bale awkwardly glue down an ageing comb-over before donning a terrible velvet jacket, before Amy Adams wanders in and unironically complements him on his appearance.  This sets the precedent for the rest of the film.  The attention to the detail of this 70s aesthetic is played for both comic and nostalgic kicks in the film.  From Bale's awful jacket to the garish colours of the opening credits to Bradley Cooper's chest hair and Jennifer Lawrence's inability to understand her newfangled microwave oven (or 'science oven' as she calls it) - it's the 1970s, a simpler age.

You would have to be watching this film with your eyes closed to not notice that there are a hell of a lot of boobs in it.  Almost every outfit Amy Adams is wearing reveals a lot, similarly so for Jennifer Lawrence when she gets out of her domestic setting.  Obviously there's nothing wrong with this, but it's a very clear demonstration of the cinematic trend that permits male leads to be chubby and have bad hair while our female leads must be pretty and ooze sex appeal.  Christian Bale and Bradley Cooper are both attractive guys, but the make up department for American Hustle does its best to play this down to comic effect (witness Bale's awful comb-over and much-expanded stomach - if ever there was an actor who gave their body up for their craft, it was Christian Bale).  Admittedly Amy Adams has a few scenes where she's made up to look a bit bedraggled, but that's definitely the exception rather than the rule.

One slight criticism would be that the film drags a bit in the middle.  Some scenes could have probably been trimmed even though they do add to the characterisation of the people involved.  It feels like you're coming to the end several times before you finally get the final denouement, but at no point did I ever feel bored or wish the end was coming.  It's 100% a caper in the original sense of it, everyone's out for themselves, no-one's trustworthy and the central relationship between the characters played by Bale and Adams is one in which you're never quite sure who are the scammers and the scammed.

Though American Hustle is a very enjoyable film I don't understand its extremely high rating at present on IMDB or the awards season talk that it seems to be getting.  Its plot is entertaining, its retro 1970s look is an amusing throwback and its cast it very good, but it's hardly Goodfellas (despite a number of moments when it really looks like it's trying to be a spoof of that film).  This is a very entertaining film that I should think anyone will enjoy, but the Academy should probably look elsewhere come Oscar season.

The Spirit of 45 - My kind of propaganda

Ok so this might be the first time I've ever posted 3 reviews in a day, but it's only the second day back in the office after Christmas and my boss isn't here - so I can really be expected to do any work can I?  The second film I watched at my parents' place over Christmas was The Spirit of 45.  It's a documentary directed by Ken Loach in which he uses primary source interviews to discuss the social changes that took place in Britain after the end of the Second World War.  He focusses on the election of Clement Atlee as British Prime Minister and the Labour government's programme to create a welfare state and nationalise all of Britain's infrastructure and industries.

The second world war was with the hindsight of history a terrifically strong driver of social and economic changes throughout the world.  In Britain the entire population was mobilised to defeat Fascism.  When that population returned from the war, people rightly thought to themselves - why can't we mobilise this strength to do something good at home?  When Britain's wartime Prime Minister Winston Churchill was voted out of office in a landslide less than 2 months after the end of hostilities in WW2, it was a seismic event in British politics that demonstrated the depth of feeling ordinary people had.  Truly it was Britain's working class speaking as one.

Unsurprisingly Loach's interviews conclude that the creation of the welfare state was one of the greatest things to have ever happened to the British nation.  The nationalisation of the industries was - though flawed - a programme that had the right intentions and was aimed at getting services and jobs to the people who needed them.  He finishes with a discussion of the dismantling of that programme from the 1980s onwards, and how the privatisation of Britain's infrastructure and industry has led to falling real-term wages and asset stripping of what should be national property.  As a film this is a little slow, but as a documentary it is very interesting.

Some might say that it's typical of someone with my attitude towards work to be in favour of social security, welfare and societal safety nets - I know that Bill O'Reilly would hate me.  What I know is that I can see plenty of people in the world with power and money who are working hard to gather more power and money for themselves and their friends.  So why would I want to work to help them do that?  Instead I think I'll sit on the fringes and quietly mess with their system in whatever small way I can.  And if that means writing blogs when I should be working, then so be it.

A Field in England - What's happening!?

Watched two films while I was back at my parents' place in Ilford over the Christmas period, the first of which was A Field in England.  This film has had an experimental release, in that it was released on multiple formats all at the same time.  It was released in cinemas at the same time as it was put out on DVD and made available for download.  One presumes that the point of this is to test out a new model of cinematic distribution, and to find out if the studios can beat the pirates by undercutting them at source.  Having seen the film though I wonder if the point was to cynically generate a bit of hype for a film that otherwise doesn't have much going for it.

A Field in England stars Michael Smiley (who will always be Tyres from Spaced) and Reece Shearsmith; Smiley is noble soldier who has absconded from his English civil war regiment and Shearsmith the investigator sent to find him.  They come across each other just after Shearsmith's character has escaped with a small band of soldiers from a bloody battle.  What happens next is a monochrome trip through the mind as Smiley's O'Neil forces the soldiers to hunt for an unspecified treasure in a field surrounded by strange mushrooms.

And that's kind of it really.  The characters have a bit of banter, O'Neil looks mad and evil, there's some mystical stuff and at the end it isn't completely clear what has happened - or if in fact anything has happened at all.  Just like Susperia, A Field in England is a bit like experiencing someone else's bad dream.  Perhaps the characters are all dead on the field of battle and lingering in a black and white English purgatory?  Perhaps the characters all ate a stew made with magic mushrooms and are on a 90 minute long bad trip?  Who knows?  I don't, and the internet doesn't seem to either.

On the Mark Kermode film show one of the public emailed in recently to opine that their favourite moment of cinema this year was Reece Shearsmith coming out of a tent - a reference to a moment in A Field in England when Shearsmith's character emerges from O'Neil's tent tied up and grinning madly.  Why this is in any way a 'great' moment of cinema is beyond me.  Perhaps if you buy into what is happening as some sort of existential journey across medieval England then this scene has significance, if you don't buy it then it becomes just another mad moment in a mad and baffling film.  By all means watch A Field in England, but don't tell me I didn't warn you.

Anchorman 2 - First Film of the Year

New year's day was on a Wednesday this year, the perfect excuse to start the year off with an Orange Wednesday trip to the cinema.  Lots of new films out at the moment, so which one to choose?  Well I ended up going for the one that my housemates wanted to see - Anchorman 2.

The original Anchorman film is a cult classic, in which Will Ferrell plays Ron Burgundy, the egotistical and misogynistic bequiffed newsreader on local 1970s Southern Californian television.  Anchorman is one of those infinitely quotable films, littered with frat-boy lines and silly visual gags.  It features a number of celebrity cameos from Ferrell's Holywood mates and an excellent performance from Steve Carrell.  This new film comes almost 10 years after the first, set a similar time after the first and tells the story of Ron Burgundy's news team getting back together, fronting a 24 hour news TV station and accidentally coming up with all the tired tropes that constant news coverage bores us with in the modern age.  Ron Burgundy invents the pointlessly patriotic news item, the heart-warming animal tale, the car chase from a copter, the news anchor desperately speculating about information they would have no way of knowing - all those things that Sky news does so well and have become so commonplace that they are accepted almost unthinkingly by a modern audience.

In terms of poking fun at modern news coverage, Anchorman 2 is on the mark.  While the original film 10 years ago was more concerned with being a gag-infused caper about the character Ron Burgundy, this film is trying to be a bit more satirical.  This is a good thing.  Where the film goes wrong is that it isn't as funny as the original, over-does it with the celebrity cameos and quite often steps well beyond the bounds of what should be considered racist.  Ron Burgundy is presented as a racist in the film, unable to cope with the idea of having a female black boss.  When he meets her family we get an extended scene in which Burgundy is just about as racist as it's possible to be.  Now though I get that it's the character who is a racist and not the film, and that we're supposed to be laughing at the character's awkward archaic attempts to ingratiate himself into a part of society he if frightened of - but this stuff goes on for ages and ages.  If I wanted to cringe listening to old people's out of date racism I can go and talk to old people, I don't find it that funny to see Will Ferrell playing a character who does it too.

Anchorman 2 is a funny film, but I think fans of the original will end up wanting something else.  It's a film that ends in a slightly odd way too.  After nearly 90 minutes of silliness and bumbling around, Ron Burgundy has a mishap crowbarred into his life, goes into self-imposed isolation, nurses a baby shark to health (seriously), then discovers his love for family life and goes to his kid's piano recital.  It feels like the writers wrote a bunch of silly sketches poking fun at Newscorp, then realised there wasn't any sort of pathos and so felt required to bolt something on to the end.  Some of the funniest bits of the film involved Steve Carrell (again) and Kristen Wigg in their bumbling attempts to go on a date together.  Even here though things are far from perfect.  There was a moment of what looked like really bad editing, where Wigg appears to be about to crack up laughing at the end of a silly back-and-forth between her and Carrell, just before we cut away to a different angle.  If that is the case then it's really sloppy editing, proper amateur stuff.

In conclusion, it's fairly good, but I doubt it will be a cult classic.