Great Film overall

One of the most extraordinary films you will see this year. Take that as you want.

Like the great film, it's made with a great deal of visible affection both in front of and behind the camera.

It is an exhilarating, distressing, funny and profound film, with one of the more memorable film scores in years,

This picture got a tremendous sort of cult following because of its peculiar dry humor. It's a kind of humor that means to be very virile and "classy". The Anchorman is basically the official license for boys to be boys: look sharp, show off, be competitive in the silliest of ways, be all-out macho and consider what they're doing to be the only and best way.So they got the whole gang here: Will Ferrell, Steve Carell, Paul Rudd, Koechner, Vince Vaughn... and quite a few cameos throughout the picture (nothing particularly funny, just wacky cameos)... and pushed big name star power with a clear-but-simple game plan, and along the way a few memorable quotable passages and jokes.None of the characters are particularly remarkable or funny and they easily could've made Carell's character for example funnier, but the point is to play ball and be silly with it, so at that it's some fun to be had. It's not particularly stale after a while but it isn't quite a fascinating watch: they did well enough to hold it all up together while slipping in scenes they apparently had intended to use anyways ('Afternoon Delight', the major brawl with all the cameos, or some of the anchorman in-studio prank stuff).Side-note: the fact this got such a strong cult following if anything is sad, because it really only is just another Hollywood comedy with the usual big name gang with a theme, a plot, and a few jokes to be remembered. But people quote this like it's a major classic, use characters' portraits as avatars or signatures on websites and forums... like the film was some kind of a classic when it's so much more benign really !6.5/10.

I have no idea what I have seen. Besides the meme potential this movie is a total zero. I smiled twice during this excuse for wasting time. Absolutely nothing worth of mention happens. Too bad the excellent cinemathography got wasted into this pile of stinking... something. Nothing happens followed by more nothingness happening.The concentration of stupidity gets so concentrated it was like watching a trainwreck... but you are in front of the trains while they collide. This movie is 'murica: Retarded, offensively retarded and holy shit how retarded can this movie get.Avoid this thing. Whatever it is.

I am not a fan of Will Ferrel. I don't get an automatic urge to watch his movies unlike say, Steve Carrell, who incidentally also stars in this movie. With that being said I enjoyed this movie.It's about a vain, pompous newscaster who is brought down by the fates. It's a predictable fall from grace and rise again story which is made interesting by the delicious left turn it takes.Sample this, there is a sequence where two rival news teams get ready to face-off in a grudge match but the situation is escalated comically by the appearance of more and more teams each wishing to get in on the action. There are delicious cameos by many of Will Ferrel's friends and contemporaries all of whom seem to be having fun.Watch it for a mysoginistic clueless showboat being brought down a notch by a surefooted and confident woman professional. Chow!

There was really only one reason that I ended up watching this film and that had to do with that meme that was really popular round 2011 (and still appears around the place). I knew that it was connected to this film, but had never really thought about it all that much until one night when there was not all that much to do and had been reminded of it after seeing a friend's Facebook post. Anyway, when the film had hit the cinemas I wasn't particularly interested in it (but then again it was 2004 so I wasn't really spending huge amounts of time in the cinemas in any case), and it had never really grabbed my attention, even when the sequel was released. Well, as it turned out, other than a few funny moments, I now understand why I never went out of my way to watch it – it wasn't all that great.The film is set in San Diego in the early seventies, back before there was cable as the narrator tells us, and in a time when men dominated the new rooms. Burgundy is the multi-award winning anchor of the Channel Four news and has managed to secure the top ratings. Everything seems to be going well for him and his crew until the network decides to introduce a bit of diversity and brings in a woman journalist, who wants to also be an anchor. Mind you, unlike now, this was a male dominated industry, so when Veronica Corningstone enters the office all of the men suddenly want a piece of her.Sure, Anchorman has quite a few classic lines (such as 'that escalated quickly'), but in the end it is your typical American comedy – funny in places but basically a feel good movie where everything works out well in the end, and with the exception of the guy that has a trident thrust through his chest, nobody really dies, or at least dies in a serious manner. However, the catch is that while one could argue about equal opportunity in the workplace, and with women being just as capable of performing the roles of men, in reality this is once again little more than your typical, sexist, American movie. Sure, we do have an element of girl power, but the way that the women are treated, especially at the beginning of the film, is nothing short of atrocious.Sure, some suggest that such films are funny because they have no shame in what they make fun at, and sure I agree that there is a form of censorship over what people can actually say and that we go out of our way not to say things that just might offend somebody; however there is also the case that sometimes we make mockery of people who have really no way of being able to defend themselves. Yet, there is also the case that these rather successful people are all basically morons – it is just that they are celebrities, and because they are celebrities then they are successful, though all they can do is read a teleprompter, and look good.However the other interesting thing is that Ron is painted as not actually being all that sweet tongue, especially at the beginning (his attempt to chat up Veronica is absolutely disastrous). However, we must also note that he does eventually succeed quite early on in the film, and also despite Veronica wishing to keep this quiet, he does anything but – in fact he shouts it not just from his office, but also live on air. Isn't it also quite interesting that Ron (at least) gets an office, while Veronica spends the entire film at a desk with everybody else. Oh, the other thing is that this film is pretty predictable, particularly since I could see a joke with the teleprompter coming right from the beginning of the film – though that might have more to do with Chekov's gun, not that Hollywood actually has any hard and fast rules that they follow.