Talladega Nights

So I went and saw The Ballad of Ricky Bobby last weekend, and I haven’t felt so duped into seeing a movie since I rented Waking Life. These two movies are actually rather similar, despite the obvious difference in genre, in that they both pander to the easily impressed. I wasn’t actually duped by only the previews for Ricky Bobby either, but the reviews I read of it too, which makes the whole thing that much more disheartening. Many people actually read the thing as being satire, when it was little more than just another sports movie brought to you by a whole slew of sponsors, none of whose obvious presence in the movie is ever subverted. This includes NASCAR themselves, who clearly sanctioned the movie, and undoubtedly played a large hand in toning down what very well may have been an edgy, cutting early draft of the screenplay.

So to maybe focus a little bit – it may be the case that the movie that was released was very much the movie that Ferrell and McKay were hoping to make, and that they are satisfied with as a comedy. It may simply be that, as was also the case with the funnier, but also bad, Legend of Ron Burgundy (and is the “blank” of “R- B—“ a sly self reference, or merely a ploy to ride the coattails of the success of Anchorman?), the movie falls flat because its just a taping-together of a bunch of sketches involving the same characters standing around as though on a cheap stage at the local improve club.

So why were the reviews good (or at least not bad and even angry at the audacity to sell so many products while claiming to poke fun at them)? I guess its just not actually the case that people won’t realize that as soon as you place a product on screen, it takes an awful lot of work to subvert its presence there. For instance, the fact that Will Ferrell spins a vaguely blasphemous prayer to “baby Jesus” as opposed to “bearded Jesus” does nothing to undermine the 2-liter bottle of Coca-Cola whose logo dominates the foreground as is kept well focused despite the fact that we are “watching” Ferrell. Or when it comes time for the big family meal, and they all head out to Applebee’s, which is some amount of joke on our culture of homogenization and the fake-special, again, when it seems to be time for the fact the Applebee’s is getting a ton of exposure to be subverted into the hands of the satire, the punch line involves nothing more than the father being tossed out for being angry that everything was too damn nice.

Big-ups to Sacha Baron Cohen, though, for killing literally every scene he has in in the entire movie with his awful French accent and extraordinarily slow talking - the only flashes of irony in the entire movie.