The Campaign (2012)

For the first time in my life, I drove to a movie theatre and laid down money to see a film starring Will Ferrell. Having been a huge fan of his work on "Saturday Night Live," it's been my disappointed belief ever since that Ferrell's genius is limited to bursts of no more than 10 minutes, some sort of Faustian bargain to make him the funniest guy on the planet in exchange for the brevity of wit that would forever curse him to never carry a film.

Believe me, I tried to laugh at Farrell's movies, though I never trusted him - or them - enough to see them in the theatres. I decided that when Farrell is not the focus, such as in "Old School," his film work seems to stand up better. And as a news and media guy, I've wondered again and again why the beloved "Anchorman" is so not funny to me.

So I don't know what possessed me to want to take a chance on "The Campaign," but I did. And either I was exhausted when I saw it or just genuinely open to it, because I really enjoyed it. Like a lot. Like more than I'd like to admit. Co-starring the also funny-quirky Zach Galifianakis,"The Campaign" is a sly satire on the absurdity of the political campaign season in America.

Ferrell plays congressman Cam Brady, a smug political asshole preparing to run unopposed for reelection to his North Carolina seat, who is shockingly and suddenly challenged for it by a pouf of a man named Marty Huggins, a doughy, unimposing family man who's backed by a super pac with dubious capitalist and corporate interests to take the seat. Huggins, of course, is genuinely interested in helping his community and is unaware of the source of his growing power to challenge Brady.

The campaign season becomes a game of one absurd one-upsmanship, with Brady subjecting Huggins to sleazy acts of embarrassment and Huggins learning to dig back thanks to the the arrival of Dylan McDermott as a macho mercenary of a campaign manager, who begins his work by first replacing everything in Huggins' home to improve his image, even going so far as to exchange the two family pugs for golden labs, which test market better with voters.

The personal attacks on each other go to such great and childish lengths that I wouldn't dare spoil them for you by listing them here, because the fun of watching "The Campaign" is knowing that each act of retaliation will only be more ridiculous than the last and waiting to see what specifically we will get.

The film has a supporting cast that isn't being advertised enough in the shadow of its two huge lead stars, but support work by McDermott, Jason Sudeikis (as Brady's campaign manager),and Dan Ackroyd and John Lithgow (as scheming and dubious revenue sources to the Huggins campaign) are just additional reasons why this particular film holds up a little better than Ferrell movies in the past.

I've read more negative reviews of "The Campaign" than positive, and what I've found interesting is that most of the negative reviews express disappointment over the fact that the film had the opportunity to be a sharp satire on American politics but wasn't. They propose that to see it as such is to be creating subtext that director Jay Roach never truly put there. What movie were they watching?

Take it from me: that satire is there, and perhaps the reason I liked "The Campaign" is because it's one of the only times I can think of when Ferrell's on-screen insanity has been grounded by something truly topical. His eccentric characters are always to be laughed at because they are so out there. But you can't watch this film without nodding your head with the familiarity that Cam Bradys exist right now, everywhere, all over America. They are perfectly-coiffed, handsome, hollow shells of men being filled by ideas by those who put up the dollars to fund their campaigns. And only the insane level of farce that this film goes to can achieve a sense of comedy when, in reality, lesser versions of the same games are actually being played out there, and they are not funny at all.

Entertainment Weekly critic Owen Gleiberman is wise to point out, I think, that director Jay Roach is not one of Ferrel's traditional collaborators and that Roach has previously directed the political HBO films "Recount" and "Game Change." So although this is also the man who brought us Austin Powers, he knows what he's doing when it comes to exploring the American political landscape in terms of the aspects of it that make us scratch our heads.

By the time "The Campaign" is over, we reinforce the idea that some of our elections are choices between bad and worse, and Roach ultimately calls voters on the carpet, too, for the decisions they ultimately make. And for me, the stroke of genius to lay a foundation of truly relevant and grounded social satire underneath Ferrell's largely unaltered buffoonery was enough to make me say that I paid for a Ferrell movie...and I liked it!

3.0 out of 4

Ted (2012)

Since my formative years occurred during the 1980s, I've got some fairly romanticized memories of that decade. The older I get, in fact, the more I think the 80s was the greatest decade, like ever. This, of course, cannot possibly be true, but it's my reality. Nor could it be true that that a slightly-altered version of one of that decade's greatest toys, Teddy Ruxpin, could carry a modern-era, feature-length film. Here, I'm more realistic; it can't. Not even in the hands of the one guy who could actually pull it off, fellow 80s-lover, Seth MacFarlane. His teddy-bear-comes-to-life tale, "Ted," is a great idea with some outrageously funny moments, but it's difficult not to watch and wonder why the film wasn't more clever still. "Ted" is all empty calories: you laugh and laugh and then in between jokes wonder why the movie is so lame.

The big let-down in "Ted" is not the humor, which is as outrageously politically incorrect as one would expect from the creator of "Family Guy." Instead, it's the plot, which is so pedestrian that any remotely alert viewer who has ever seen anything will figure it out rather quickly and be completely accurate with the prediction. "Ted" tells the story of a loner boy named John who receives a huge teddy bear for Christmas one year as a boy and makes a wish that the bear, which he names Ted (of course), will be his friend forever. The bear comes to life to accept this agreement.

The one funny plot hook of the film - its one clever conceit - is the exploration of what would happen later in life when that boy is now a man. What happens to the bear? "Ted" flashes forward to show us a now 35-year-old John (Mark Wahlberg), who is barely what you could call a man, but still doing almost everything with Ted (voiced by MacFarlane in a vocal performance sometimes too similar to his Peter Griffin). After all, how do you just box up, donate, or otherwise get rid of a teddy bear who's come to life?

And why would you want to? Ted is a hard-core party animal: a sex-crazed, beer-guzzling bear who scores the best pot in the neighborhood, makes jokes about 9/11, and calls fat kids "Susan Boyle." He's always been the life of John's party, and John's party has always revolved around Ted. So when John, the biggest film case of arrested development I've seen in years (and there are tons of films with these kinds of characters around right now) tries to navigate his romance with Lori (Mila Kunis) with Ted looking on, well, it's clear that the film is headed for a very stereotypical "it's either me or him" ultimatum on the part of the girl who has waited four years for a marriage proposal, and for her man to grow up. I can stop summarizing the plot here, because you already know that John will make her promises and that Ted will interfere and screw them up. John will be forced to choose between the two and will choose the girl, and then a dejected best friend will cut off communication with him for a while but ultimately the friends will be reunited by some sort of conflict that will end with the three of them happily, if inexplicably, accepting each other.

Couldn't the brilliant writer of "Family Guy" come up with something better than this? Film critic Brad Brevet, who disliked "Ted" much more than I did, makes a fantastic point when he reminds us that MacFarlane, on his TV show, "has a knack for pointing out the weaknesses in films and television shows and yet when it comes to creating a film of his very own he decides on the most cliched storytelling available to him." I couldn't summarize the problem with "Ted" better, so I won't try to. The film feels like a cheap excuse to string some jokes together, a scenario rather than a plot. And that's a big disappointment.

What I found far less disappointing, however, was the humor in "Ted," unapologetic in its pervasive use of crude, offensive and culture-skewering humor. Maybe it's because I am only three months older than MacFarlane that I share much of his sense of sarcasm and taste for what's funny. So a scene featuring actor Giovanni Ribisi dancing in front of a TV to a Tiffany music video, for instance, is as funny to me as it is to him. And MacFarlane's rapid-fire use of pop culture references, some of which might be obscure to teenaged fans of "Family Guy," are firmly within my wheelhouse and memory bank of childhood, meaning that they strike me right at the funny bone in an instant, with no need for further context clues.

The dialogue exchanges between John and Ted give the film its best moments. In one particularly funny conversation, Ted tells John that he's met a girl with a "white trash name" and they turn it into a game, John running through over two dozen names without taking a breath. What's even funnier is that most of the names are relatively common, thus meaning that MacFarlane is calling many of "Ted"'s female audience members "white trash" by proxy. Not that much of "Ted"'s audience is female; "Ted" joins "The Dark Knight Rises" as an oasis for movie-going men in the summer of "Magic Mike."

I laughed so hard at "Ted" that I think I'd eventually need to see it again to get some of the jokes I missed. In fact, while reviewing some of the great quotes from the film on IMDB, I saw at least three that I didn't even remember. No doubt I was in the middle of punching my best friend's arm in the movie theatre or stabilizing my rolling office chair in the upscale eatery-theatre to prevent my friend from shoving me down the aisle flight of stairs in a fit of laughter. Ultimately, "Ted" is not only about a man who won't grow up enough to not need his teddy bear, but a man who won't grow up enough to work his way beyond ironic, childhood pop culture humor. And while I can't relate to the film's pervasive use of drug humor, I can certainly relate to that.

2.5 out of 4