My son knows me

It's Father's Day here in Australia. That's right, the first Sunday in September.

And the portrait you see here was among the gifts lavished upon me, which also included a water bottle holder and phone holder for my bike, a hamper full of my favorite foods, pastries for breakfast and a charcuterie board for lunch.

I'm posting this picture for two reasons, only one of which applies to a movie blog:

1) I'm incredibly proud of the young artist my eight-year-old is becoming. Look at that work! You may not know what I look like, but this captures my essence very well. (It looks like I wear glasses, which I don't; those are sunglasses, or "sunnies" as they call them here.)

2) He drew/painted me wearing my Step Brothers t-shirt, which I only just had occasion to write about here.

As my wife pointed out, he even remembered the detail of the fancy trim that surrounds the portrait of Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly.

On this Father's Day, I'll quick take a pause from the movie marathon they've allowed me to undertake in my garage -- more on that in later posts -- to tell you how grateful I am to have a family who knows me, gets me, and indulges all the things that make me who I am.

That's the best present any dad could get.

America loves Step Brothers

The vast majority of the time I wear this shirt is, of course, in Australia. Where it goes uncommented on for months and months of semi-regular wearing.

I have, unsurprisingly, worn it more regularly on this trip to America, since you tend to wear the small number of t-shirts you brought with you, especially on a trip that takes place during summer, about once every five days. Assuming you also regularly encounter the means to launder them. 

When I wear this shirt, two hours never pass without a comment from someone who loves this movie. 

If I thought it was just an Indiana or a New England thing, yesterday's wearing during our second day cleaning out our house disabused me of that notion. Our first stop of the day was 7-11, where, as I was buying my fourth cucumber lime Gatorade in the previous two days, the woman behind the counter told me how much she loved the movie.

America on the whole appears to love Step Brothers.

The movie is of course a personal favorite. My wife and I talk about how when we first saw it together at the drive-in in 2008, it was the hardest she had ever seen me laugh in the three-and-a-half years she had known me. She wondered if I might have been losing grip on my sanity. I have since seen it five more times and it's currently #119 on my Flickchart, which places it within my top 20 or possibly even top ten comedies of all time. 

But I guess I still think of it as sort of "my" movie, and am surprised when I discover that other people share my affection. Maybe part of this phenomenon is that comedies have, on the whole, become significantly less funny since 2008, so much so that I have a hard time believing that anything as recent as that can rise to the level of a widely embraced classic. It's not just because you have to work a lot harder to make good comedy these days, due to the minefield of political sensitivities out there. Please don't interpret this as me saying "wokeness means you can no longer be funny," because I hate that opinion. But I don't think it's entirely a coincidence that I haven't laughed hysterically at a lot of comedies in recent years.

Step Brothers, though, is indeed viewed as a comedy classic -- at least by Americans. Especially on the day I wore it in Maine, I had no fewer than a half-dozen passers by and others I encountered comment on it. This is significant especially since I was not already having an interaction with those people. They just blurted out their affection for it to me, or in some cases, mentioned it only to whoever they were walking with, smiling and laughing appreciatively, though of course I could hear what they were saying.

I don't think it's that Australians don't like Step Brothers. I have certainly gotten comments on it in the past. But I do think Australians are less likely to give you their unsolicited opinion on something, good or bad. Just as they're less likely to randomly say hello to a stranger they are walking past. Australians are no less friendly than Americans -- and are certainly more friendly on average, since there tend to be fewer assholes -- but they save their friendliness until you are already engaged in some sort of interface with them.

Having had this experience of overwhelming support for the movie on this trip, I'm sure to pay a lot more attention to the sorts of reactions this t-shirt gets, or does not get, when I return to Australia. We'll be starting to head into warmer weather when I get back. 

Only then will I have a better idea of whether there is something distinctly American about the appeal of Adam McKay's film, and even then, it'll be based only on circumstantial evidence. 

A sensible laughs-to-stars ratio

I've gone and done it again. I've gone and liked a movie that everyone else seems to hate. 

I sort of loved it actually. But we'll get to that in a moment.

I don't know if it was just a coincidence that I laughed the hardest I've laughed in years on the first night in Australia after Joe Biden was inaugurated. I didn't consciously feel the sense of relief I imagined I'd feel. Given that his inauguration had recently become a fait accompli, I had an underwhelming actual response to it, even with waking up at 4 a.m. to watch it -- and realizing only then I probably needed to wake up about 15 minutes earlier, as he was already mid-speech.

But Thursday night our time was indeed a cause for celebration. The kids pushed for a special dinner, so we went up to Errol Street and got fish and chips, and beers for the adults. Later when we came home, I told my wife I was going to watch something really silly. I didn't know what, but I wanted a cinematic balm for my celebratory mind.

That thing ended up being Vacation, the fifth movie in the series that started out as a National Lampoon property before shedding that affiliation (at least as far as the titles were concerned) with Vegas Vacation in 1997. I had before now considered it safe to avoid this movie, as Ed Helms already felt like a dud at the movies way back in 2015, and the only previous movies in this series I actually like are the original and the aforementioned Vegas Vacation. That's right, I don't like the Christmas one. 

In fact, if I'd felt for the whole movie like I did in its first 15 minutes, I'd have written a post on The Audient with this title: "I like Ed Helms, I just don't like Ed Helms movies." I was already planning what I'd write about The Clapper when this happened:

I started laughing.

And laughing. And laughing.

And just never stopped laughing throughout the rest of the movie.

That might be a slight exaggeration. But three or four hysterically funny scenes put me in this film's good graces, and I never saw any reason to leave them. And most of the remaining scenes were solid doubles if not actual homers.

It all started with the introduction of the Albanian minivan that the grown Rusty Griswold (Helms) rents for his family to make another ill-fated trip to Wally World. The vehicle is this incredibly odd shade of blue and has kind of a bubble butt at the back, for no good reason. It has multiple gas tanks and multiple charging cables flopping out of it like spaghetti, which have connector prongs that don't go to any outlet you've ever seen, complete with protruding springs and other doohickeys. The remote for the car has about 17 buttons, most of which have completely unclear meanings, including one with a swastika on it. 

Here, have a look:

Anything related to this vehicle had me in stitches, including its GPS and the steady reveal of what the various buttons do, but they weren't the only moments that made me laugh out loud during Vacation. In fact, in one moment involving a highway chase, I was so doubled over with hysterical laughter that my wife had to come check on me to make sure I was okay. (Actually, that did involve the minivan.)

As unpredictable as all this was, it led to something highly predictable: I went to Metacritic and saw that Vacation has a 34 metascore. That's an improvement on its 27 on Rotten Tomatoes. I'd remembered it hadn't been well received, but in those few minutes between when I finished the movie and when I checked on these scores, I convinced myself I'd remembered it wrong. After all, how could I find those scenes so much funnier than anyone else did? But nope. I read the review of the guy who liked it the most on Metacritic -- Vulture critic Bilge Ebiri -- who also admitted to "laughing [his] ass off." But he spent about every other sentence of the review apologizing for his reaction.

Why do we need to apologize for laughing?

It occurred to me after watching Vacation that if something is funny, it's funny. If it's racist or sexist or homophobic and you find it funny, that's a you problem. But Vacation is none of those things (very much) so I don't know why I can't feel pure about the laughter it inspired in me.

And it's not like this movie has no bonafides. We may not have known who they were then, but Vacation was written and directed by Jonathan M. Goldstein and John Francis Daley, who may not be household names, but sure got a lot of kudos when they made Game Night a couple years later. I laughed a lot harder at this than I laughed at Game Night.

If I put myself in my wife's shoes, seeing me on Thursday night -- or rather, hearing my guffaws from the other room and coming in after they'd ended -- would only be comparable to the time she saw me lose my shit at the drive-in while watching Step Brothers for the first time. I was like a crazy person to her with how much I was laughing at that movie. Have I laughed that hard another time since then? Surely, but the fact that Step Brothers was what immediately came to mind as a point of comparison is a good indication how hard I laughed during that one particular scene in Vacation. That's got to be worth something, right?

It's worth four stars, I decided.

Yep. I snubbed that 34 metascore and 27 RT score and logged a four-star (out of five) entry on Letterboxd.

I did feel a little funny about it -- who's going to see that rating on Letterboxd and think less of me for it? -- but not as funny as Vacation was. 

Is this as good as other movies I typically give four stars? Surely not. But I am going to remember that laughter for a long time. Maybe someday I will see another really funny movie and compare it to those times I saw Step Brothers and Vacation.

There's probably no reliable way to translate laughs into stars. And surely, one funny scene in a movie is not going to be enough to push it even into positive three-star territory. I've seen movies that were total duds outside of one brilliantly conceived comedy bit.

But again, that wasn't the only time I emitted guffaws during Vacation. The sheer quantity of laughter forced me to realize that star-ratings are a measure of a subjective experience of watching a movie. Opinions cannot be "right" or "wrong," though of course, the more opinions someone gets "wrong," the less likely you are to believe them when they recommend a movie to you.

Well, I hope you'll still believe me when I tell you that Vacation might bring you the same laughs it brought me.

If we are grading only the laughter, and grading it on a curve, and grading it subjectively, it may have even been worth five stars.

Richard Jenkins double feature

We made it an evening of favorite comedies on Saturday night. We'd already queued up Step Brothers, noting it had been a while since we'd last seen it (2015), and then had time for another short one afterwards. Turns out, it had been a lot longer since we'd last seen Flirting With Disaster: 2009.

The choice of the second movie was certainly influenced by the first. As I was going through the folder of DVDs I brought with me from America, I landed on Flirting because a) we wanted to keep the comedy vibe going, and b) it would allow for a double feature of movies featuring the great comedic actor Richard Jenkins. Or, Richard E. Jenkins, as he was once credited.

Not only did this make a great 1-2 punch of exasperation and perfect line deliveries, it also made an unexpected two-movie exploration of families constructed, reconstructed and deconstructed in unusual ways.

In Step Brothers, of course, you've got a new family unit that is composed of two sixtysomething adults (Jenkins and Mary Steenburgen) and their two adult children who still live with them (Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly). The parents are both successes in their respective fields and the kids have no fields at all, yet we are invited to try to see the similarities between them that would make them legitimately related. Ferrell's gentler nature mirrors that of his mother, whom he describes as a saint, though not his asshole brother (Adam Scott), who must have taken more after their dad. Meanwhile, we finally see the relationship between Reilly and Jenkins bear fruit at the end, when Jenkins explains that he always wanted to be a dinosaur, even in his late teenage years. It explains some of the fantasy focus of the adult Reilly.

In Flirting With Disaster, we've got Ben Stiller's character desperately seeking to belong to biological parents, to see in them traits that he has. With each misstep they make on their journey, it takes usually less than an hour to determine the person he's meeting is not actually related to him, but by that point he has already identified apparent physical and behavioral similarities to the people he's meeting -- kind of like how you can read yourself into any horoscope if you squint hard enough. His potentially rivalrous relationship with his own previously unknown brother (Glenn Fitzgerald) is explored, and we see Stiller in all manner of possible family dynamics. Then of course there is also the unconventional family of Jenkins' character with his husband, played by Josh Brolin.

The common factor is Jenkins, but I'm not going to posit any kind of match between actor and subject matter. It's surely just a coincidence.

What isn't a coincidence is how great Jenkins is in both films. Neither part is a lead role, though he does have plenty of screen time. But he's got the presence and the comic instincts to steal scenes from those he does appear alongside. His apoplectic rage at the step brothers is comic gold, and his reaction to getting dosed with acid after eating the wrong quail in Flirting With Disaster is legendary. "Is this a musical table?" "Good night Tina!"

His delivery is, of course, first rate, as he can put a cynical spin on a line of dialogue with the best of them. But this time around I took particular note of the work he does with his face. His look of absolute adoration as he takes in the bullshit slung by his new stepson, the asshole brother Derek, is just hilarious. He's a sixtysomething man glowing with a school girl crush. It's a variation on that same look that is so great when he wishes Tina good night in the middle of his acid trip. This is a first-time experience as well, and for this moment at least, it's a good one.

As Jenkins is now 73 and hasn't appeared in a film since The Shape of Water, I worry that there will be a paucity of future Jenkins roles for me to appreciate the way I appreciate these two. Then again, he's in two 2020 movies that have yet to release. Miranda July's Kajillionaire, at least, seems like it has the potential for Jenkins to again wrestle with the absurdities of life the way only he can.

My top five comedies of the 21st century

Laughing isn't something I've been very eager to do this past week. I missed an unprecedented (as far as I can remember) three days of work with a terrible hacking cough and related symptoms, which included chills, lack of energy, and rivers of phlegm. (Non-consecutive days, at that -- I went in Wednesday before relapsing Thursday.) This is also why you haven't seen a post from me since Tuesday.

You especially don't want to laugh when even small chuckles erupt into rib-bruising episodes that last 15 seconds. Fortunately, I watched plenty of movies not designed to make me laugh -- and one that was designed to make me laugh, but didn't.

But that's not what I'm here to talk about today. Today is project day. See, this week I also listened to Filmspotting's episode devoted to their top five comedies of the 21st century. That episode was inspired by BBC's recent critics poll of the top 100 movies since the year 2000, which is also something I'd like to tackle on my blog. But for now, I'll tackle it in a roundabout way, just as the Filmspotting guys did.

One of the responses to that BBC list was that it was almost totally devoid of pure comedy. Sure, it had films with comedy as one of their genres (The Grand Budapest Hotel, Ratatouille), but hardly anything whose sole purpose was to make you laugh from start to finish. The Filmspotting guys decided to do their show as a corrective.

The thing is, their choices really disappointed me. Obviously comedy is pretty subjective, perhaps the most subjective type of film taste. But that doesn't mean you have to abandon objective critical discussion tactics when discussing comedy. And on those grounds I was inspired to come up with my own top five, to balance the injustices I saw on their lists. (Wouldn't you know it, though -- I had failed to listen to their #1 picks until during this very writing, and one of the hosts picked a movie that appears in my top five, removing just a bit of my righteous indignation.)

Before revealing my choices, I'll give you a bit of a sense of what I'm up against:

Josh Larsen:

5. Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby
4. Mean Girls
3. Songs from the Second Floor
2. Cedar Rapids
1. Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazahkstan

Adam Kempenaar:

5. While We're Young
4. The Trip
3. Role Models
2. Shaun of the Dead
1. xxxxxx (I'll hold this one back for now)

Don't get me wrong -- this is not to say I don't like these films (all of which I've seen). Shaun of the Dead is one of my favorites. However, it being funny is not primarily the reason I like Shaun. Then there are those movies they chose that I am tepid to negative on, like Talladega Nights and Role Models.

To come up with my own choices, I went through my 17 individual Microsoft Word documents covering the years 2000 to 2016, which house a complete listing of movies I've seen in each year. To save time, I suppose I could have just reviewed my list of movies seen multiple times, since it's unlikely any of my choices would come from movies I've seen only once. But that might rule out something recent, and it would be interesting to know whether something I'd seen only once could still claim that kind of pull on me. In the end, all my choices were movies I'd seen more than once.

There were some other interesting patterns. For example, no year before 2004 yielded more than a single realistic contender, which means either comedy was going through a bad stretch around the turn of the century, or I just don't remember laughing very hard at the movies I saw back then because it was too long ago. In fact, I didn't shortlist a single film from 2002. The second half of the years in question were much more fruitful, with every year except for 2013 and 2016 yielding at least two contenders, and sometime as many as four. (Oddly, 2013 gave me zero contenders, wedged in between two other years that gave me at least three each. 2016 is still only half over, so its one contender was not such a surprise.)

One last bit of explanation. The five I chose were meant to represent a diversity of sensibilities, at least somewhat, though some clearly grew out of each others' sensibilities. I didn't repeat a director, in any case. This mostly occurred organically, anyway.

Okay, I think you've had enough preamble. I'll proceed with my top five, and then some honorable mentions in various categories.

5. What We Do in the Shadows (2014, Taika Waititi) - My #5 movie comes by its spot on this list rather unusually. It's a film I made the mistake of watching for the first time on the plane. Which doesn't mean I didn't find it funny, it just means it was not exactly a laughter-conducive environment. I ended up ranking it only 40th among my 2014 films. But my second viewing last year was with my wife, and it immediately primed me for my third viewing. This is just a delicious setup that consistently realizes its jokes, not to mention producing some actual blood and guts for horror enthusiasts and even some seamless special effects (made to seem all the more "real" by the mockumentary format). And part of why I wanted to get this on here was as a nod to the mockumentary as a form, though the 1980s and 1990s had far better examples of that form than anything worth honoring in the 21st century (other than this movie, that is). Favorite moment: When Waititi's main vampire Viago tiptoes down to the basement to wake up Petyr, the 8,000-year-old vampire who communicates only by bearing his teeth and making that "vampire hiss" that sounds basically like an exhalation of air. "Peeta! Peeeeeta!" he says in a sing-songy voice, as though calling forth a hiding infant.

4. The 40 Year Old Virgin (2005, Judd Apatow) - This was the one Adam chose as his #1. And I have to agree. (Well, not entirely -- it's my #4.) I have lately actually felt a bit of an aversion to this film that I can't really explain, which gives you some indication why I haven't seen it in nine years. But as I was coming up with this list, I just remembered the gales of laughter I unleashed in the theater as I was watching it. (And I also remembered that I ranked it my #3 film for the year.) It's no surprise the comedy pickings got better on my year-by-year lists after 2005, as Apatow's directorial debut put in place a new blueprint for comedy, one that has largely flourished (despite plenty of obvious examples of failures, and a likelihood that we'll totally burn out on it within the next five years). It was a grossout with heart, and it "went there" like few films I'd seen. I owe it a revisit, and at the very least I honor its role in our current comedy climate by including it here. Interestingly, this is the only film on this list I saw in a conventional theater environment. Favorite moment: As it's been nine years since I saw it, I'll just go with the one that came first to mind, that made me recognize I was watching something fresh and exciting: Seth Rogen's delivery of his story about seeing the woman have sex with the horse in Mexico. If the movie as a whole was an introduction of a new comedic voice, then within that, we were introduced to Rogen's distinct voice, which has arguably been nearly as influential as Apatow's.

3. Idiocracy (2006, Mike Judge) - Given the reputation in comedy circles this has built in the past ten years, it's hard to believe it was basically dumped, its studio having no idea how to market it. Tellingly, I was looking up movies to see at local theaters the week it came out, and even in the screening times listed on the website it had a placeholder name: Untitled Mike Judge Comedy. And I wasn't going to be that one person to go see it in the theater -- I had to discover it later on video. Fortunately, Idiocracy has made itself known in the intervening years, especially in our house, where my wife might call it her favorite comedy, period. Judge is underappreciated in terms of not only what he's contributed to the comedy world, but the different types of things -- Beavis and Butthead and King of the Hill share more in common with their visual appearance than the actual content of their comedy, and Idiocracy is altogether different from both, though they all serve up satire in endlessly funny ways. Now that Trump is actually competitive in the presidential race, people are thinking of this movie as even more prescient than it already seemed even from the start. Favorite moment: When we see the changes to the outside of a Fuddruckers hamburger restaurant down through the centuries, as the name becomes increasingly more suggestive until finally landing on: Buttfuckers.

2. Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story (2007, Jake Kasdan) - If Idiocracy is the best satire of the last 16+ years, Walk Hard is the best spoof. It was another one that caught me by surprise, as I didn't prioritize a theatrical viewing. Once we queued it up at home, though, I couldn't get enough. I've seen it only twice, but only because I haven't had a natural opportunity to buy the movie yet. A sort-of third viewing came when I actually went with a friend to see John C. Reilly perform as Dewey Cox in a small nightclub in Los Angeles -- one of my truly cherished live performance experiences of all time. Kasdan makes by far my unlikeliest director to appear on this list, as even his best other movie (Orange County) is pretty middling as comedies go. This movie pierces the heart of its subject matter, the music biopic (specifically Walk the Line), and finds its comedy in a combination of parodies of the typical tropes of a music biopic, a handful of great impersonations, and some of the funniest songs written for a movie since This is Spinal Tap. I just grin from ear to ear as I watch this movie. Favorite moment: When Tim Meadows, as Dewey's band mate, warns him of the dangers of marijuana via many emphatically stated traits of the drug that should scare him: "It's not habit forming! It makes sex even better! It's the cheapest drug there is!"

1. Step Brothers (2008, Adam McKay) - And John C. Reilly is the star of both of my top picks. Narrowly the funniest of McKay's many collaborations with Will Ferrell (edging out Anchorman and leading the others by a wide margin), Step Brothers had me simply screaming with laughter. As my wife looked over at me while we were at the drive-in, she thought perhaps I was possessed -- she had never seen me laugh like that. And this makes four of five films I watched with my wife for the first time, while the other was one I watched with her the second. If I wanted to come up with a thesis on what makes Step Brothers my #1, as I've done with some of the other movies on my list, I couldn't. It's just the movie that made me laugh the hardest. It's also the comedy I've seen the most since 2000, as our fifth viewing was about a year ago. I also have a Step Brothers t-shirt. It helps that with my curly hair, I also look kind of like both Ferrell and Reilly in this movie. Also, it made my top ten of the year. Favorite moment: There are so many I could choose from, so I will just choose a little one, maybe the one that told me I was in for a wonderful ride: At their first dinner together as a joined family, Reilly's Dale makes some crude remark about Ferrell's Brennan, and Ferrell just gets this pained look on his face for a moment, which is completely unexpected -- it's a combination of disgust and genuine hurt. I don't know why but it may be the funniest look I have ever seen Ferrell produce.

Honorable mentions 

As a liberal, I'm a little displeased that my list couldn't include a female-driven comedy or a minority-driven comedy, but there were these two very strong contenders:

Spy (2015, Paul Feig) - The movie that turned me around on Melissa McCarthy, though I unfortunately must admit that the single funniest moments belong to Jason Statham. Feig deserves a mention given that he's also come through with Bridesmaids and The Heat.

Black Dynamite (2009, Scott Sanders) - Just saw this this year, and was laughing throughout. Reminded me of one of my favorite comedies of last century, I'm Gonna Git You Sucka.

There were a couple movies I laughed at incredibly hard the first time, but they didn't hold up as well the second time. They are:

The Dictator (2012, Larry Charles) - Sacha Baron Cohen absolutely needs a mention.

The Interview (2014, Seth Rogen & Evan Goldberg) - The controversial film that many people hated the first time. I loved it the first time, but only liked it the second.

Zack and Miri Make a Porno (2008, Kevin Smith) - It took until the third viewing last week for me to turn on this one. Maybe Seth Rogen doesn't age well.

I also highlighted some movies that really surprised me, given what I expected from them. I had no idea these movies would be as funny as they were.

Date Night (2010, Shawn Levy) - I was openly disdainful when I saw the trailers. The opposite after I watched it. One of my favorite lines of the 21st century, delivered by Mila Kunis: "Those nipple clamps hurt me!"

Hot Rod (2007, Akiva Schaffer) - Seen it only once and don't remember the details, but I laughed a lot.

Wanderlust (2012, David Wain) - I had been down on Wain (see my thoughts on Wet Hot American Summer) so this one took me totally by surprise. Paul Rudd practicing and then delivering his dirty talk to Malin Akerman (and her response) is comedy classic material.

Stone Bros. (2009, Richard Frankland) - Comedy featuring Aboriginal actors that we watched mostly because my wife's boss was a producer. We laughed hysterically.

Hall Pass (2011, Peter & Bobby Farrelly) - As this is "late Farrelly" I didn't expect much, but this just missed my top ten for that year. Laughs throughout. Worried about a potential third viewing though.

And finally, funny movies from the period that in many cases I like better overall than the movies I've mentioned, but the reason I love them is not primarily because they are funny.

Tangled (2010, Nathan Greno & Byron Howard) - Has one of my funniest single lines of this century: As the hero, Flynn Rider, engages in a duel with a horse holding a knife in his teeth, while he uses a frying pan, and they move closer to the edge of a cliff, he shouts: "You should know, this is the strangest thing I've ever done!"

Forgetting Sarah Marshall (2008, Nicholas Stoller) - Hilarious, but the heart is what I really remember about this one.

Elf (2003, Jon Favreau) - Take comment on Forgetting Sarah Marshall and apply here.

Toni Erdmann (2016, Maren Ade) - Perhaps the hardest laughter I've ever experienced in a movie sustained over a ten-minute stretch, but the movie's profundity is what left me sitting in my seat in a pensive fugue state until the credits ended. (Sadly, this is also the only choice in this whole post directed by a woman.)

Okay, I thought I was done but here are just a few more honorable mentions that have no other category:

Team America: World Police
Napoleon Dynamite
21 Jump Street
Klown
Tropic Thunder
Zoolander (thought Ben Stiller deserved some love with these last two)
Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy (referenced but not actually singled out)

Okay! That was rather exhaustive. Turns out there have been some funny movies this century. Would love to hear your thoughts on the matter.

Not "how we do it"

Time Warner Cable is trying to render my favorite comedy from last year a lot less funny.

If you really like a movie, you prefer it in unaltered form -- whether that's Spielberg not replacing the guns with walkie-talkies in E.T., or just a line you think works really well the way it is.

But in Time Warner Cable's spot advertising Step Brothers, they've seen it fit to change one of these lines, presumably to get across the humor in a broader, less specific way. The problem is, Step Brothers was already facing an uphill battle against being considered too broad and unspecific. When it transcended those limitations excellently (see it if you don't believe me), it was a victory over our preconceived notions. The pay-per-view spot -- which I don't for a minute assume was actually commissioned by Time Warner, rather, simply aired by them -- undermines all that, and stops the discriminating viewer dead in his/her tracks.

Let's see if you've seen this ad. It features that moment when, in one of the movie's most regrettably famous scenes, John C. Reilly jumps on the upper bunk of a structurally unsound bunk bed, which he and Will Ferrell have just assembled with a delicate combination of two-by-fours and spit. The upper bunk immediately falls (and presumably crushes) a helpless Ferrell below.

For starters, I don't think this is among the 20 best scenes in Step Brothers. However, it does appeal to that middle-of-the-road, "I know what's coming but will still laugh" mentality that presumably sells lots of tickets. So I guess I get why it's considered a moment they want to showcase.

Actually, the film's writing team of Ferrell and Adam McKay make the moment a lot more absurd because of what Reilly says at the time of that ill-fated jump. I'm paraphrasing, but as he takes flight, like an excited six-year-old he spits out: "I forgot to ask you: Do you like guacamole?" Pretty random thing to be asking, right? Funny.

Except in this ad, his dialogue is changed to "This is how we do it!," sung "in the style of" (to use karaoke terminology) Montell Jordan, the artist who recorded and popularized the frivolous hip hop tune "This Is How We Do It" in the mid-1990s. I have to assume Reilly actually sings this song sometime in the movie -- even though I've watched it twice and don't remember that happening -- but it's certainly not during the bed-bounding incident. Oh, and to throw in an extra little something: They follow it with a surprised yelp from Reilly, which I believe also originated in a different scene, if it appears in the film at all.

This may seem like a lot of "column inches" (to use the old newspaper term) to devote to a fairly simple and inoffensive ruse. Trailers are nothing if not compressed, mashed-up versions of films, where information is imparted in a specific sequence not because that's how it unspools in the film, but because that's how it communicates essential details to the viewer in a limited amount of time. I get that. And I understand profanity is sometimes a consideration, as well. When watching Coraline among scads of elementary school kids -- many of whom were too young for the scarier shit in that film -- we saw a trailer for another Ferrell film, Land of the Lost. For the fragile ears of these youngsters, Ferrell's already-signature exclamation "Matt Lauer can suck it!" has been altered to "Matt Lauer can eat it!" The linguists among us can argue whether sucking a dick or eating shit is actually the more scarring image for a six-year-old, especially when "eat it" can also be interpreted as eating a dick. But nonetheless, there's no doubt it was changed to what was considered the less offensive term.

But how does John C. Reilly covering Montell Jordan really improve the bunkbed gag? Answer: It doesn't. It just drives away prospective viewers who are already looking for a reason not to discover one of the best surprises of 2008.

Well, I guess that just means I gotta work a little harder here on The Audient ...