Sunday

You can sometimes guess how good a film will be by how much the studio publicises it. I heard very little about Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby. Of course, studio publicity and press coverage form a symbiotic cycle of sorts, but in this case the little advertising the movie received seemed to match the overall quality. I wanted to like it. After all, I loved Anchorman, and love Will Ferrell's performance in almost every other movie. Plus, this film had John C. Reilly and Sacha Baron Cohen. It's possible I wasn't in the right mood (I am a great believer in matching your mood to a movie). I have been quite ill recently. On the day in question, I struggled to eat a sandwich, ran out of breath, sweated, and eventually gave up. My eyes were watering almost constantly. So, not ideal conditions. But this film's problems go beyond my physical condition. At its heart was that Will Ferrell's character isn't very likable. You can't sympathise with him in the same way that you can in Anchorman. This is a great problem seeing as, despite the context, the plot is exactly the same. And, the context is a sporting movie, which are very hard to make interesting, set around motor racing, which is perhaps the hardest to pull off. So, we have to judge the film by the quality of the jokes. Yes, sometimes I did laugh out loud. But it wasn't enough, and it wasn't frequent. I read that Knocked-Up and Superbad with their sensitive humour have sidelined Will Ferrell, and that he may struggle to command such large budgets anymore. On the evidence of this, I wouldn't disagree.