Vice (3/5 Stars)

Not that it is wise to suppose that Dick Cheney cares, but I bet he never suspected at the time when he was at the height of his power, that the little known writer currently working at Saturday Night Live producing Bear City skits would go on to make the definitive biopic of him. That is the problem with being an under-the-radar bearaucrat with little to no personality. Nobody talks about you, until one person does and that person becomes the only storyteller around.

The writer and director of Vice is Adam McKay, better known for his work directing Will Ferrel comedies such as Anchorman, Talldega Nights, and Step-Brothers. Will Ferrell is still doing that type of shtick. For the time being, Adam McKay seems to have moved on to more serious entertainment. His first venture into this genre, The Big Short, was one of the best movies of the year. Vice is in the same vein. It takes a complicated subject, the life and politics of hugely influential if not particularly known man, Richard Cheney, and tries its best to explain the significance of his policies and politics. The Big Short had an easier time at it. That movie's subject matter was complicated to, but the movie (and the book as well) adroitly got all the major points across by inserting them into the stories of several sympathetic well-rounded characters. Vice lacks a sympathetic well-rounded character. We learn alot about Dick Cheney but not so much about what makes him click. We learn much about what he did but not much about why he thought it was the right thing to do. Perhaps it would be hard for a writer-director such as Adam McKay to really understand someone so politically opposite. I have seen it done before though. I thought Oliver Stone did a particularly good job with Richard Nixon in Nixon. I mean, the movie makes a big deal about Dick Cheney's pursuit of power, but what is power without purpose. Did he actually want anything besides it? I'm not sure this movie found the answer to that question.

The most chilling thing about Cheney is that there might be less to him than you would think. I watched Errol Morris' documentary interview of Donald Rumsfeld and was absolutely taken aback by the utter lack of seriousness and self-introspection in Donald Rumsfeld. Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney go back a long way, Cheney basically learning the ropes of Washington from Rumsfeld. Was Dick Cheney like Donald Rumsfeld? Can he really be explained by a scene in the beginning of Vice in which a hungover and bruised Cheney is read the riot act by his wife and told that if he does not make something of himself she will leave him. To gain power to keep his wife, is that the sum total of this man's ambitions. What a scary thought.

Adam McKay does not seem to agree. I think McKay's politics are provoking him to seek some more nefarious answer to that question. So the movie makes much more sense in its first half when Cheney is an underdog more defined by a simple pursuit of power than in the second half when Cheney gains power and pursues many of his controversial policies like war and torture. McKay hasn't achieved insight into Cheney motivations, but he is assuming that something more is there. Maybe, maybe not.

The performance in Vice are damn near perfect. Christian Bale may seem a not obvious choice to play Dick Cheney until you see him onscreen for five seconds and you realize its the perfect casting choice. As a matter of course, he seems to have gained like fifty pounds to do this role. All in a days work for this man. This is a much better version of Dick Cheney than we briefly saw Richard Dreyfuss give in W.The most perfect choice of casting though belongs to Steve Carell as Donald Rumsfeld. That is some uncanny shit. I remember being unnerved while watching the real Donald Rumsfeld in The Unknown Known. I felt the same thing here and think it a stroke of genius to use Steve Carell, an actor who has played famously empty characters before like Brick the Weatherman, to portray Rummy.

Like any half-way decent movie that portrays well-known people, the viewer gets a kick out of who got cast to play whom. Tyler Perry plays Colin Powell. Sam Rockwell plays George W. Bush. Amy Adams plays Lynne Cheney. George W. Bush, bless his big dumb heart, doesn't seem to know what he is doing half the time and is under the unfortunate impression that Rumsfeld and Cheney do.

I like political movies with a point of view. Not only does Adam McKay have a point of view, he is brilliantly angry about it. This movie and The Big Short reminded me of the best movies of Oliver Stone. They take chances, they are vibrant, and they are passionate about the subject matter. Sometimes this really works like when Dick and Lynne Cheney speak Shakespeare. Other times not so. Vice has a narrator who is not really introduced and might not be a portrait of the actual person he is supposed to be. (Noticeably, he narrates this story in a wearied manner, not unlike the narrator in last years War Machine. Is this how Afghanistan and Iraq are to be remembered? As sad slogs.) We do not know who this man is until he gets run over by a car and Dick Cheney as organ donee, receives his heart. The movie argues that Dick Cheney slighted the dead man by referring to his donor heart as "his new heart." I get what the movie is getting at, but heart problems don't seem to be a fair thing for which to criticize someone.

I found Vice to be frequently funny. That does not mean the movie has jokes. This relates more to the skill of the writer/director who consistently finds ways to present information in a clever and efficient manner. I am a big fan of Adam McKay. I look forward to whatever he does next.

The Big Short (5/5 Stars)

This movie is an achievement on several fronts. First it achieves clarity in its subject. Second it achieves humor throughout. Third it has a strong moral. It takes considerable skill to do this given that the subject, the secondary mortgage market, is complicated and obscure and I can only hope my review is organized well enough to capture everything that needs to be praised.

The story comes from Michael Lewis’s nonfiction book, “The Big Short.” That book tells three completely separate stories about who profited from the subprime meltdown that cratered the global economy in 2008. Given that almost nobody figured out (or wanted to figure out) that everything was terrible before it was, the people that did are very interesting outsiders. The movie was adapted by Charles Randolph and Adam McKay. It was directed by Adam McKay.

One is Dr. Michael Burry (Christian Bale), an ex-brain surgeon hedge fund manager, who did something nobody else did. He read the underlying mortgage bonds. He spent a couple weeks doing so while barefoot in his office listening to deafness-inducing death metal. Then he did an extraordinarily audacious thing. In 2005, he invested 100 million dollars of his client’s money (against their wishes) in a financial instrument he requested the banks invent that bet against these bonds. It was a ballsy move given his own calculations had the bonds failing in the second quarter of 2007. How the movie treats this character is illuminating. They could have easily gone down the Benedict Cumberbatch route of making him arrogant and dismissive of all the ordinary people of the world. But as Michael Burry points out to his angry clients, “I don’t know how to be sarcastic. I can’t tell a joke. I know numbers.” He corresponds with the incredulous bankers he works with in a humble unassuming way. Everybody is either making fun of him or angry with him for the next couple years.

Second is Mark Baum (Steve Carell). We are introduced to him in an anger management support group. A troubled man is talking about how the world makes him angry. Mark Baum walks in late and immediately starts talking about himself. He is angry with Wall Street bankers and all the big guys beating up the small people. He casually pours himself a cup of coffee and sits down completely oblivious to the fact that he has interrupted the meeting. Then his phone rings. “I have to take this,” he remarks and leaves the room to take the call. Fucking Brilliant. The man is an asshole, but given that he hates Wall Street and spends the entire movie railing against corruption and fraud, he is our asshole. He has a team of angry people working for him including Danny Moses (Rafe Spall), Porter Collins (Hamish Linklater), and my favorite Vinnie Daniel (Jeremy Strong). This quartet form an angry hedge fund that is propositioned by an oily banker named Jared Vennett (Ryan Gosling). Vennett has heard of Michael Burry’s bet and wants to sell somebody else the same thing. Unfortunately nobody wants in on this bet. Except the Baum hedge fund guys who don’t trust bankers. There is a lot of yelling amongst these guys, most of it hilarious. And that is a very important thing as what Vennett is explaining to Baum and (also to us) is the secondary mortgage market, which is an absurdly obfuscated and complicated thing. The movie pulls out all the stops and breaks a lot of rules in order to explain how it works. Jared Vennett, the chief explainer, also serves as the movie’s narrator. At other times people just turn to the camera and make it a little clearer to the audience what exactly is happening on the screen. Then at other other times the movie employs Margot Robbie in a bubble bath, Selena Gomez at a blackjack table, and Anthony Bourdain making a Monday morning stew of old fish to explain the different tranches of a Collateralized Debt Obligation. It also helps that McKay sometimes substitutes for different financial terms the word “dogshit,” as in “these loans are dogshit,” as opposed to “non-performing." All of this saves a lot of time, which as McKay should know and amply demonstrates is the friend of comedy.

Third is the twenty-something partnership of Charlie Geller (John Magaro) and Jamie Shipley (Finn Witrock). They specialize in betting that bad things will happen (natural disasters and the like) given the theory that most people do not plan on terrible things to happen to them. They are introduced (about 45 minutes into the film) in a very endearing way. They want to go work for JP Morgan and have an interview that does not get past the lobby of the building. An intern (or at least a very young associate) meets them downstairs and points out that they have one billion (or something) less money than it takes to get an ISDA (described as the ticket to get to the big boys table). They feel stupid and rejected. So let us do a tally. We have our bullied nerd, our asshole, and our young nobody underdogs.

There is one more character but I’m going to intterupt my own review to talk about the ingenious way Adam McKay brings all of these characters together. They never meet each other, but they know about each other. Jared hears about Michael Burry’s bet at an afterwork bar. Charlie and Jamie pick up Jared’s prospectus in the lobby of JP Morgan. Except that is not how it happened. We see this happen but then Jared turns to the camera at the afterwork bar and tells us that he does not hang out with these people. He has fashion friends. Actually, Charlie tells us, he did not pick up the prospectus in the lobby. He heard it through a friend and Jamie found out about some other not very cinematic way. This is halfway brilliant by Adam McKay. First, how these characters hear about the other deals is not important to the story. In many nonfiction adaptations moviemakers do this sort of efficient blurring of the truth all the time. It saves time for the audience, this is understood, so it does not take away from anything for the characters to turn to us and let us know that we are seeing a movie convention. But only that would not be brilliant. It is brilliant because McKay takes this convention and admission and turns it into a setup for one of the greatest, hilarious, and cathartic payoffs in the movie. During a seminar Mark Baum interrupts a speaker on a stage (not during a Q and A session) with a question. The speaker answers and Mark interrupts him again to contradict him angrily. Then Mark’s phone rings, he answers it, announces to everyone that he has to take this and leaves the room. Then Jared, who is also in the room, turns to the camera and states, “That actually happened. Mark did that.” This joke would not have been possible if McKay had not been breaking the rules all the while. He needed to break the rules in order to tell the story efficiently. What makes this movie’s screenplay brilliant is how he uses all the broken rules (that are rules generally because they are distracting and take the audience out of the story) to do things that bring home jokes and cathartic points. The techniques that break the rules do not distract, they reinforce and make scenes better. Adam McKay and Charles Randolph deserve the Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay.

So Charlie and Jamie are rejected but they have a trick card. They have befriended an ex-banker in their hometown named Ben Rickart (Brad Pitt with a beartd). Underscoring how bullshit the system is, this guy uses his connections with a big bank to get the necessary ISDA that they would not have been able to get based on their underlying merit.

So now everything is set up and explained and the rest of the movie is payoff. It is generally funny up until a point and then the movie hits us with several very moral scenes. My favorite (and there are plenty to pick from) comes at a point where Charlie and Jamie make several great bets and are very excited about it. They are dancing in the lobby of a Las Vegas convention center and Ben Rickart angrily tells them to stop. “Do you realize what you just did? You bet against the U.S. economy. If it turns out well for you it hurts everybody else. One tick upward in the unemployment rate is a hundred thousand people out of work. This is what I hate about banking. It takes human beings and turns them into numbers in a spreadsheet. Just don’t fucking dance.”

There are several moments like this in the movie and they all work very well. It may come as some surprise that this is the first dramatic movie Adam McKay has ever made. He is known for the best of the Will Ferrell comedies (Anchorman, Talladega Nights, Step-Brothers, and The Other Guys). It is fun now to watch other movie critic revise what they think of the guy now that he has made a truly great movie that is not a comedy. (Not me. I have always thought Talladega Nights was a perfect movie). I hope McKay makes other movies that are not completely comedies. He obviously cares deeply about people and has the skill and talent to take complicated problems and break them down in digestible parts. He also has a comedic director's skill in caricature. This comes into play most readily in his satirical treatment of secondary characters. I especially love how the woman at the ratings agency (a fine Melissa Leo) has come back from an eye exam and is wearing thick sunglasses. And the coup de grace has to be the SEC girl who is in Vegas at the secondary mortgage market convention with the sole purpose of shacking up with a guy with Goldman Sachs in order to get on the ground floor of that bank once her couple years at the agency are up.

I have studied this subject quite a bit and have only this to add. Everything this movie shows about the banking industry is correct and their angry attitude is entirely called for. Having said that, it does not follow that the homeowners (who this movie does not hold under their satirical light) are entirely blameless. Many took out loans for houses they could not afford. Some people took out two or three mortgages and a line of credit on their property. These people deserved to lose their homes. I bring this up not to contradict this movie but to impress upon the reader that one does not need to take sides between ordinary people and banks in this crisis. It is entirely possible and I would posit that it is completely true that everybody is guilty and the true injustice is not that ordinary people suffered but that the big banks and the people who worked for them did not. Of course if one had to decide who is guiltier, it would tip towards the banks. After all, they were professionals who told everyone that they knew what they were doing.

One of my favorite scenes is when Charlie and Jamie sneak into Lehman Brothers after it has collapsed. And they walk around the deserted trading floor with its infantile Red Bull can pyramids. It was not how Charlie imagined it would be. “What did you expect?” asks Jamie. Charlie reflects a moment before adding, “I thought adults worked here.”

Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues

“Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues,” the sequel to the 2004 movie “Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy,” may serve as an insightful comparison for those interested in charting the career evolution of the long partnership of Actor Will Ferrell and Director Adam McKay. The two have certainly changed in the almost decade since the original movie came out. Someone in Clown College could totally write a thesis about the transformation. No, not me, I don’t have the credentials or motivation suited to such a task. Oh, all right I’ll do it.

Back in the way back day when dinosaurs ruled the world and the Mayans had not yet arrived on their galactic starships, there were two Saturday Night Live alumni named Will Ferrell and Adam McKay. Their SNL colleagues, obsessive, neurotic, and urbane New Yorkers, all of them I tell you, incessantly wrote about the trivial and not so pleasant pleasantries of daily life of people who live close or at least nearby people. But not these two for they hailed (or at least Ferrel) from a land of strip malls, culdesacs, and an almost ludicrous amount of grass fields, I mean really. It was known as “The Bubble,” for legend has it nobody from the outside ever came in and anyone from the inside who ever wanted to ‘do something’ had to leave the city limits, generally in bumper-to-bumper rush hour traffic, a feat few ever accomplished, at least on a regular basis. But to Ferrel it was merely called Irvine, California. Out from “The Bubble” came a new kind of comedian, the Ferrel Man Child: loud, brash, and wholly absurd. But above all other lowly adjectives, the Ferrel Man Child was defined by his overconfidence. He was a man not challenged in any meaningful way by society or civilization and walked this great land like a King: that is with a deluded sense of self-importance and entitlement.

The Ferrel Man Child was first seen in the realms of cinemadom in “Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy,” as a local anchorman in sunny 1970s San Diego. It was ripe territory for the Ferrel Man Child. The employment allowed his character to take all the credit for an entire bureaurcracy and think he deserved it too. He had a grand mustache at a time when that sort of thing was without shame. And he had a news team of enablers. Brian Fantana (Paul Rudd) was the man on the street. Champ Kind (David Koechner) was sports. And who could forget dear Brick Tamlin (Steve Carell) on weather. Turns out, the man was retarded, but nobody knew for years because doing weather in San Diego takes no brains at all. It’s Sunny! Everyday!

But Hark! What’s this?!?!? Out of nowhere and not taking notes or bringing coffee was a woman, a female reporter named Veronica Corningstone (Christina Applegate). The original movie relied heavily on one Ferrel Man Child joke in particular: that is making Christina Applegate look as uncomfortable as possible. Ten Years later, the Legend Continues, and even though there is still plenty of deluded male chauvinism still around, the themes are an entirely different animal, like say a sneaky snake instead of a giant panda, that sort of metaphor. Starting around 2010, after one great movie about NASCAR (Talladega Nights) and one okay movie about forty-something men living with their parents (Step-Brothers) the Ferrel Man Child reinvented himself in that grand old country of satire, lampooning Wall Street (The Other Guys) and Politics (The Campaign).  

It should be said that the choice of a sequel for ‘Anchorman’ by Team Ferrel/McKay is not simply a ‘get-the-gang-back-together-for-another-paycheck’ kind of job. They chose this sequel because even though the original movie was not a satire there lay in the promise of a sequel, the good territory for it. After all, it is a decade after the 70s (that means it’s the 80s) and although dinosaurs no longer roam the Earth, there is this new thing called 24 hour NEWS. This too is ripe territory for the Ferrel Man Child. Turns out everything that is stupid and petty about the 24 News Networks is Ron Burgundy’s fault. While enjoying a breakfast buffet in the New York Headquarters of his new workplace, Ron has an idea to get more ratings. “How about instead of telling people what they need to know, we just tell them what they want to hear?” What an idea! Cut to lots of patriotic talk about how great America is, a ridiculous amount of flashy graphics, highlight reels of only home runs and touchdowns (Whammy!) and sticking Brick Tamlin outside in the middle of a hurricane. They also have the idea of using police car chases as Breaking News. Ron has the great idea of speculating on air as to who is being chased and why when he has no real information to go on. The ratings for the 24-hour news network go through the roof.

For those who liked the first movie there are plenty of sequel jokes, that is jokes that are just like the ones in the first movie but bigger. So Ron recites even more absurds warmup phrases before airtime, plays his Jazz Flute in bigger fashion, and has an even bigger newsman brawl with even more famous celebrities in cameos. That’s great as long as there is plenty of fresh material and there is plenty of fresh material, but my personal problem with it is that I happen to be regular viewer of “The Daily Show with John Stewart.” That show skewers the 24-hour news networks on a regular basis so the jokes that are supposedly fresh for Team Ferrell/McKay is actually stuff I am already familiar with. I bet though that those who don’t watch “The Daily Show” on a regular basis will find all the 24-hour news network satire on the money.

My favorite part of the movie is neither a sequel joke nor a 24 Hour news satiric piece. For me that would be the inclusion of the great Kristin Wiig as a love interest for Brick Tamlin. It’s a match made in comedy heaven. She is as big an idiot as he is if which seems impossible but hey that’s how you know that they are meant for each other. It is a little dismaying though to see Wiig in this role at all. After the critical and commercial success of ‘Bridesmaids,’ I bet that she would finally become a movie star with her own annual string of movies. Somehow though Melissa McCarthy became the breakout star of that movie and Kristin Wiig has once more been relegated to supporting roles in the movies of inferior comedians. (I don’t include Ferrell/McKay in that group. I would say they are equals in comedy). This is idiotic and makes the capitalist in me a little sad. There is plenty of money to be made on the Kristin Wiig ticket and the studios are refusing to make it due to what has to be a sexist lack of imagination. 

The weakest part of the movie deals with a series of racial jokes. Ron Burgundy’s new boss at the station is a black woman. This unfortunately is as far as her character development goes as much of the scenes she is in don’t go further than Ron’s bewilderment as to what a black woman is doing in the room. Inexplicably she likes him enough to start dating him and eventually brings him home to her classy Upper East Side African American family. Ron spends his time at the table loudly talking jive, in order to instill racial harmony you see. The black people don’t do much of anything other than gasp in shock and anger. There is something that doesn’t quite work about this scene and it is kind of been milling around humor for a while now. Let’s say you had two white guys making racial jokes about ghetto blacks. That would not be okay, right? But for some reason this is okay here because of the presence of well-dressed and educated middle class blacks looking offended. Who is the joke on here? Is it on Ron Burgundy who can’t tell that the people at the table are not the type of people he thinks they are? Or is it on the black people at the table who are made to be nothing but insulted and uncomfortable? And what does it actually say? I think it says that Burgundy is deluded because these particular black people are not poor and uneducated and thus would not be speaking jive. But it also sidesteps any recognition that there are indeed black people who are underpriviledged, in poverty, and live in violence who do speak jive. This would be especially true in 1980s NYC, which had some of the most dangerous and dilapidated ghettos in the country at that time.

How about if this were the scene? The black woman takes Ron Burgundy back to a family dinner in a scary ghetto, but Ron Burgundy mistakes the family for a version of The Jeffersons. He makes idiotic references to moving on up to the East Side and doesn’t seem to notice that people are underemployed, come from terrible schools, and that brother 15-Year-Old Keenan was shot last week in an escalating series of gang violence. Ron can even start singing the theme song at one point and declare the virtues of Reagan Era trickle-down-economics. Edgy Satire, right? And it should make everybody not just black people uncomfortable to see it. Anyway that’s just a thought. Otherwise all the other jokes in this comedy land pretty well and I look forward to the next comedy by Team Ferrel/McKay.   

The Other Guys (4/5 Stars) August 12, 2010

The most recent collaboration between comedian Will Ferrell and writer/director Adam McKay (Talladega Nights, Anchorman, and Step Brothers) is a stereotypical action adventure movie about an odd couple of N.Y.P.D cops. One is a take charge tough guy played by Mark Wahlberg, and the other is a nerdy desk mammal played by Will Ferrell. They are known as the Other Guys as opposed to The Popular Guys who are played by Samuel L. Jackson and Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson. Those Guys specialize in the types of car chases and action packed machismo you see in run of the mill superhero/cops movies. Wahlberg, relegated to being Ferrell’s partner because he accidentally shot Derek Jeter, bemoans his sorry existence and takes it out on his partner. He calls Ferrell a “fake cop,” kidnaps him at gunpoint, hijacks his Prius and they both head out into the world to fight crime like The Popular Guys. Can Will Ferrell man-up and stop being such a pussy? Watch and find out!

The most recent collaboration between comedian Will Ferrell and writer/director Adam McKay is a sly social commentary that isn’t as much a parody of regular cop movies as it is a veiled insult to the entire demographic the earlier paragraph (and this movie’s marketing campaign) would appeal to. Out on the beat fighting petty crime, Ferrel and Wahlberg stumble assbackward into something much bigger. The only problem is that they have no idea what it is. It involves a sleazy Wall Street type played by Steve Coogan (Hamlet 2) and a huge investment bank named Llendl Corporation. Llendl’s company motto is “Were into Everything.” Wahlberg persistently assumes that drugs are involved. But as the movie points out, he only does this because he’s an idiot. It is the Will Ferrell character that figures out that they are witnessing a $32 billion dollar theft from unwitting investors in order to make solvent the huge investment bank. (In contrast, that high speed chase involving the Popular Guys at the beginning of the movie achieved nothing but the arrest of a couple of Jamaican’s selling marijuana). The Will Ferrell character is routinely bullied by the other cops (Rob Riggle amongst them) and called a pussy, a queer, a bitch, and several other epithets. His Prius, which gets great mileage, is also routinely derided for its unmanliness. This is all done in Ferrell/McKay style. So the insults are clever and we are invited to laugh at Ferrell. But then the movie’s plot does something quite extraordinary. It gives Ferrell’s character a smoking hot wife played by Eva Mendes and has him almost single-handedly solve an enormous crime that has as much complexity as the scheme in “Chinatown.” So was it wrong to laugh at Ferrell? Am I the idiot for having done so? 

The most recent collaboration between comedian Will Ferrell and writer/director Adam McKay is an absurdist comedy where realism is abandoned at every whim in order to get laughs. This is most evident in the presence of several ridiculous characters. One is a mild-mannered police chief played by Michael Keaton who moonlights at Bed, Bath, and Beyond and inexplicably quotes song lyrics from TLC. Another is Dirty Mike and the boys, a gang of homeless men that like stealing Priuses and having orgies in the back of them (“Soup Kitchens” I believe they’re called). There are also a host of very funny comic situations like a whisper fight at a funeral, Ferrell’s back-story as an accidental pimp, and the deaths of the Popular Guys via mind-blowing stupidity. Finally there is plenty of funny dialogue, the best of which is an argument about whether a lion or a tuna would win in a fight. The big question though is whether you can still take a movie seriously once the writer/director casts himself as Dirty Mike. Does Adam McKay want us to think? Or is this all for shits and giggles?

Perhaps this movie’s biggest fault is that it is intent on being all three movies. This makes the movie feel like it is constantly interrupting itself. Near the end when one of the movies becomes a little more interesting than the others (for me it was the social commentary) it seemed like a distraction when it changed course again. The parts of this movie are all very good, but there are too many parts and makes the movie seem overlong at points. This is a small complaint though. I would rather a movie gave me too much than too little and there is quite a lot here. 

Given the movies that Will Ferrell and Adam McKay have collaborated on, one might get the impression that they specialize in portraying arrogant alpha males behaving badly, but that would be an oversimplification. Alpha People are entitled to be arrogant to a certain degree if they actually know what they’re doing and are better at it than most people. What Ferrell and McKay are particularly good at conveying is Overconfidence. They know inside and out the type of guy who acts like he’s Alpha without actually being better. This type of guy is oftentimes confused with the Alpha Male because, at first impression, they both display a stunning amount of confidence. But there is usually a way you can tell them apart. In my opinion the main giveaway is if the guy equates his ignorance and stupidity with being manly. For example, it is common overconfident man-knowledge that the manliest beer in the bar is always the worst tasting god-awful swill you can find. Now if you knew anything about beer you might confidently point to a better brand. But it certainly takes more confidence to adamantly proclaim that the worst is the best. You may even go so far as to say that anyone who likes his alcohol to taste good is a pussy or fag. By the way, just the act of calling a guy a pussy is also very bold. Pussy, as we all know signifies feminine traits. So to call a guy a pussy in a derogatory sense is like insulting every woman in the room. If the main goal of your night out drinking is to get laid it should follow that you wouldn’t go out of your way to insult women. BUT, wouldn’t it also signify the enormity of your self-confidence to do exactly that and then be as forward as possible. I mean only someone who is truly better than other people, an Alpha Male, could get away with that sort of thing. So the logic goes around like this: You aren’t better than anybody. But to give the impression that you are better, you do something incredibly stupid because only a truly better person could afford to get away with it. And people do fall for it. Take for example, the death of the two Popular Guys. If they had actually survived their idiocy (which action movie stars do all the time), would you think they were stupid or badass? Why are some women attracted to bad boys? I mean that’s just retarded.

This line of logic leads to the sort of hilarious idiocy that is on full display in Ferrell/McKay comedies and especially in “The Other Guys.” The NYPD is full of officers that take macho pride in cracking down on petty crime while their very livelihoods are being put into risk through complicated financial schemes they find to boring and faggy to understand. A $32 billion theft is huge, but nobody besides the Will Ferrell character cares about the case. The Other Guys are ordered to turn over all the evidence to SEC, only to find out that the SEC agent is also the lawyer of the Wall Street scumbag he is supposed to be investigating. I assume that the makers of this movie we’re angered by the Wall Street fiasco of the past years. They wanted to make a movie about it but, at the same time, wanted to stay true to their chops of action/comedy. So in effect, what we have here is a subterfuge movie like Blood Diamond or Quantum of Solace. The audience walking into the theater has been promised silly action and comedy. The movie delivers on this promise but has an ulterior purpose. In this case: veiled ridicule for society’s idealization of ignorance. Of course the funny thing about making fun of overconfident people is that they won’t ever admit they’ve been insulted. They take the insult and brag about it. You can trick them, insult them, and laugh at them all you want but you will never win the argument. Take that Wall Street. 

Oh and by the way, Ferrell and McKay are huge pussies by having the safe, competent accountant married to an incredibly hot doctor. I mean she actually likes him and there is even a comic riff about them having great sex which apparently they enjoy equally. What fags.