Saturday, December 21, 2013

Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues [2013]

MPAA (PG-13)  CNS/USCCB (A-III)  ChicagoTribune (2 1/2 Stars)  RE.com (2 1/2 Stars)  AVClub (B-)  Fr. Dennis (0 Stars)

IMDb listing
CNS/USCCB (K. Jensen) review
ChicagoTribune (M. Phillips) review
RE.com (M. Zoller Seitz) review
AVClub (B. Kenigsberg) review

Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues [2013] (directed and cowritten by Adam McCay along with Will Farrell) is a really unending parade of racial/racist jokes about Blacks, Hispanics, even Filipinos (!) with a smattering of Polish jokes (to remind Poles and really all Slavs/Central and even Southern Europeans that when white hooded folk of WASPish / Aryan stock talk of "white people" they don't really mean to include them ...).  Of course the trailer to the film already featured a racist dinner scene at an African American home (all that was missing would have been Will Farrell's character asking "Where's the watermelon?") so what would one really expect?

Well, I would have expected a boycott of the film by critics AND THE CNS/USCCB (U.S. Catholic Bishops' Media Office) to give the film at minimum an "L" rating ("limited adult audience, films whose problematic content many adults would find troubling") which the CNS/USCCB recently gave 12 Years A Slave [2013] (!), and more appropriately an "O" rating ("morally offensive") which it recently gave American Hustle [2013] (FOR LANGUAGE and _PROVOCATIVE CLOTHING_) and had previously given to the children's film Gulliver's Travels [2011] (because it contained a scene in which Jack Black's "giant" Gulliver (discretely) pissed on the Lillipots' castle and, accidentally, their king to put out a fire, when the Lillipots' fire fighters had run out of water ;-). 

Given that the majority of American Catholics today belong to the very ethnic and racial groups targeted in Anchorman 2's dimwitted dialogue while NOT A SINGLE REVIEWER FOR THE CNS/USCCB is of non Irish / German extraction, perhaps some changes in the CNS/USCCB's media office are in order so that the reviewers become far more reflective of the tremendous ethnic/racial diversity of the Catholic Church in the United States today and really in the world.  We are supposed to be a universal church.  Racial jokes especially when it's NOT EVEN CLOSE but A PARADE OF THEM ought to earn a film at minimum an "L" and more appropriately "O" rating.


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