Review: Wake Up, Ron Burgundy: The Lost Movie

       When movies are made, there are usually some scenes left on the cutting room floor. Sometimes whole subplots are taken out, other times the plots are rewritten almost entirely. Such is the case with Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy. Given that Anchorman was largely improvised I wasn't surprised to learn that many scenes had been cut out of the final product. I was surprised to learn that the original version of the film was almost an entirely different movie. This early version of the script made it so far into production that it got filmed and shown to a test audience. When this test audience didn't like what they saw, the film was rewritten and we got the comedy classic we know and love. However, the footage of that original plot still survives, cut together with other scenes that were excised due to length concerns, as Wake Up, Ron Burgundy: The Lost Movie.

Review: Wet Hot American Summer

     A falling satellite, a talent show, a cook with PTSD, and a heroin binge. What do these things have in common? They all can be found in Wet Hot American Summer, a disjointed, manic spoof of teenage camp sex comedies like Meatballs. Co-writers David Wain and Michael Showalter worked together on MTV's sketch comedy show “The State” and later as part of the comedy trio Stella, along with Michael Ian Black, who also worked with them both in this film as well as on MTV. Their screenplay takes every opportunity to make a joke, and many of them are delightfully absurd. Many critics don't appreciate this film because I think they are trying to take it seriously as a traditional comedy. But that's not what it is, it's a send-up of the tropes teen sex comedies so often find themselves perpetuating. But this film doesn't limit it's focus to just spoofing comedies. It also spoofs a wide variety of movies including disaster movies and romantic dramas. Because of this, the film has too many different facets to be compared to any comedy that has come before it. The closest it perhaps the Zucker Brother's Kentucky Fried Movie, but this is still different because it manages to piece together a plot that can be followed throughout the entirety of the film. In my opinion, Wet Hot American Summer is one of the funniest movies ever made.