Was it any good? No, not really. I thought it was alright, but overall, I was disappointed. It's about on a par with a mediocre Family Guy episode; a few decent laughs, but a lot of gags that fall flat and a lot of pointless surrealism. If you want my advice, wait for the DVD.
Or, y'know, just download it, like you probably already did.
That's my short review, but the more I think about it, the more it strikes me that one of two things is going on: Either I'm getting old, or comedy is getting shit.
Ignoring the implications of the former being true, here's what bothers me about the latter:
1. Not just anybody can do comedy.
Mark Wahlberg, despite his recent attempts, doesn't work for me in comedies.
He's got a lot going for him; a likeable screen presence, a ludicrous movie star physique, some solid hits under his belt, but he just isn't naturally funny.
This is something that needs to be understood a lot more thoroughly these days.
Comedy, despite its poor relation status, is one of the hardest things for an actor to do.
Think about all the actors who were known as comedians until they turned in great dramatic performances. Tom Hanks was just that goofy actor from "Big", one upon a time. Steve Martin got excellent reviews for his dark turn in David Mamet's "The Spanish Prisoner." Robin Williams (the artist formerly known as Mork) was genuinely creepy as a deranged stalker in "One Hour Photo." Billy Connolly in "Mrs. Brown." Richard Pryor in "JoJo Dancer." Nobody took the Fresh Prince seriously until he was in "Ali."
The list goes on and on, but now turn it around and try to think of a respected, classically trained actor who has given a genuinely funny performance.
I liked Brian Cox in "Super Troopers," and John Gielgud said "cock" in the original "Arthur."
After that, personally, I'm tapped out.
Groucho Marx, amongst others, said that if an actor can play comedy, they can play anything else with ease. Or, to put it another way: Peter Sellers could impersonate Laurence Olivier, but Olivier could never have played Clouseau.
With all this in mind, it's time Hollywood stopped giving comedy roles to non-comic actors. Wahlberg is supposed to be a slacker and a loser in this movie - that doesn't really fly when you have 5% body fat and 15-inch biceps. Already physically miscast as a result, he just doesn't have enough natural comic ability to carry a role that already has a lot of weak lines.
2. Something happened, therefore it's funny, right?
There's a horrible, cringeworthy idea in comedy these days that as long as we acknowledge an event in popular culture, it creates a joke.
Seth MacFarlane has a lot to answer for on this one, but ultimately I think whichever drunk primates created the "Spoof Movie" movies are the instigators.
Ever since the whole "Meet the Spartans/Superhero Movie/Disaster Movie" cycle of celluloid diarrhea, audiences have been taught that as long as we show something recogniseable on screen, then that's funny.
"Ted," like some of the worst Family Guy moments, seems to agree.
At one point, the movie lifts an entire scene from "Airplane!", shot-for-shot.
They don't do anything different with it, they just show it to us again, recreated to the tiniest detail with different actors.
It's not funny, any more than that scene in "Meet the Spartans" is funny where they - for no real reason - show the clip of that androgynous person who was upset that society wouldn't leave Britney alone.
Acknowledging that there are things in the collective human awareness is not the same as saying something funny.
I'll prove it.
Knock knock.
(Who's there?)
Not only do these pointless non-sequiturs fall totally flat for me, they also prove distracting. The "Airplane!" scene made me wish I was watching "Airplane!", and it also made me think...
3. Audiences are treated like idiots.
Part of what bothered me about the "Airplane!" sequence was that some people were laughing because they'd never seen it before, which was hugely frustrating. Not only was the reference not funny, but a lot of people didn't understand that it was a reference in the first place, which means the movie was getting a few sporadic laughs off of someone else's work. That's plagiarism, plain and simple.
Aside from this, MacFarlane - who is clearly not a stupid man - is worryingly okay with giving his characters the same "ignorant and proud of it" attitude that makes his alleged intellectual opponents (people like Bill O'Reilly or Sarah Palin) so unpalatable.
At one point, Norah Jones has a cameo, and Ted refers to her as "half Muslim." When she corrects him "Half Indian," he shrugs it off by saying "Whatever; thanks for 9/11."
I'm struggling to find any context where that's not a comment which, taken to it's conclusion, blames all brown people for terrorism.
I'm not against a little working class pride, by the way. I love Al Bundy and Marty Crane from "Frasier", but the glorification of the blue collared slob has apparently now become so desperate and tapped out that it has sunk to the level of glorifying racists and morons.
Like I say, MacFarlane isn't an idiot, but maybe that's his problem. When trying to write "average guy" characters, he clearly doesn't understand that the average people who make up his core audience aren't actually a clump of overweight bigots with substance abuse problems. Ironically, his assumption that we, the blue collar audience, are all knuckle-dragging beer-swilling rednecks is, in itself, shockingly elitist.
MacFarlane, apparently, thinks he's better than his audience.
If someone would just make a movie where the jokes are funny, the actors delivering them are comedically talented and the audience isn't assumed to be stupid from the word "go," we might actually end up with... Shit, I don't know.
A comedy, I guess.
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