The Headliner

The Campaign

Just in time for Election Day, here's your chance to watch the Will Ferrell–Zach Galifianakis satire The Campaign in the comfort of your home — the very place where you may have already planned to spend the weekend pondering your political options! To be honest, "satire" is a pretty strong word for The Campaign: Though there is some pretty savage stuff in there about the Koch brothers (extremely thinly veiled versions of whom are played here by Dan Aykroyd and John Lithgow, using their money to influence the titular campaign), most of what happens is pure silliness.

Though I wouldn't put The Campaign in the top tier of Will Ferrell movies, it's a serviceable entry at the level of, let's say, Talladega Nights. What put it over for me was Galifianakis's performance as Marty Huggins, a local boob thrown into the political arena by the wealthy, connected father he's pitifully desperate to please. Marty is basically a sweet idiot who's woefully ill-equipped to handle the effects that a brutal campaign will have on his personal life; if we didn't have the naive Marty to root for, The Campaign might be unwatchable for being too depressingly real.

This is 40 (Christmas)

Silver: I find my complete indifference to this trailer vexing. For a film written and directed by Judd Apatow I feel like I should have been laughing more. Even the bits with Apatow ringers like Jason Segel and Melissa McCarthy only elicited a smile from me. In just three films (This is 40 being the fourth) Mr. Apatow has proven that he’s successfully stolen the melodrama torch away from Cameron Crowe (for the time being). Apatow makes such a concerted effort for his films to tonally and thematically slalom down the narrative hill between humor and drama that films like The 40 Year Old Virgin and Knocked Up felt unnecessarily long, and a film like Funny People played like two different movies. So for a trailer positioning a film as THE holiday comedy it would have been nice to have a few legitimate laugh-out-loud moments (“Ah! Kelly Clarkson!”). Nevertheless, I’m going to chalk this up to bad marketing, this is a film (and filmmaker) I am more than willing to give the benefit of the doubt.