(2004)
Maybe it’s a good thing that the news business in 1970s San Diego is a boys-only club. After all, it’s a Darwinian world where rival news teams rumble like West Side Story gangs, only with better weapons and the occasional murder and bloody dismemberment. So maybe the guys are just being protective when they try to keep newcomer Veronica Corningstone (Christina Applegate) out of the anchor seat, fobbing her off on cat fashion show stories… Naah, they’re just being classic male chauvinist pigs.
Ron Burgundy (Will Ferrell) is the alpha male in this pigpen, and the tension between his romantic feelings for Veronica and his impulse to block her professional advancement tears him apart. Since Ron is the most bubble-headed newsreader this side of Ted Baxter, it’s not clear why Veronica falls in love with him (well, he is a sharp dresser and plays a mean jazz flute), but at least she sticks to her guns professionally.
It should be easier to suspend disbelief for a movie whose deus ex machina is a talking dog, but it’s hard to buy an ending where Ron and Veronica find both personal and professional happiness together. Fortunately, it looks like obstacles lie ahead for the couple as they enter the early cable news era of the 1980s in Anchorman 2, due in December. You stay classy, Channel 4 news team.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tCWjo1ymhGs]