I hadn't intended to watch this movie but the opening credits were very intriguing.  It started out with title sequence that looked very much like West Side Story. All of the gangs in New York were invited to the Bronx to an organization meeting.  They met a flamboyant leader, named Cyrus, bent on creating a super gang.

When Cyrus was assassinated, a rival gang blamed the Warriors. All hundred gangs in attendance went after the nine delegates.  They had to make it from the Bronx all way back to their Coney Island turf with every gang in New York after them. It was a long night.

Narrowly keeping from getting caught and losing several members along the way they finally make it home only to find the rival gang there.  The leader of the rival gang laughingly admitted to the murder that was overheard by another large gang leader which cleared the Warriors.

Great movie.  Wery well done and very much so a must see, especially if you enjoyed West Side Story without the music.

During the movie there were advertisements for the game version for the PlayStation2 and X-box.  The graphics look identical to the movie and many of the same scenes were shown.

I expected this to be a Vin Diesel version of Kindergarten Cop, and I was largely correct.  However this movie was very slow and tedious building up to the good stuff.  The big Navy Seal changing diapers and coping with teenagers sneaking around and throwing parties is all pretty standard fare and predictable.  the director just long-winded the build up quite a bit.

Once the ninjas broke in the first time the movie just almost jerked to life.  Kind of like trying to start your car, and it just didn't quite hit.  Soon after that the movie came together for the last 45 minutes or so.

The last parts make everything else worth the wait.  Very enjoyable.  The movie is worth the rent (or the buy), but if you want to go "Yadda Yadda Yadda" as you skip forward to chapter 9 on the DVD.  That's where the oldest son, Seth, quits the wrestling team that his father wanted him to do, and joins the cast of The Sound of Music.  It gets interesting there.

Hal is a party animal.  Out every night, picking up cute girls.  Hanging on to a girl for only a short while until he finds something wrong with her, or until she gives up on him.

He runs into a hypnotist who changes his outlook.  He sees people who they are on the inside.  The beautiful girl inside the shell.  And in Hal's case, he completely falls for the most beautiful girl he's ever seen, inside a very, very large woman.

And predictably in the end, he learns that beauty is also inside, not just skin deep.  For an hour and forty-five minutes the movie goes traipsing down a predictable path.  But there was a very touching moment when he sees the little girl in the hospital that was just the cutest button earlier, now with true eyes is a massively scarred burn victim.  He holds her and understands.

This is quite possibly the stupidest movie I've ever seen, although I haven't seen Man with the Screaming Brain, yet..  Throughout history I have never shyed away from watching movies, even those that I know are supposed to be horrible.  And if the critics don't like a movie, I'm defiantly seeing it.  They rarely ever give good critiques, and movies like Gandhi win top awards.  I even want to see Gigli just to see how horrible it really is.

Luckily a lot of people enjoy stupid movies.  Anchorman has a vast contingency of fans that spent the movie rolling in the floor.  And that is absolutely great.  I'm not going to tell anyone that they are wrong for liking a movie, and the movie fans aren't stupid, stupid is just the genre.  A lot of people didn't like Airplane! for the same reason and I thought it was great.

Anchorman is the story of a news.. umm. anchorman in a time when women were just coming into their own.  By the clothes and hair it was set back in the late 70's or early 80's.  A woman gets brought in to give the news some diversity.  Ron falls in love with her and she with him, which only goes to complicate things.

The stupid parts?  How about an animated sex scene?  No, not an animated portrayal of sex, I mean a fantasy amusement park named Pleasure Land where cupids and unicorns abound and you make love on rainbows.

How about the street fight scene between the news teams of five televisions stations?  The only rule is no messing with the face or hair.  "Of course."  The lead of the Spanish Channel News Team shouts "Policía!" and everyone scatters, with the music riffs in the background taken straight from West Side Story's rumble.

During the end credits they even played outtakes.  FROM Smokey and the Bandit!  Wha?  Ha Ha.  OK, that was funny.

The best way to summarize the movie was a line from the final outtake.

This is ridiculous.

Nicolas Cage is targeted by modern Ghost of Christmas Future in a Ferrari -- HIS Ferrari.  Nick is a leading financial giant, in a world of merges and take overs, some of them hostile.  Too busy for family, his love life is nil, but WHOA what a sex life.  He's able to woo the finest things in life.

Running across a guy in a convenience store while he's picking up Egg Nog to drink alone, he tries to "save" him, talk him out of carrying a gun and such.  The guy spins things around, and tries to save him.

When he wakes up, his world is different.  No Ferrari, No apartment in the city, no $130 Million deal.  But what he does have it worth just as much, or at least he learns that it is.  He's now in a world married to his old "what if" girlfriend with two kids, including the cutest little girl that thinks he's an alien, and working at a tire shop for his father-in-law.

Pretty good movie.  It's a good "feel good" movie, but it's not the "get lucky" type of chick flick that it sounds like.  But it's well worth a watch in mixed company.  You can probably squeeze a kiss or two out of it, and then, who knows? 

StoryTeller had some nice things to say about it, from a woman's point of view.