**
Ted is a highly raunchy comedy centered on a 35-year old underachiever
(played by Mark Wahlberg) and his childhood friend, a now perverse teddy bear,
who by virtue of a wish had come alive.
It’s written and directed by Fox animation mogul, Seth MacFarlane, who
is behind such popular shows as Family Guy, American Dad, and the Family
Guy spin-off, The Cleveland Show. For
those of you unfamiliar with MacFarlane’s prime time animated creations, these
shows have made their mark by pushing the envelope in both anti-political
correctness and various forms of vulgarity, ranging from musical numbers
featuring aborted fetuses to every type of scatological and sexual humor
imaginable. Another feature of
these shows is their constant referencing to Generation-X pop culture
(MacFarlane was born in 1973), which seems to be a fad these days in more
mediums than just film/television.
Watching Ted is something
akin to reminiscing with an old friend about, to borrow a phrase from Pauline
Kael, “the crap from their childhood”.
Usually, I consider this a very cheap shot, much in the same way as we
regard individuals who casually drop names for affect. In Family Guy, this sort of referencing actually works very well,
because it’s presented in a manner as to where they are able to put a spin on
it. For example, in a certain
scene in Family Guy, there is a
reenactment from the shower scene in the 1982 film, Porky’s, in which one of the characters is viewing a group or
young women taking a shower. In
the original film, a group of boys peek through a small hole in the wall to get
their glimmer. In Family
Guy however, after we are given the same
perspective as the original film, we see that Peter Griffin is merely standing
in the shower room along with the girls, holding a small chunk a wood with a
hole in it. It’s this sort of
unexpected whimsy that make these references successful, and virtually all of
the pop culture references made in Family Guy are done in a similar spirit. In Ted however, there’s no spin, just a blatant onslaught
of casual references inserted ad nauseum. It’s as though MacFarlane expected that
at the mere mention of these, he were allowing the audience to share in a
series of “in jokes”. As I said
earlier, it’s a cheap shot at best, but I’m at least grateful that the
characters are of the correct age to be making such references, unlike the
recent film, Juno, which did more
or less the same thing, but with a protagonist who was born well after the pop
culture items she constantly alluded to.
I make such a significant
point of the pop culture infusion in Ted
because it’s a major component of what Seth MacFarlane’s brand of humor rests
on. Unfortunately, where it has
worked quite successfully in his animated shows, it doesn’t quite translate to
live-action film. Another significant
facet of MacFarlane’s brand of humor is the raunchiness. And oh boy, is this film raunchy. I won’t go into details, but this film
was given an “R” rating, and it deserved it. Ted, while not
a particularly funny film, gathers its biggest laughs from its most distasteful
jokes. There were numerous times
where I had laughed uproariously, only to be ashamed of myself a few moments
later for realizing what it was I had laughed at. Such as it is with MacFarlane’s brand of humor.
Seth MacFarlane
himself is something of an enigma.
An enormously multi-faceted talent, if you’ve seen him in interviews
then you have learned that he actually possesses very refined tastes. He’s a great admirer of such figures as
Rex Harrison and Frank Sinatra. A
talented vocalist himself, he recently recorded an album of 1960s Sinatraesque
big band arrangements. So, it
comes as quite a shock when you are exposed to the kind of jokes he employs in
his animated shows, and in Ted. But at the same time, there’s the
guilty sensation of actually enjoying them.
The
jokes in Ted unfortunately are not
enough to carry the film. And as
it happens, the only funny character in the film is Ted himself, who is voiced
by MacFarlane. There really isn’t
much for the other characters to do.
They are just there to serve the film’s mundane plot, and most of them
are very two-dimensional. The
story, which is uninspired, is also so formulaic that the audience can predict
everything that is going to happen in the film within the first fifteen
minutes. I felt that had the film
managed to be more zany and unpredictable, as Family Guy is, that it would have been more successful. There’s a good concept here, what with
the talking teddy bear, but it gets horribly diluted with the stale, rehashed
story they chose to pursue. If you
watch Ted, you’ll get more than a
few good laughs sporadically throughout the film, but the rest is a big
yawn.
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