Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby (McKay, 2006) is streaming on Neon
This week marks the 17th anniversary of the week that I took over the Capital Times film review column from Graeme Tuckett. It wasn’t my first go round with the CT – I had reviewed films for them back in the late 80s when I was still a student but those pieces are now lost to the mists of time.
Capital Times didn’t make anything from the paper available online so, in exchange for writing every week for no money, I kept the copyright and posted each week’s reviews to my new blog, Funerals & Snakes.
The best film I wrote about in that first week was L’enfer, Denis Tanovic’s production of an unproduced script by Kieslowski.
Good as it may have been, that film is not available digitally in Aotearoa (you can rent a DVD from Aro Street or Alice) so today we celebrate the next film on the list, Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby:
The perplexing (and slightly pasty) charms of Will Ferrell are on full display in Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby. Ferrell plays another of his loveable man-children, the eponymous NASCAR driver who is forced to re-evaluate his life and values when challenged by macchiato-drinking Formula 1 driver Jean Girrard (a scene-stealing Sacha Baron Cohen). It’s pretty funny but it’s no Dodgeball.
That was my verdict at the time but, on discovering that the film is a favourite of Christopher Nolan, maybe it’s due for a reevaluation.
Also in that first column were Stick It (“… a girl-power gymnastics fantasy starring someone called Missy Peregrym and a decrepit-looking Jeff Bridges”) and the documentary history of the punk rock movement American Hardcore (“… I couldn’t wait to get home and listen to “Jessie’s Girl” over and over again to give myself a pop music exorcism”).
Further reading
The 2023 Show Me Shorts film festival kicks off in New Zealand on Friday and I’ve previewed four of the 86 films in the programme for RNZ.
