I gained an unfortunate curse in college. During my time working with the Cornell Concert Commission, I had the “professionalism” thing drilled into my head so much – and had to work in role model positions enough where I had to practice it – that I find it hard to get excited over celebrities when I see them in person. They are, honestly, just people like you and me.
What this leads to is a slightly surreal situation when I see one – “Oh, there’s ______. Yup.” What I don’t normally have to deal with is seeing more than one at a time, but when this does happen, it leads to an exponential growth of the surreal feeling I get.
No time has that ever been more true than tonight – for the Anchorman seminar I talked about a few weeks back (note how the card says “Special screening”) was not in fact a seminar. It was the NYC Premiere.
I can only write about what happened as though I’m retelling it in one big gasp of breath. The story is too disjointed for regular sentences.
So.
At around 6:30 James Lipton got out of a big humvee and then Al Sharpton came out from down the street with two girls on his arm (turned out to be his daughters!) and then George Whipple went by and we freaked him out by saying hi (the eyebrows went up!) and then we talked to other people in the crowd none of whom had tickets and then finally we were let in around 7.
And at the reception Al Sharpton was in the corner and James Lipton looked lonely and Amy Poehler looked really bitter (she’s a little hard to recognize with the makeup off) and then the crowd just gradually grew and we saw some journalists we didn’t recognize and the finger food was decent and there was a giant table where they were pouring scotch and more people I didn’t recognize came in and then Kenan came in and Katie said he was in Burgertime (instead of Good Burger) which made me giggle and then she started going for autographs and got Kenan’s and Zoe Saldana and then managed to get Tina Fey’s and I heard Tina say “Aww that’s so SWEET!” to her at least four times and then we saw Will Farrell progressing slowly down the interview line and Katie managed to step on James Lipton’s foot and said “I’m sorry Mr. Lipton!” and he apparently REALLY does talk like he does on tv, and then Paul Rudd came in and okay this crowd was too much so we went to get seated.
After considering the placement of the reserved seats and our leg room where we were sitting we moved up behind two reserved seats which happened to belong to Bill Kurtis who was the one that was going to be interviewing Will Farrell in character and then we saw the other reserved seats start to fill in and Jimmy Fallon was less dressed up than I was (shock, awe) and Gwenyth Paltrow was sitting in Christina Applegate’s section, right next to her in fact, and she looked pretty good for having just had a baby, and there were more SNL cast members like Molly Shannon and then okay time for the movie to start but wait there’s Susan Sarandon and Tim Robbins and their kids wtf are they doing here?
Bill Kurtis gave the opening speech and took a shot at Michael Moore which caused an exchanged glance between Sarandon and Robbins, but afterwords Kurtis gave Robbins a reassuring pat on the shoulder, very strange and the movie started. During the movie Bill and Tim were laughing by far the loudest out of anyone in there and at one point Christina Applegate got up to go out of the room but when she came back she sat on the stairs about five feet from me for the rest of the showing which was rather amusing but then again I was directly behind Bill Kurtis so what the hell and I’ve never been at a movie with so much applauding and cheering and laughing, are all premieres like this?
*deep breath, calm down*
Okay, here’s the serious movie review: Go see it. It was quite funny. The plot isn’t deep, and it’s a pretty typical “wacky lead character” comedy, but there’s so much oddball stuff, so many fantastic cameos – at least three Mr. Show alums, as well as the best comedy fight scene in the history of film with essentially FOUR cameos, including someone I’ve mentioned in this writeup already – and Steve Carrell literally steals the most laughs I’ve ever seen. Like Dodgeball, you will find yourself laughing at goofy shit and not caring. See it with the kind of friends you see screwball comedies with, and you’ll have a good time. And stay all the way through the credits.
As for Will Farrell’s in character interview – apparently Ron Burgundy had some homosexual relationships. By “some”, I mean “eleven” – straight from the horse’s mouth. The Q&A was not quite as funny as the movie was, but it was fun watching Will Farrell improv.
And then, it was over, and we headed out (it was late and I was sort of dead tired of people watching), and I think at least one idiot paparazzi accidently took our picture.
So. Yeah. Kind of a crazy night.
