Anchorman is one
of my favourite movies. There’s just something about it that’s so ridiculous
and over the top that it’s perfect. I mean the part where all the different
news teams fight in an alley is cinema gold! All in all, fans of Anchorman had much to look forward to in
2013–the sequel to the film was announced and Ron Burgundy wrote a book! Well,
according to critics and fans alike, the second film didn’t go over all that well
and–after I raised my hopes that the book wouldn’t let me down–I’m sorry to say
that it did. Let Me Off At The Top: My
Classy Life and Other Musings was a huge disappointment, and below, I’ll
tell you why.
Let Me Off At The Top
is the memoirs of the number one news anchor in America: Ron Burgundy. He writes
about his humble beginnings in an Iowa
coal mining town through his whirl-wind career as the top anchorman ever.
It’s hard to tell you about the author of this piece. It’s a
book written as a memoir by a fictional character from a movie. I don’t know if
Will Ferrell (who played Ron Burgundy in the film) wrote it himself as he
pretended to be Ron Burgundy or if it was a ghost writer pretending to be Will
Ferrell as he pretended to be Ron Burgundy! For lack of a better way to say it,
I’ll just refer to the author as Burgundy
from this point out.
So, as stated before, this book is a memoir written by Burgundy and it’s all about his life (although most of
the time it’s so off topic that Burgundy
himself plays very little into it at all). After about the first chapter, Burgundy’s writing voice
comes off as nothing but arrogant and annoying. And (if we’re going to be
honest) if the movie Anchorman had
been any longer than it was, he probably would have come off arrogant and
annoying there too, but the movie was just enough of him and his news team (of
which he has the highest respect for but hardly mentions at all in his memoirs)
so to not become overbearing. In the book, it was all him. It was obnoxious to
begin with but almost unbearable after about half the book. Everything that
made him charming in the movie is forced and awkward in the book and just not
fun to read. There’s no humour because it’s so forced–this book was about as
natural as the polyesters that make up Burgundy’s
suits.
I had such high hopes for this book but unfortunately, it
fell short. It fell way short. Burgundy
comes off charmingly stupid in the film, but in the book, he quickly becomes
the worst person to ever have written a book (and yes, saying that a fictional
character wrote this book IS killing
me!). There are some great one-liners that came off naturally in this
unnatural/forced piece and they made me stop to think if they had been in the
movie, but most of it was just mindless filler, unfunny nonsense, and just
plain bad material. Honestly, there’s a whole ten pages on Ron Burgundy’s
interpretation of the history of Mexico and it’s awful. It’s truly
awful. If this book were a stand-up bit that Will Ferrell performed as Ron Burgundy,
it might stand a chance. But as a book that you sit and read, well, let’s hope
most people don’t waste their time.
My final thoughts on Let
Me Off At The Top: My Classy Life and Other Musings are to save your money.
If you’re a fan of the first Anchorman
movie and want more Ron Burgundy I suppose you could risk it, but for the love
of Odin’s raven, borrow it from a library and completely skip over the Mexican
history chapter! Ron Burgundy, I’m afraid to say, has not followed his own
motto and stayed classy.
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