![]() ![]() …It does serve up a pretty jaw-dropping array of remarkably crude, nasty, and at times pretty gut-busting jokes. ![]() Will you also laugh? In double-time, like a Rockette.Īnyone over 15… might sit in the theatre in stony silence. Will it make you wince with embarrassment? That’s a promise. We’ve seen it all before, but seldom with such reckless abandon, and never with a teddy bear. There are many such cultural references, and several celebrity cameos. “This is how the cast of Diff’rent Strokes feels,” Ted says as he takes a blue-collar job. He’s after Ted because the bear was once famous he’s positioned as a former celebrity who has grown up to substance abuse and failure. The thin premise is thickened only slightly by a subplot involving Giovanni Ribisi as a creep who wants to buy Ted and give him to his own son. When John and Lori are together, they have a believable chemistry: you’re actually rooting for these people, and you sympathize with the pain that John feels as he tries to come to terms with his own childishness (“All I do is smoke pot and watch movies with a teddy f in’ bear.”) Wahlberg is essentially the straight man, but he has a few good comic moments, including a lightning fast list of trailer-trash girls’ names that’s a classic of cultural stereotyping, which is the least of the film’s worries. Lori wants John to start to take responsibility for his life and put aside childish things (literally). The triangle forms the plot of Ted, and under the obscene jokes - Ted sometimes pushes envelopes you didn’t know existed - is a surprisingly sweet love story. “Are we having homosexuals over for dinner?”) about her choices. She’s the kind of woman who has to bring home takeout for three and then gracefully put up with the wisecracks (“Turkeyburgers?,” asks Ted from the couch. “I look like Snuggle’s accountant,” he says with the slacker’s indolent insight.Īgainst all odds, John has a girlfriend, Lori (Mila Kunis) who - in the manner of all 30-something women in these relationships - is trying to drag her boyfriend into adulthood even as his unrefined friend (a teddy bear, in this case) conspires to keep him perpetually adolescent, not to mention perpetually stoned. In one scene, Ted gets dressed up in a suit so he can apply for a job he doesn’t want. He’s voiced by Seth MacFarlane, the director and co-writer, with a similar sense of blue-collar transgression of his animated TV show Family Guy indeed, Ted sounds very much like Peter Griffin, the star of that show, and he has a similar throwaway tone of rude surrealism. The bear is a marvellous construction, a walking and talking special effect that has the adorable face of Pooh and the vocabulary of, well, poo. UNIVERSAL PICTURES�And for goodness sakes, put on some pants!� Wahlberg grins and bears the humiliation of co-starring with a plush toy. That’s not necessarily funny either, except when a teddy bear says it. ![]() Now, 27 years later, he and the bear are the kind of roommates who make up new words for beer, or who comfort each other through thunderstorms with their childhood Thunder Buddies song that glories in its unabashed vulgarity. John (Mark Wahlberg), the human in this relationship, is a 35-year-old man who, when he was eight, wished that his Christmas teddy would come to life. This is John and Ted’s excellent adventure. It’s just that when Ted, as the bear is called, begins to fulminate about, say, the post-coital behaviour of Boston girls (“now I’m gonna stuff my f–kin’ face with Pepperidge Farm”), it’s hard not to laugh because, well, a teddy bear is saying it. This shouldn’t be funny, of course: it’s not only dopey, it’s coarse and repetitive. The funny thing about Ted - yet another comedy about a dopey man-boy who spends his days (and nights) puffing on his bong and watching old TV shows, a character who has taken up permanent residence in the finished basement of American culture - is that his best friend is a talking teddy bear. This article was published (4270 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.
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