No, I am not Michael Blowhard. It’s just coincidence that he and I watched the same movie last weekend–Talladega Nights.

My impressions were close to Michael’s. It’s a few good jokes* strung together with a siller-than-average plot. They missed their chance to be the definitive NASCAR comedy; and even as a comedy, it would have had more red corpuscles if Ricky Bobby’s moral education had been more believable.

Quite long stretches of the movie seem to have been ad-libbed. You can get away with this if you’re a good natural comic, which Will Ferrell is, but still it shouldn’t be so obvious.

However, I stayed awake all through, after dinner with wine, which puts it in the top 33 percent on the Derb scale of watchability.

One odd thing was that I didn’t realise the gay French driver was being played by Sacha Baron-Cohen till my wife pointed it out afterwards. I’d seen “Borat” and should have recognized him. This says either something good about S B-C, or something bad about me, I don’t know which.

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*Well, they’re good if you don’t mind hillbilly jokes, which I suppose some people do.