The Associated Press just got the memo: the 1970s are funny! "Platform shoes, leisure suits, fondue, fro picks. What used to be cool is now the stuff of comedy. When it comes to period comedies, the '70s are the equivalent of Victorian-era costume drama. While serious-minded filmmakers are forever reaching back to the time of royalty clad in waistcoats and dressing gowns, comedians are more likely to cull from the less halcyon days of disco and sideburns."
The AP article runs through the history of Me Decade-based comedy, from movie parodies like I'm Gonna Git You Sucka! to the long-running sitcom That '70s Show to the one movie that really got it right, Dazed and Confused. Not surprisingly, Will Ferrell is singled out as one of the movement's leaders, given his retro roles in Anchorman and now Semi-Pro. "Whenever I look back at old photos and this and that, it just seems like such an alien time," Ferrell said. "The '80s are funny too, and I guess we'll look back and the '90s will be funny too, but the '70s are holding strong."
While we're all waiting for that wave of hilarious '90s-based humor, we might as well point out the obvious reason Ferrell and his cohorts are so fascinated with the '70s: that's when they grew up. (Farrell even confesses "I was so into the bicentennial. No joke. I bought a Liberty Bell necklace that was pewter. It was like a prized possession.") The new issue of Sight and Sound takes a look at Farrell and his somewhat more respectable contemporaries in "Indiewood" or "The Frat Pack" — Wes Anderson, Alexander Payne, Spike Jonze, Paul Thomas Anderson, etc. — and finds the '70s influence alive and well.
"Many of them had emerged from Sundance in the mid-1990s and they shared that elusive 'indie sensibility' even as they moved into studio production; there were rumours that, like the much-mythologised Movie Brats of the 1970s, these guys hung out together. . . The comparison, and the self-consciousness, were almost inevitable since the rebels arrived on the backlot at the peak of 1970s retro — in music and fashion as well as in film culture." The piece goes on to note that Indiewood was influenced not only by the Movie Brats, but MTV and SNL in equal measure, which is where Ferrell comes in. Indeed, the Semi-Pro star finds an unlikely defender in the notoriously prickly David O. Russell, who served as an executive producer on Anchorman: "I am a comedy snob, and Will Ferrell is sublime." We think he means "groovy."
