For years, Armageddonwas certainly the most surprising movie to receive admission into the prestigious Criterion Collection. Technically it hasn’t been supplanted, but what if Criterion really did put out a special edition DVD of Will Ferrell and Adam McKay’sThe Landlord – you know, that hilarious little sketch that put Funnyordie.com on the internerd map. I’m not sure if the whole company is endorsing it, but on the Criterion blog (”On Five”), there’s at least acknowledgement and support for the recent “Criterion Edition” clip of The Landlord, featuring a commentary track (and video) from Ferrell and McKay.
The video itself is pretty funny, though it goes on way too long. They really should have stopped commenting when the short ends. Instead, they ramble on about Ferrell’s ego and then ultimately get serious and thank the fans for making it so popular. Also, it would have been more interesting or appropriate to the Criterion model to be more than simply a commentary. Maybe ten years ago commentary and Criterion were synonymous, but not anymore. Where is the film historian/professor? Where is the new interview with Pearl McKay? I love the reference to Rick Baker, but otherwise isn’t this a bit of a missed opportunity, as well as an overdone one?
Will Ferrell and Adam McKay’s video sharing site FunnyOrDie exploded over the summer with The Landlord, a one-joke short featuring Ferrell and a little girl with a dirty mouth. But the site has been widely criticized lately for failing to sustain the high levels of traffic delivered every time Ferrell is featured in a clip. A Hollywood Reporter piece last week pegged Landlord as both a blessing and a curse for the infant start-up: it attracted a huge amount of attention, but Ferrell and crew didn’t have enough quality content in the vault to keep visitors around, and though they’ve solicited successful contributions from stars such as Eva Longoria and Bill Murray, since there’s no compensation involved, no one with a Los Angeles mortgage to pay can afford to devote too much time to it. The conclusion: FunnyOrDie needs to pull from a wider talent pool in order to survive.
This week, they’ve expanded that talent pool with one key name, although whether or not it’ll solve Funny’s core problem is still debatable. In the clip above, Ferrell and McKay welcome Judd Apatow, writer/director of Knocked Up and producer of SuperBad. It’s a clever clip, clearly referencing if not the THR story specifically, then the general buzz that FunnyOrDie needs to become a money-making business, or die. But will Apatow, the busiest comedy producer in town, really prove to be a reliable fount of content?
We’ve had a bit of trouble getting this episode to go through the iTunes feed, so we hope this re-post will fix the problem. The original post, with episode description and embedded player, is here.
filmcouch-114
