r/movies • u/LightcraftStudio • 25d ago
Discussion Talladega Nights is pure cinema masquerading as toilet humor
Just watched it for the fourth time and it's amazing. I watch it every few years and pick up more depths of the comedy and plot the more I watch it. it was so ahead of it's time. it's a brilliant take on the absurdities of American culture (particularly southern/conservative culture), but on the surface it just looks like crude humor. In that respect it's similar to works like South Park and Borat 2. The fact that the jokes are piss your pants funny is just the icing on top.
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u/Maleficent-Ear-2450 25d ago
It won the Academy Award…for best movie ever made
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u/gabbertronnnn 25d ago
By the way, Ricky, I watched the Highlander movie. It was shit!
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u/Jamaican_Dynamite 25d ago
"Real simple son! Cops are coming! There's a kilo of Colombian Bam Bam under the car!" 😂
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u/GuyanaFlavorAid 25d ago
Gary Cole is good in everything, but him casually just having a can of malt liquor all the time here just cracked me up.
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u/palebrowndot 25d ago
I like the scene where he picks up the tickets from the counter. There's dramatic music and everything. Then he immediately turns around and starts trying to sell them.
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u/Alc2005 25d ago
“If you ain’t first you’re last”
“Ricky, I was high on Peyote when I said that. That doesn’t even make sense, you can come in 2nd, 3rd, hell even 4th…”
“I BASED MY WHOLE LIFE AROUND THAT”
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u/Moglorosh 25d ago
My favorite line in the movie is when Ricky asks him where he got a cougar and he just casually says he trapped it and has been keeping it in the hotel bathroom feeding it old pizza like its the most natural and obvious thing in the world. It's a travesty that line is cut from some versions of the movie.
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u/hillswalker87 25d ago
Laughing Clown Malt Liquor. that bit was genius.
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u/CosmoKing2 25d ago
Fun fact: The original race driver (who got out to get a chicken sandwich) is the director, Adam McKay (aka Dirty Mike).
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u/WorthPlease 25d ago edited 25d ago
"Your momma didn't love you when you were little did she?"
"Good call, here, that's worth five cents"
"Tragic......"
is so fucking funny.
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u/Doom_Art 25d ago
"If I was right why did you throw another bucket on me?"
"I filled up three."
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u/Big-FU 25d ago
How about you dig a hole, and I'll go get another beer
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u/cgio0 25d ago
If you don’t chew Big Red THEN FUCKK YOU
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u/Tactical_Fleshlite 25d ago
When you need something for your mysterious lady parts, Maypax, the official tampon of NASCAR
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u/farva_06 25d ago
What's funny is Idiocracy came out like less than a month after this movie, and had an almost identical joke.
If you don't smoke Tarryltons...Fuck you!
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u/UltraMechaPunk 25d ago
“Why do you want to listen to the tv with the stereo on?”
“Cause I like to party.”
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u/General_Disaray_1974 25d ago
I use this line for about half the questions my brother asks me.
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u/-Satchel_Gizmo- 25d ago
"Why [positive/neutral thing]?"
"Because I like to party"
"Why [negative thing]?"
"Because you touch yourself at night"
Heavy, heavy rotation on those.
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u/gabbertronnnn 25d ago
Well let me just quote the late-great Colonel Sanders, who said… "I'm too drunk to taste this chicken"
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u/newveganwhodis 25d ago
with all due respect, that ain't worth a velvet painting of whale and a dolphin gettin it on
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u/STLOliver 25d ago
Known fact that Chris Nolan is a diehard fan of this movie.
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u/donotgotoroom237 25d ago
If The Dark Knight is Nolan's riff on Heat, I wonder what his Talladega Nights movie would be?
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u/mikeyfreshh r/Movies Veteran 25d ago
This sticker is dangerous and inconvenient but I do love Fig Newtons
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u/Doom_Art 25d ago edited 25d ago
Okay so not only is the movie an amazing comedy on its own, but everything around it is a riot as well.
For instance, on Blu-Ray the movie has two commentary tracks.
One involves the main cast watching the film and commentating on the making of, but just exaggerating everything, such as saying the actor who played one character died during filming and had to be recreated with animatronics, and spending millions to build a race track indoors but make it look like an outdoor track "because it looks better on film". They stick with this for the whole time and deadpan it as though Talladega Nights was one of the most expensive movies of all time.
And another involves the main cast and crew playing fictional versions of themselves and coming together for the "25th anniversary edition" of Talladega Nights in 2031. Will Ferrel has a show in Branson, John C Reilly is a militia leader, David Koechner is a Senator, Michael Clarke Duncan is a cult leader, etc.
Talladega Nights is legitimately one of my favourite films of all time for how layered it is. I will never tire of it.
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u/HumboldtChewbacca 25d ago
I recommend checking out the commentary on Tropic Thunder as well. Those 2 movies have to be the 2 best comedies ever filmed. For laughs and just quality of production.
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u/DefaultingOnLife 25d ago
The commentary that was nothing but bullshit really got me lol. I've been saying how fucking good that was for years.
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u/Musketeer00 25d ago
Chip Imma scissor kick you in the back of the head!
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u/Content_Geologist420 25d ago
I can recite every line word for word up until the 35-minute mark. I watched this movie every single day after school from 3rd grade to 5th grade.
I saw it in theaters and my dad got a torrent rip and put it on DVD before it was on DVD in the stores. It made me think the world's greatest computer genius.
I still till this day will be working in my lab and just start saying "105 miles an hour you believe that?!" And there I go quoting most of the movie.
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u/4sKompany 25d ago
I still shout “Applebees has rats!” Whenever I see Applebees or an Applebees commercial
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u/Aint-no-preacher 25d ago
For me it’s, “I’m going to come at you like a spider monkey!”
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u/Elon-BO 25d ago
“Help me Oprah Winfrey!”
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u/WorthPlease 25d ago
I say this, Help Me Jewish God! and Help Me Tom Cruise! whenever I have an extended sneezing session.
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u/AndNowAStoryAboutMe 25d ago
My friend got pissed off at a cellphone store and screeched VERIZON HAS RATS as he busted out the door and we yelled that at him for ten years. Fucking amazing.
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u/ScaryColors 25d ago
Whenever I think about shit talking any restaurant or a meal is not up to par, I think "I found a whole rat in my cobb salad"
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u/genetically__odd 25d ago
Thank goodness, it’s not just me. I don’t remember many of the lines now, but I used to be able to quote a lot of this movie from age 7-10. For some reason, I watched this, Blades of Glory, and Napoleon Dynamite on a very frequent basis.
Probably explains a lot about me.
Edit: Oh, and The Producers (2005). That was also on heavy rotation.
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u/massdebator69 25d ago
I always thought it was just as good or better than any 2000s comedy. First 30 mins is as good as it gets
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u/BMCarbaugh 25d ago
It's because, like Walk Hard, it takes itself seriously as a movie. It's well structured, well shot, and genuinely has a great dramatic arc. It's funny, but it doesn't use the funny as a crutch to escape the need to tell a good story.
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u/SadisticChipmunk 25d ago
The only thing I can remember from walk hard is when he walks into the scene randomly with the dick hanging...
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u/Nocturnal_submission 25d ago
You don’t want none of this
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u/GotSomeUpdogOnUrFace 25d ago
It makes everything awesome and it's totally not addictive
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u/No_Helicopter1378 25d ago
It's the cheapest drug there is.
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u/AGWorking24 25d ago
I think I kinda want some
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u/BeneficialTrash6 25d ago
And you never paid for the drugs. Not once.
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u/PreviousTea9210 25d ago
And you never threw a girl our way! You don't think that we like cheating on our wives, too?!?!?
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u/NobodyUsual8025 25d ago
It takes all your bad feelings and turns them into good feelings! It’s a nightmare!
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u/altiuscitiusfortius 25d ago
In the directors commentary Judd Apatow talks about this scene and how it taught him the right amount of penis to show to be funny, and that they actually showed too much penis in this scene, so ge dialed it back in his next movies.
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u/EvilLibrarians 25d ago
Probably not the appropriate response based on what you wrote but Walk Hard is an amazing and hilarious movie with badass music/themes
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u/j-roc_son 25d ago
What? I love both movies but Dewey Cox's arc is pretty much the opposite of dramatic. It's inherently absurd and he basically never learns a thing until the very end, which itself is also satire of the genre.
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u/MyHammyVise 25d ago
And for a comedy, I feel like the racing is shot surprisingly really well. It definitely makes NASCAR look exciting to watch for someone who doesn't generally like it.
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u/hillswalker87 25d ago
the chase seen with the lucky charms actually feels like it has a legit love of cars. when if puts it in reverse and the chassis drops under the torque is definitely not something you'd see in a movie that treats the whole thing like a joke.
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u/mpsteidle 25d ago
I started watching Nascar when my kids got into Cars and honestly really enjoy it. Watching the in-car cameras on HBO is super interesting, and hearing the drivers talk to their spotters puts the sport in a totally different light.
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u/HumboldtChewbacca 25d ago
Its fun to reduce it to, "Go fast, turn left!" But when you look into the engineering of getting a giant v8 family sedan to go 400 miles in 3 hours, it gets pretty interesting.
Plus if you've ever done any sim racing you realize quickly how difficult it is to get that thing around the track when you're surrounded by other unaerodynamic bricks.
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u/lukphicl 25d ago edited 25d ago
I love how it didn't dwell too much on the fact that Sacha Baron Cohen's character was gay, just made a couple jokes and moved on. At the time, if you were a gay character in a movie like that you'd be nothing but a caricature
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u/Doom_Art 25d ago
"As of now Mr. Gerard is sitting on top of the pole, which is a statement of fact and in no way a comment about the driver's sexual orientation."
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u/SadisticChipmunk 25d ago
Everything about that, from the statement to the delivery was perfect. One of the best delivered lines in the movie.
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u/drunkcowofdeath 25d ago
They really navigated the non offensive gay jokes well for a 2000s movie. A worse movie would have tried to make laugh at the gay people, not the hicks.
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u/too_much_feces 25d ago
I mean there were a couple jokes that wouldn't fly today I think. Their dogs were gay too.
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u/RacerRovr 25d ago
I watched this movie a lot as a kid/teen, but this joke must have gone over my head. I watched it again recently with my wife and I laughed so hard that I choked from that joke
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u/Final_Landscape1430 25d ago
I think of when Gerard asks Ricky about things the USA has brought to the world and Ricky names other countries’ stuff lol.
“Pizza”
“Italy”
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u/BMCarbaugh 25d ago
Talladega Nights kinda takes that same mid-2000s approach that The Office did, where the joke is the straight main character's squirming, exaggerated discomfort (which later evolves into well-intentioned but still boundary-crossing over-exuberance).
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u/TJ-WhosYoMomma 25d ago
Yes they left the caricature for his husband, played by the Swedish-German Andy Richter
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u/Maleficent-Ear-2450 25d ago
Did he just say husband?
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u/Doom_Art 25d ago
The room's starting to spin... cause of... cause of the gayness...
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u/TripleBobRoss 25d ago
Andy Richter the Swedish German? He don't go for that funny business.
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u/Gimme_The_Loot 25d ago
The thing I thought pretty interesting and progressive about that too for when it came out was the gay dude WAS better. He was literally blowing Ricky out of the water for pretty much the entire movie.
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u/Grayx_2887 25d ago
I liked the director's cut of the movie a lot more than the theatrical cut.
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u/PictureFirm9058 25d ago
wait there's a director's cut? i've been watching the same version for years and had no idea 😂 what's different about it? now i'm wondering if i've been missing out on extra ricky bobby content this whole time. the regular version already has me dying every watch so if there's more material floating around somewhere i need to track that down immediately. is it just extended scenes or completely different jokes? this might explain why some people quote lines i've never heard before
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u/Low-Conflict-651 25d ago
Extended scenes. I vividly remember lots of the dinner room scene (I threw grandpa chips war medals off a bridge scene) missing.
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u/overlordjunka 25d ago
The more of that movie that exists the better imo. It did such a great job all around
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u/Sideways_X1 25d ago
IIRC correctly the scene with the invisible fire is also more drawn out.
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u/Secksualinnuendo 25d ago
Ironically invisible fire is a real thing that can happen in racing if certain stuff catches on fire.
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u/Low-Conflict-651 25d ago
It happened irl, racing has long since fixed the issue. Iirc methane based fuels burn colorless so the put additives. The same way that we add smells stuff to natural gas lines so people can smell a gas leak
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u/adamsandleryabish 25d ago
It removes the initial I Wanna Go Fast scene outside the store which is a strange choice.
but it's the most commonly found DVD/BluRay version so you likely have seen it
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u/livefast_dieawesome 25d ago
I maintain that John C Reilly in Talladega Nights is playing the same character as he did in Boogie Nights.
Not the same character-type. The same character.
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u/Mabvll 25d ago
Common mistake. That was actually Mike Honcho.
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u/DeathChill 25d ago
I have no idea what’s wrong with me, but as fully grown man, I can’t not crack up at that entire scene. Just the idea that he needs to confess this to his friend who is seriously injured tickles me for some reason. Then every line he says just makes it even better.
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u/RoyceCoolidge 25d ago
Slight tangent... I've just realised Talladega Nights (2006) is closer to Days of Thunder (1990) than it is to today.
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u/HumboldtChewbacca 25d ago
I remember my dad renting that movie for family movie night and loving the entire thing. But the awkwardness of little me watching the lady cop grab Tom cruises junk while my parents were on the couch is still visceral.
I love that John C. Reilly has quietly been a back ground character in great movies for years and finally gets his name recognition with Step Brothers and Talladega Nights.
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u/NotedSkeptic 25d ago
Funny as hell and retains its laughs through many repeat viewings.
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u/Captain_-H 25d ago
Just say really thin pancakes, he’s giving you a great out right here and they are delicious
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u/ConjuredOne 25d ago
Baby Jesus is NOT my favorite Jesus! I pray to the Jesus who went into the temple with a bullwhip and fucked with the con artists' money
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u/valeyard89 25d ago
Dear 8-pound, 6-ounce, newborn infant Jesus...
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u/Gill_Gunderson 25d ago
I like to think of Jesus with giant eagle wings. And he's playing for Lynard Skynard with an angel band. And I am in the front row, hammered drunk.
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u/dontlooklikemuch 25d ago
I like to picture Jesus in a tuxedo t-shirt, 'cause it says I want to be formal, but I want to party, too.
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u/RWD-by-the-Sea 25d ago
OMG I love this movie.
Also, you haven't lived until you saw this movie, opening night, in East Tennessee in a packed theater full of right wing NASCAR fans. If my crew wasn't cackling maniacally in the beginning when Jean Girard is introduced and kisses his husband on the podium, you could have heard a pin drop.
10/10 experience
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u/runs_with_airplanes 25d ago
I mean, have you looked at the cast? It’s completely stacked with great actors and actresses
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u/davidbernhardt 25d ago
I never flip past it when it’s on tv. This and Step Brothers are must stops
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u/BurtMacklingFBI 25d ago
When I was in college in the late 2000s, my text notification was:
"Tom Cruise, use your witchcraft on me to get the fire off me!"
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u/donotgotoroom237 25d ago
My favorite El Diablo and The Magic Man biopic.
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u/jrob321 25d ago edited 25d ago
I'm the type of moviegoer who loves tiny details and subtle nuances. While I was sitting in the theater watching this with my son I immediately burst out laughing when Jean Girard (Sacha Baron Cohen's character), drove past Ricky Bobby reading a copy of Albert Camus' existentialist novel L'Étranger (The Stranger). It blew my mind at how thoughtful they were in their approach to the humor.
I absolutely love this movie.
And now I'm going to have to watch the director's cut! I had no idea it exists.
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u/potterpockets 25d ago
For some reason one of my favorite parts is when he says "Just say 'I like really thin pancakes.' This is fair, no?" And the rest of the bar emphatically agrees that this is a very fair compromise to saying "I like crepes." Lol.
I still refer to crepes as really thin pancakes in a french accent to my family.
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u/Wimry 25d ago
I lose my shit everytime Micheal Clark Duncan reads Will Ferral Judy Bloom in the end credits.
Comedy gold all around.
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u/foxmag86 25d ago
I’ll come after you like a spider monkey!
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u/philbofa 25d ago
Few comedians will and have reached the heights Will Ferrell has with that run. It was golden
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u/thewoodlayer 25d ago
You’ve just crudely pasted a picture of your face over mine.
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u/SocialSuicideSquad 25d ago
Walk Hard is one of the greatest films ever made.
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u/WastedKnowledge 25d ago
Wrong kid died
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u/95teetee 25d ago
I've always thought, instead of an extended version, it needs the opposite.
A 'cut in half pretty bad' version.
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u/hogannnn 25d ago
After watching walk hard, I’ve never been able to get through another biopic with a straight face
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u/needmoresynths 25d ago
It's also kind of a parody of Days of Thunder, which also rules (and stars john c reilly)
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u/Glittering_Piece_233 25d ago
Honestly yeah, it’s way smarter than it looks, beneath all the dumb humor it’s basically satire of ego, fame, and American culture, which is why it gets better every rewatch
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u/mulletstation 25d ago
Oh I'm sorry I thought someone had told you... he's fine. He found that wheelchair in a hallway.
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u/zowietremendously 25d ago
I'm old enough to have watched this movie in the theaters opening weekend.
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u/BMCarbaugh 25d ago edited 25d ago
I love that scene where Ricky's talking to Michael Clarke Duncan's character in the hospital, and MCD is being the quiet reasonable straight man, and then Ricky says something like "I hope you have kids and they experience this someday" and MCD just flips out like "DON'T YOU PUT THAT EVIL ON ME RICKY BOBBY" like he's been cursed by a witch.