Beyond the dinosaurs, this does incorporate a lot of atmosphere from the original series. In this version, Marshall, Will, and Holly are not related, and are all adults, so we get a lot of jokes about groping Holly’s boobs. But there are still cliff landscapes, jungles, lost cities, and the lizard-men Sleestaks, along with semi-evolved primate Cha-Ka.

But what it mostly is, is Will Ferrell doing some crude, sometimes gross, and generally pretty funny schtick in dinosaur lands – sometimes Laugh Out Loud funny.

It’s not really much of a parody of the old show – oddly enough, the Sleestaks are played pretty straight. And I’m not sure how much of this really needed to be in The Land of the Lost… pretty much the same jokes would have worked with any time-machine-throws-us-back-in-time story.

But, probably a lot of people seeing it have never heard of the original show.

Quite a lot of the movie takes place in a sort of desert Sargasso Sea of time; where artifacts from our world seem to have dropped in willy-nilly. I don’t remember that in the old show, but maybe that was in the 2nd or 3rd season.

The movie seems a little confused at times as to what kind of farce it wants to be. Still, Will Ferrell dumping dinosaur pee on himself, that’s entertainment!

Will Ferrell is Harold Crick, an IRS agent by day and.. well.. IRS agent by night. Other than work his schedule is pretty much open. He gets up at the same time every day, follows an exacting schedule (including precise breaks for coffee) and goes to bed at the exact same time each night. We assume he does something boring on the weekends, but it’s never mentioned in the movie. One morning while brushing his teeth Harold hears a voice… talking about him brushing his teeth. He hears it again while getting dressed… talking about him tying his tie.

After a few days (and a few amusing outbursts) he goes to see a shrink. She says he’s a schizophrenic while he just thinks he has a narrator. To that end she suggests he talk with someone versed in literature, so he ends up visiting a college literature professor (Dustin Hoffman.) At this point you’d be forgiven for thinking “yeah right, like the shrink would have suggested that.. and the professor would actually believe him!” and you’re right, neither thing would really happen. But Will manages to play Harold in such a sympathetic “everyman” fashion that for a moment you do think people would want to believe him just because he’s such a nice guy.

His narrator turns out to be Karen Eiffel (Emma Thompson), a noted author who is trying to get past a bad case of writers block on her current novel. She of course has no idea that everything she writes concerning Harold Crick actually happens to him, and she’s currently trying to figure out how to kill him off.

Oh yeah, the romance. Harold is in the process of auditing Ana Pascal (Maggie Gyllenhaal), a local baker who decided she didn’t want to fund the war in Iraq so she reduced her tax payment by the amount that would have gone to the defense budget. On a side note, I really like this idea… a line item veto on your taxes! I’d fund defense, but I’d really like to skip payment on the various entitlement programs and pork barrel projects that Congress keeps spending my money on. ANYWAY, Harold becomes smitten with Ana and since learning from his narrator that he is destined to die soon he decides to pursue her.

At this point it’s the typical “live for today cause you don’t know what tomorrow holds” type of story line, a little sappy but it’s interesting to watch Harold come out of his shell to pursue his interests. Usually a movie will go over the top at this point with the main character doing really stupid things, but in keeping with the low key nature of Harold, his desires are much more realistic and obtainable. This is also the point of the movie where you’ll say to yourself “damn, Will Ferrell can actually act!” You read that correctly.. Will Ferrell can act. Do NOT be surprised if he starts getting non-comedy roles at some point.

Stranger Than Fiction is a date movie, one that will certainly increase your odds of getting a little action on the couch. Even if you don’t have someone to watch this one with I think it’s worth seeing, it’s just a darn good movie. A solid 4 stars.

There really isn’t much to the plot, this is purely Will doing his thing. Ferrell plays Ricky Bobby, a man born to race. He turns into NASCAR’s greatest driver. He has it all and wins effortlessly until a F1 driver from France comes onto the scene to be his rival. Pretty thin isn’t it? But who cares, the real question is whether or not it’s funny.

This is the funniest Will Ferrell movie we’ve seen to date. Although that doesn’t say much, this is one of those movies that will make your side hurt. Our main concern going in was either it would be way too NASCAR centric and be tough for anyone who is not a fan to “get” the jokes or it would make fun of stock car racing so much as to offend the fans.

The movie does neither, it’s just funny. It’s crude, it’s rude, sometimes it’s even silly, but we dare you not to laugh. If you’re looking for some Days of Thunder style action, well, the racing is well done and believable. But see this for the racing, see it for the humor. I suspect this is going to be showing on a lot of DVD players in RV’s and SUV’s at the tracks next year. We give it 5 stars and look forward to seeing it again to catch the jokes we were laughing through the first time.

John (Owen Wilson) and Jeremy (Vince Vaughn) make their living as mediators in difficult divorce cases. When the spouses are yelling at each other about who gets the frequent flyer miles, these two manage to talk some sense into them and get the case resolved. The side effect of this is that they are really good at talking utter crap to get people to do what they want, especially women. This fits in perfectly with their hobby of crashing weddings.

Where most guys see weddings as horribly boring events that require us to change into clean socks, John and Jeremy see an opportunity to score free food and drinks. They also score a little something extra with the bridesmaids who have themselves all worked up over the ceremony. While I still couldn’t put up with the clean socks, I can certainly understand the lure of free… stuff.

Things are going great, the boys are scoring and having a great time until John falls for one of the bridesmaids. Now here’s where I expected the movie to turn into a chick-flick, I’d start yawning and just count the minutes till the inevitable happy ending. Surprisingly enough, that didn’t happen. Instead the writers ramped up the humor even more (and I’d been laughing out loud quite a bit up till this point) and kept the romance down to a tolerable level.

All the expected romantic-comedy queues are here… getting the family to like you, telling the girl you lied, getting into a fight with your best friend, and so on, but it’s done so well that I just didn’t care. I could run through a really long list but that would end up giving away the entire plot, but just think to yourself about the various possibilities that could happen when 2 guys hook up with sisters (one of which is a bit nuts) and go off for a weekend with the whole family that consists of a powerful dad, a horny wife, a jealous boyfriend and a gay brother. Most of what you just thought of is in the movie.

It did slow down some near the end as they had to wrap up the romantic stuff for the ladies, and as funny as the wedding crashes were, we did see a lot of them for the first hour of the movie. In the end the movie was just a bit too slow to get a 5 star rating, but it easily earned 4. Trim off 15 minutes worth and it might have been perfect.

Mitch, played by Luke Wilson, comes home early from a business trip out of town to find his wife having some sort of twisted orgy at home. His buddies hook him up with a house on the local campus. However, to keep it they have to form a fraternity. They do, and the house and frat quickly become party central with everything from Snoop Dogg concerts to nekkid KY Jelly wrestling.

Luke Wilson is pretty much the straight man here. Will Ferrell, playing Frank the Tank, steals many scenes in this movie. The other buddy, Beanie, is played by Vince Vaughn. If you’ve seen either Made or Swingers and enjoyed Vaughn’s characters in those movies, you’ll like him here. He’s money.

We were happy to see a sophmoric comedy that actually has an R-rating instead of the cursed PG-13. The nudity is still rather tame, but at least they didn’t pull any punchs when it comes to everything from swatting children out of the way to tying concrete blocks to pledge’s genitalia. There are some genuinely funny moments in the movie. Unfortunately it ends up being a bit disjointed with some slow spots.

Unfortunately the real slow spots in the movie are toward the end. The last half really drags quite a bit and the movie finishes with a whimper. The jokes attempted toward the end come across as just silly. The first half of the movie had us thinking 4 stars. The last half had us thinking 2 stars. So we’re gonna split the difference and give this Old School 3 stars. You can certainly skip this on the big screen, but there are enough laughs to make it a very worthwhile DVD.