![]() ![]() MacFarlane never stops providing Ted with suitably offensive one-liners: the bear, for instance, talks of suing the toy manufacturers Hasbro for not giving him a penis, and dismisses an unattractive, overweight little boy with the line: "Back off, Susan Boyle". The two are enthralled by the popular culture of the 1980s, and Ted has an encyclopaedic knowledge of films and TV. But he constantly leads John astray, most notably attracting him to an orgiastic party attended by their hero, the minor movie star Sam Jones, who played Flash Gordon in the 1980 film version of the comic strip. The bear must go, and he's found a job at a supermarket where his every outrageous depredation is followed by a forgiving promotion. The crunch comes when Lori and John return from a dinner celebrating the anniversary of their first date to find Ted carousing with three hookers, one of whom has defecated in the corner of the living room after playing truth or dare. A triangular relationship is completed by the sensible, high-flying business woman Lori (the delightfully confident and puckish Mila Kunis), who, after four years of going steady, is tired of John's devotion to Ted and his inability to commit. John is in a dead-end job with a car-hire company, Ted is as demanding of his attention as Kenneth Halliwell was for Joe Orton's in Prick Up Your Ears, though the nature of their intense friendship is far from gay as Ted is obsessively heterosexual. His face is immobile, but his voice (provided by Seth MacFarlane himself), eyes and body language are frighteningly human, a triumph of digitally created image-making. By this point, Ted has become real to us, a foul-mouthed, acerbic, wisecracking ex-celeb. But as with everything else the audience gets bored with the novelty of a talking bear and Ted's popularity is short-lived.īy the time the film's title comes up after the re-credit sequence, Ted's a nobody and we jump to the present where the 35-year-old John (Mark Wahlberg) is stuck with his friend for life, the cynical, disenchanted Ted, watching TV and getting high on marijuana. Ted immediately becomes a national celebrity, and in a glorious montage we see his rise to fame, his scabrous repartee causing Johnny Carson to collapse with laughter on his TV talk show. Which he does, not as an imaginary friend of the kind we all have had or as an invisible rabbit like Harvey, but a real-life "thunder buddy" to console him at anxious moments. John gets a large teddy bear for Christmas, christens him Teddy and wishes that he could come to life. Ted opens in 1985 in a wintry Boston so full of violence and prejudice, narrator Patrick Stewart tells us, that a Jewish kid immediately joins a band of Irish-American antisemites in tormenting the film's lonely eight-year-old hero, John Bennett. ![]() Told by her suave English lover Rex Harrison that she's funny, the Austrian refugee Lilli Palmer asked: "Funny ha-ha or funny peculiar?" I found this weirdly disturbing movie funny in both of the senses referred to in the 1945 British film The Rake's Progress. ![]() It's the big-screen debut as director, co-writer and co-producer of Seth MacFarlane, author of the popular, envelope-pushing American TV series Family Guy and American Dad. These observations are provoked by some very sniffy and patronising reactions to the calculatedly provocative film Ted. ![]()
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