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CRITICS TALK A good populist game. Thirty-five years after Pauline Kael published Trash, Art and the Movies, they have little choice. But in some ways, the talk doesn't seem sincere. Too often the films that critics take seriously are the films their old professors and critical heroes told them they're supposed to take seriously. I don't just mean films based on history and literature, but films affixed with some sort of art-house pedigree, like ultraviolence or subtitles—or films that are directed by Steven Spielberg, Brian De Palma, Tim Burton or some other genre-loving populist filmmaker Kael anointed back in the day, thus giving young critics permission to take them seriously, too.

I mention those three directors not to tear them down—anyone who reads this column regularly knows I think they're giants—but to suggest that legitimacy accrues to those filmmakers who already have it. Deep down, even critics who fancy themselves rebels lavish attention on films they think they've been conditioned to favor, while ignoring or dismissing movies that are scruffier but just as surprising and substantive. This past spring, for instance, critics pored over Bernardo Bertolucci's sensual but lumpy and simplistic 60s drama The Dreamers, because it was directed by a onetime master and Kael anointee, and because it flattered their own gauzy memories of young lust and the great films referenced by Bertolucci. Both the film and its mixed but loving reception amounted to a Boomer nostalgia trip.

Some hit movies of substance haven't been taken seriously, either, despite (or maybe because of) the fact that their studios packaged them as entertainment rather than personal expression. Zack Snyder's Dawn of the Dead remake did well at the box office, but it was dismissed as a glorified midnight movie—even by some critics who liked it. Few reviews delved into its awareness of post-9/11 trauma, the speed-metal vigor of its filmmaking or its illustration of how one's moral sense can be dulled or sharpened by chaos. (Remember the rooftop scene where Sarah Polley's heroine chastises her fellow mortals for coldly sniping at zombies that resemble celebrities?) By and large, the reviews didn't connect the film with life, much less presume that audiences would.

Spider-Man 2 might meet the same fate. In a superficial sense, it hasn't been ignored; it's a massive hit. But few reviews have bothered to take it seriously as a movie that hits basic, powerful themes in ways that resonate with ticket buyers. Director Sam Raimi and screenwriter Alvin Sargent hit themes of social striving and double lives with unpretentious simplicity and directness. It has as much or more on its mind than the two Jurassic Park sequels or Tim Burton's Planet of the Apes remake, all of which were taken far more seriously by critics and the entertainment press than Raimi's movie. Despite this, fans are seeing Raimi's movie two and three times, not because of the hype (hype didn't make hits of The Hulk or Daredevil, or the last Batman movie, for that matter), but because they're able to look past the film's colorful surface and see themselves in Peter Parker. (Snob critics can't be bothered to do this, so they fall back on the moviegoers-as-sheep explanation.)

As you read this column, Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy is the country's second-most popular movie, and it, too, is being dismissed with faint praise. The film, starring Will Ferrell as a super-macho, jazz-flute-playing anchorman reigning over San Diego in the side-burned 70s, is no comic masterpiece—far from it. But its conception and execution are solid, original and on-point, much more so than the typical feature based on Saturday Night Live-style sketch comedy. (The director, Adam McKay, is an SNL veteran who cowrote the script with Ferrell.)

You can feel free to ignore any pans that complain about the creators' roots in television, or the fact that Anchorman is not really a structured movie, but a collection of sight gags and silly exchanges built around a pretty loose story. The same complaint could be leveled against almost anything by the Marx Brothers, Laurel and Hardy, Jerry Lewis or Mel Brooks, and in any case, is completely irrelevant. What matters in comedy isn't structure, but originality and style plus a willingness to focus all the gags on a couple of pet themes or motifs. Anchorman manages all this quite well—and so unpretentiously that I wouldn't be surprised if critics missed its serious theme: the destructiveness of male vanity and aggression.

Rich and famous local anchor Ron Burgundy is Ted Baxter plus Hugh Hefner: a living, breathing example of a "bachelor lifestyle" that was nearly treated as a statement in the 60s and 70s, but was really just a cover for male privilege. His "Action News Team" includes cowboy-hatted sportscaster Champ Kind (David Koechner), who's so macho you just know he's denying something; mustachioed city reporter and ladies man Brian Fantana (Paul Rudd), who competes with Ron as a Casanova, and wears a lethal brand of musk called Sex Panther; and weatherman Brick Tamland (Steve Carrell), who has an IQ of 48. ("People seem to like me because I'm polite and rarely late," he says, blinking like a toad.)

Ron and his cohorts lord over the women in the newsroom and in the city at large, groping any little filly that strikes their fancy and recounting their bedroom exploits in language rife with talk of subjugation and war. Their world is upended by the arrival of female reporter Veronica Corningstone (Christina Applegate), who wants to be an anchor like Ron and eventually gets her wish. Of course all the guys compete for Veronica's attention, and of course Ron wins, and finds himself embroiled in an affair-cum-competition that's like His Girl Friday with a head injury. (Veronica isn't an idealized figure, but an equally vain, equally self-important version of Ron. "I am good at three things," she declares. "Fighting, screwing and reading the news!")

When Ron is late for a newscast—thanks to a highway incident that employs Jack Black in a cameo as a biker—Veronica fills in, and does such a good job that the station makes her co-anchor. Love becomes war, and the sublimated, sexualized aggression the lovers feel for each other comes boiling to the surface. (When the mic isn't turned on, Ron mutters to Veronica, "I'm going to punch you in the ovaries," and she spits back, "Jazz flute is for little fairy boys.") Late in the picture, Ron and Veronica have an argument that degenerates into a brawl so violent that one can envision John Wayne and Randolph Scott standing off to one side, shielding their eyes and muttering, "Jesus."

The performers sell this material by playing it straight; McKay helps them out by pretending the story is an epic with dire consequences. The opening montage suggests you're about to see a fairy tale, which in a sense you are. Ferrell adds another memorable character to his growing gallery of freaks, many of whom are united by an infantile machismo and inability to understand their smallness in the greater scheme of things. Like Peter Sellers, Ferrell's dementia erupts at the damnedest times, and it's full of poetic touches that suggest he's actually thought not just about the costume and the catchphrases, but the character's soul, whatever that looks like. (Like Jerry Lewis riffing on Proust, Ferrell's ad-libbed dialogue often references scents. He brags that his apartment "smells of rich mahogany" and says of Veronica, "She has beautiful eyes, and her hair smells like cinnamon.")

This isn't dumb comedy; it's smart dumb comedy. Without putting too fine a point on it, Anchorman actually defines a specific cultural moment in the United States: the Nixon-Ford era, when heterosexual single men thought "liberated" was a synonym for "easy," and women entered workplaces previously ruled by men and sometimes felt obligated to have empty sex with men in order to gain admission to their boys club. The men's loutish behavior is funny because it's portrayed with such an overwrought sense of entitlement, practically as the spoils of war.

Yet despite the sex jokes, Anchorman never seems lewd, because it finds the ringlet-chested men and their dewy-eyed conquests ridiculous, and subtly sympathizes with the women who have to put up with their bullshit. When Veronica makes inroads at the station, the other women are inspired, even though the film never pretends her line of work is noble or even difficult. They rebel in small ways; one woman who's catcalled on the way into the office turns to the news team and says, "Children, grow up." Amen to that. o