Ted (2012)

2012, comedy, hollywood,

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Directed by	Seth MacFarlane
Produced by	Seth MacFarlane Scott Stuber John Jacobs Jason Clark
Screenplay by	Seth MacFarlane Alec Sulkin Wellesley Wild
Story by	Seth MacFarlane
Narrated by	Patrick Stewart
Starring	Mark Wahlberg Mila Kunis Seth MacFarlane Joel McHale Giovanni Ribisi
Music by	Walter Murphy

John Bennett is a grown man who must deal with the cherished teddy bear who came to life as the result of a childhood wish...and has refused to leave his side ever since.

PLOT 

John Bennett, (Brett Manley) an 8-year-old boy who lives in Boston, is friendless as nobody will play with him. On the Christmas morning of 1985 John gets a teddy bear from his parents as a Christmas present and names him "Teddy" (Zane Cowans). That night John wishes Ted was alive so he can have a friend and his wish is granted by a falling star. The next morning, Ted comes to life with the mind of a human such as being able to walk and speak. At first both John and his parents are scared, but soon become overjoyed. Soon after, Ted becomes famous world-wide, but his fame is short-lived.

Twenty-seven years later, in 2012, John (Mark Wahlberg) and Ted (Seth MacFarlane) are still best friends and live together in an apartment in Boston doing drugs and boozing while watching TV. John's other room-mate and girlfriend of 4 years, Lori Collins (Mila Kunis) becomes annoyed that John is spending time with Ted and that he is acting like a child. After their dinner date one night, John and Lori discover Ted had invited hookers for a party with one of them defecating on the carpet. John soon helps Ted get an interview at a local supermarket where he gets a job as a shop assistant. Ted flirts and befriends Tami-Lynn, another new employee. The pair are caught having sexual intercourse during their shift, but this only causes Ted to get promoted and not lose his job much to Ted's annoyance. After a dinner-date which includes Ted and Tami-Lynn goes wrong, Lori admits to John that she knows he is still hanging out with Ted, even making excuses to leave work as a car rental assistant early. John promises to stop being with Ted.

A few nights later at a house party hosted by Lori's stalking boss Rex (Joel McHale) who has a crush on her, John gets a call from Ted that Flash Gordon star Sam Jones is in his new apartment. John, after some encouragement, disobeys Lori and goes to see Sam Jones at Ted's apartment. At Ted's party Sam Jones befriends the duo, and they have the time of their lives getting stoned, drunk and Ted singing karaoke. Lori though discovers John had betrayed her and tearfully dumps him. John blames Ted for what happened and asks him to get out of his life. A week later, Rex asks Lori out on a date and she accepts, hoping to temporarily distract herself from heartache and finally get Rex to leave her alone. Ted finds out and visits the hotel room where John is staying to tell him about it. John accuses Ted of lying and says he wishes he had never asked for a teddy bear as a kid that Christmas. John and Ted get in a dramatic fist fight, which ends with them making up and deciding to crash the Norah Jones concert at the Hatch Shell where Rex took Lori.

It turns out Ted is personal friends with Norah, so she agrees to let John sing a song onstage dedicated to Lori, which turns out to be Octopussy theme, All Time High, by Rita Coolidge, in which he sings off-key. John is fiercely booed off the stage by the angry spectators, but Lori is touched by the gesture and ends her date with Rex prematurely. The next day, Ted shows up at Lori's apartment and tells her that John is lost without her and offers to leave forever if it would help them be together and he tells her what happened that night at Rex's. Lori then leaves to meet with John, before Ted is kidnapped by a creepy man named Donny (Giovanni Ribisi) and his obnoxious, overweight son, Robert, who had offered to buy Ted from John in an earlier scene. At their home, Ted discovers pictures of himself all over the wall, and Donny explains that when he was a little boy, he saw Ted on TV and asked his father if he could have a magical teddy bear like Ted. His father said no, and Donny vowed that he would never say no like that to his own future son.

During Robert's play-time, Ted tricks the boy into playing a game of hide and seek, using the distraction to call John, who is now talking with Lori about their future together, but Donny catches Ted using the phone. Donny and Robert try to flee the house with Ted before being chased by John and Lori who shows up just in time to catch them in a car chase that leads them to Fenway Park. Ted manages to outrun Donny to the Green Monster, while John punches Robert in the face, knocking him unconscious. As they climb up one of the wall's light towers, Donny grabs Ted by the foot and accidentally tears Ted in half, causing him to fall limp to the field below. Donny runs away as the police show up, and John and Lori run on the field beside Ted. With his last breath, Ted tells John not to lose Lori again because she is the most important part of his life. The magical glimmer vanishes from Ted's complexion, and the life fades from his eyes. Unwilling to lose him, John and Lori rush back to Lori's apartment to try to stitch Ted back together; though they manage to do so, they are unable to bring him back to life, so they have no choice but to accept that he is gone. That night as John is asleep, Lori sees a shooting star and closes her eyes, appearing to make a wish. The next morning John wakes up and discovers that Ted has come back to life, without any visible trace of the injuries he had suffered the previous night. Lori admits that it was her wish that was responsible for saving Ted, and John finally proposes to her. John and Lori are then married and at their wedding, Sam Jones, who is apparently an ordained minister, presides over the service, and Ted is the best man at the wedding. After the wedding, Ted and Sam then end the day by doing the "Flash Jump".

The narrator (Patrick Stewart) reveals what happens to the characters after John and Lori are married:

• Ted continues his relationship with Tami-Lynn and gets promoted to store manager when he's caught eating potato salad off of her bare bottom.
• Sam Jones moves back to Hollywood to restart his film career and shares a studio apartment in Burbank, California with Brandon Routh, from "that god-awful Superman movie".
• Rex is forced to give up his pursuit of Lori, falls into a deep depression, and dies of Lou Gehrig's disease, which, ironically, had been wished on him by John.
• Donny is arrested by Boston police and charged with "kidnapping a plush toy," but the charges are dropped when everyone realizes how completely stupid that sounds.
• Robert gets a personal trainer, loses weight, and goes on to become Taylor Lautner.

TRAILER 

REVIEW 

The funniest movie character so far this year is a stuffed teddy bear. And the best comedy screenplay so far is "Ted," the saga of the bear's friendship with a 35-year-old manchild. I know; this also was hard for me to believe. After memories of Mel Gibson's bond with a sock puppet, "Ted" was not high on the list of movies I was impatient to see.

The opening scenes find the right tone. A treacly narrator (Patrick Stewart) describes a Christmas that reminds us of a "A Christmas Story," except for the jolts of four-letter words and anti-PC one-liners. We meet young John Bennett, the most unpopular kid in the neighborhood, so disliked that while a Jewish kid is being beaten up, John feels envious.

All young John wants is a true friend for life. For Christmas, his parents give him an enormous teddy bear the size of a first grader, and that night under the sheets with a flashlight, John asks Teddy to be his real and true forever friend. Teddy comes to life and agrees.

The miracle of a walking, talking teddy bear of course makes the little stuffed creature an overnight celebrity, and he appears on the Carson show. But his fame fades ("like Corey Feldman," the narrator explains), and he settles in as John's roommate for life. Years pass. Teddy is now a little frayed, and John (Mark Wahlberg), at 35, has a counter job at a rental car agency. Against all odds, he also has a fragrant girlfriend named Lori Collins (Mila Kunis), who has been waiting four years for a marriage proposal.

John and Ted lead an "Animal House"-like existence, inhaling wholesale quantities of weed and recalling their early years as "Flash Gordon" fans. American movies have recently featured a lot of male characters who are victims of arrested adolescence, but few who have resisted growing up more successfully than John.

The laughs in "Ted" come largely through the teddy bear's dialogue. With an edgy Beantown accent and a potty mouth, Ted insults and offends everyone he comes into contact with, and sees Lori as a threat to his friendship with John. This despite his own pastimes, which include drugs, hookers, and as we later discover, a torrid early 1990s affair with absolutely the last female vocalist you could imagine having sex with a teddy bear — and I mean the last.

The movie was co-written and directed by Seth MacFarlane ("Family Guy"), who also provides Ted's voice and gives himself the same freedom he has in animation. The bear itself is a CGI creation, striking a reasonable balance between the agility of a sexual athlete and the clumsiness of Pooh. It appears that Ted is stuffed with cotton wool and feels no pain when an ear is ripped off, but he behaves as a living, breathing best buddy.

The plot of "Ted" is fairly standard but greatly embellished by MacFarlane's ability to establish comic situations and keep them building. One crucial scene occurs when Ted persuades John to leave Lori at a party ("just for five minutes") and come to Ted's own party, where their childhood hero has turned up. This is Sam J. Jones, star of the 1980 movie "Flash Gordon," who in middle age has become a party animal. How this situation ends up with an enraged duck attacking Ted you will have to discover for yourself.

There's also peril involving Donny, a creepy dad (Giovanni Ribisi) who as a child passionately wanted Ted to be his own teddy, and his pudgy spoiled son (Aedin Mincks), who wants Ted now. Their desire is pitched at such a perverse level that it approaches teddy-bear predation.

What's remarkable about "Ted" is that it doesn't run out of steam. MacFarlane seems unwilling to stop after the first payoff of a scene. He keeps embellishing. In Ted, he has an inexhaustible source of socially obnoxious behavior and language, and it's uncanny the way a teddy bear can get away with doing and saying things that we wouldn't necessarily accept from a human character. This is partly because Ted is a stand-up insult comedian trapped inside the body of a teddy bear.

I must end on a note of warning. "Ted" is not merely an R-rated movie, but a very R-rated movie — "for crude and sexual content, pervasive language and some drug use," according to the MPAA, and what they mean by "some" is hard to figure, because it could hardly contain more. No matter how much kids want to see the teddy bear movie in the ads on TV, steer them to "Brave." Trust me on this.

AVAILABLE DVDs/CDs

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