Remember all the good times we had with our teddy bears growing up? Our big stuffed animal would hide under the covers with us from the big scary thunder storm, play dress up, snuggle, smoke weed, party with hookers, get into fist fights and drink beer. Okay maybe not the last few parts but for John (Mark Wahlberg) it was very much a reality in one of the best comedies of the year, Ted.

I am sure most critics after seeing Ted are complaining about how the film is basically Family Guy with a teddy bear but honestly did you expect anything else? I didn’t. I love Family Guy and had a feeling that most of the movie would be the same comedy, which it was and I still enjoyed it.

Don’t worry. Ted the teddy bear looks legit. Seth MacFarlane , who voices the character Ted and is the creator of Family Guy, has actually been sitting on this project for over four years. First he was going to make it into an animated TV series but realized it would make a better motion picture and he had to wait for technology to meet his expectations of what Ted would look like on screen.

If you haven’t guessed the movie is about a Boston kid, John, who wishes his teddy bear to life. Ted becomes a rockstar of sorts being on TV talk shows, magazine covers, and getting all the ladies. Unlike any other story told, Ted sticks with John into his adulthood. Ted is now forgotten by the world and John has a dead end job that has little promise of a bright future. So what better way to pass your time than to hang out with your teddy bear and smoke weed and drink beer, right? Oh wait John has a girlfriend, played by the beautiful Mila Kunis, that after a few years of dating decides that her boyfriend needs to grow up and have Ted move out. She thinks for some strange reason that a vulgar, very inappropriate, unemployed teddy bear is a bad influence on him. Total classic story line right?

That is what I love about this movie. It is original and not totally predictable. Even watching the trailers it doesn’t give away a big part of the plot. To be honest I thought Mark Wahlberg’s accent was a little off and there is one part where it is really obvious he is reading from a cue card which kind of took away from the comedy of that scene, but that is really the only negative critic I have about this movie. Mark Wahlberg was great in this comedy. It is so awesome to see actors who can pull of a comedic role and then turn around and be the bad ass blasting and punching it up in an action flick. When doing

the press interviews with Wahlberg he was surprisingly funny. I always got this impression from him that he is real serious and not much of a talker but in person he is quite the opposite.

Boston was a great place to pick for this movie because there are a lot of scenes that you can recognize the location like Fenway Park. When I did the press interviews with Seth MacFarlane I even asked him if there was any reason behind choosing Boston. He said it was so the audience could recognize the scenery which allows the viewers to connect to the movie more. They did the same thing with Ghostbusters by shooting it in New York. I always find it entertaining to hear little details that show how much thought goes into putting a movie together even when it comes to the location of the shoot.

What can you expect from Ted is a lot of laughs that carry from start to finish. Most comedies seem to lose their laughs as the film progresses and it tries to make a poor attempt at concluding a story line. Ted is hilarious straight through. If you appreciate Family Guy humor then you will want to see Ted more than once. In fact I am going to see it again tonight!