One understands why Will Ferrell and director Adam McKay waited so many years to follow up "Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy." That 2004 hit, which they co-wrote, seemed to take wild non-sequitur humor as far as it could go — its scabrous raunch approached perfection. A sequel would have to expand upon the earlier film's concept of a preening TV nitwit amok in the happy-talk local-news scene of the 1970s. Could such a movie ever be more than a re-tread?

Well, Ferrell and McKay finally went ahead and made that sequel, and here it is, and yes, they've extended their story in a clever way. The year is now 1980, and Ron (Ferrell) and his onetime nemesis Veronica Corningstone (Christina Applegate) are married-with-kid and have moved up to the big time, co-anchoring a weekend newscast in New York City. As the story begins, we see their boss, Mack Harken (Harrison Ford), firing Ron — for being an idiot, of course — and promoting Veronica to become the first female anchor on the network's primetime news show. Ron is crushed. After Veronica dumps him, he returns to his home turf of San Diego, where he fails to stay classy. Then he's approached by a talent-scouting producer (Dylan Baker) who's assembling an on-air roster for a radical new venture: a 24-hour news operation called Global News Network, which is being launched by an Australian gazillionaire named Allenby (Josh Lawson). (This conflation of CNN and Fox News is way off chronologically, but still pretty funny.)

Ron accepts the offer and sets about rounding up his old team. He finds weird sports guy Champ Kind (David Koechner) running a fast-food chicken restaurant (well, "chicken of the cave" — also pretty funny). Onetime investigative reporter Brian Fantana (Paul Rudd) has become a kitten photographer for a magazine called Cat Fancy. And bonehead weatherman Brick Tamland (Steve Carell) has just died — although not exactly. (When the boys arrive at his funeral, they find Brick, himself, giving the eulogy — a scene that's more than a little limp.)

After surviving a really funny slo-mo auto crash on their way to New York, Ron and company arrive at GNN headquarters to discover that the hard-ass news chief (Meagan Good) is not only a woman, but a black woman ("Black!" Ron blurts out, by way of introduction), and that a rival anchor named Jack Lime (James Marsden) is already Ron's sworn enemy. But it's Ron who comes up with a game-changing concept for the upstart network. "Why tell the people what they need to hear?" he asks. "Why can't we tell them what they want to hear?"

And so we see that witless Ron Burgundy is the author of ratings-obsessed cable news as we now know it — heavy with soft features, over-lacquered anchors and extra-heavy with zap-pow onscreen graphics. Very clever, as I say — although laced with predictable Hollywood condescension toward Middle America (GNN's viewers are shown to be even bigger morons than Ron Burgundy) and lightly pocked with liberal cliche ("What happens when the powerful own the news?").

As serviceable as the plot is, though, it's the strafe-and-burn dialogue we've come to hear, and this is a bit of a letdown. There are some rousingly absurd lines. (Looking back over his long life, Mack Harken says, "I killed four men in Okinawa. That was four weeks ago.") But Ron's out-of-the-blue oaths this time around ("By the hymen of Olivia Newton-John!") are strained; and some of Brick's verbal eruptions ("I'm wearing two pairs of pants!") are fake-funny — semi-amusing because they come out of nowhere, but basically just odd and flat.

It helps that Brick has been given a love interest here, a spaced-out secretary (Kristen Wiig) who's just as loosely wrapped as he is. And while a big battle of international network news teams is essentially a re-run of a sequence in the first Burgundy film, here it's pumped up with an all-new herd of guest-star cameos (as well as the ghost of Stonewall Jackson). But Ron's jive-talking dinner with a black family is gratingly dated, and interludes with his sweet, needy son (Judah Nelson) are a recurring annoyance.

"The Legend Continues" isn't likely to resonate in popular culture the way the first film did — its japes and random jabberings aren't as memorable. It's a funny sequel — there are some choice bits. But for prime Burgundy, it's not quite funny enough.

'Her'

Theodore Twombly, lonely guy, may have found the perfect girl. She lives inside his computer. Her name is Samantha, and she is the voice of Theodore's new operating system. She's really something. At first she was all small talk: "Good to meet you," "Do you want to know how I work?" Very Siri. Then things got more interesting. "At every moment, I'm evolving," she informed Theodore. "You'll get used to it." Will he?

Spike Jonze's "Her" is an enchanting tale of love among our many machines. The movie is charming and funny and a little unearthly. It features yet another uncanny performance by Joaquin Phoenix and an improbably dazzling one by Scarlett Johansson, who never actually appears.

The story is set in a future not far ahead of our own (a period in which the fashion in menswear inclines toward high-waisted trousers). Theodore (Phoenix) is an underachieving writer employed by a company that provides handwritten letters for clients who can't be bothered to write their own. His wife, Catherine (Rooney Mara), a successful author, is divorcing him. He is bereft. At night he cruises Internet chat rooms in search of romantic connection, but encounters only sex maniacs. His broken heart is scabbing over. "Sometimes," he says, "I think I've already felt all that I'm gonna feel."

Then, booting up his computer one day, he encounters Samantha (Johansson). With all the resources of the Web at her non-existent fingertips, Samantha quickly learns how to make herself of service. She starts by sorting through Theodore's emails — saving this, deleting that. Soon she's proofreading the letters he writes for work. Before long, they're stepping out together (Samantha travels by phone). Theodore is smitten. He tries to explain this unusual new relationship to his only real friend, a videogame designer named Amy (Amy Adams). When he's with Samantha, he says, "I feel cuddled."

Some of this has literary overtones, recalling the Mark Twain short story "Eve's Diary" as well as the traditional science-fiction theme of sentient machines. But Jonze, working for the first time from his own script, creates narrative inventions that are unique. (The question of virtual sex, posed by Samantha, is resolved in a novel way.) And the actors do some of their best work. Phoenix, who's in every scene, never falters in conveying the dreamy confusion of a man for whom life is a puzzle whose pieces may never fit together. And Johansson, who's not in any scene, is a wonder, dancing around Theodore's befuddlement with a voice at one moment sparkling and sweet, yet at others hurt and even irritated. (Samantha's lines were originally read on-set by Samantha Morton; when Jonze brought Johansson in to re-do them, he adjusted the movie to accommodate her extraordinary performance.)

There's also strong support by Mara — who's only in one scene (apart from a few flashbacks), but hits telling notes of conflicted affection and regret — and by Adams, giving a full-hearted account of a woman with love problems of her own who's open to alternatives. (Her character assures Theodore that he's not weird — she has another friend who's also dating an OS.) And cinematographer Hoyte Van Hoytema ("Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy") wraps the L.A. exteriors in a gauzy haze that's ideal for the story's understated otherworldliness.

The movie has more on its mind than the old question of "What is love?" In a bracingly original way, Jonze suggests that whatever the future of digital evolution might hold in store for human romance, the danger of heartbreak will always remain, along with its attendant torments of desperate yearning and unfocused jealousy. "You helped me to discover my ability to want ," Samantha tells Theodore. Want what, he wonders.

Kurt Loder is the film critic for Reason Online. To find out more about Kurt Loder and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.