To cleanse the palate. I was going to write a post about the director of “Man of Steel” claiming that it’s more acceptable for overseas audiences to make Superman an American now that Obama’s president, but I’d rather blog this instead. What’s left to say about Hollywood liberals being jerky? And wrong, of course: If there’s any one theme that’s dominating political media today, it’s the fact that the rapprochement with Europe that Hopenchange was supposed to bring about hasn’t exactly gone as planned. As one contributor to Der Spiegel put it in criticizing Obama for the “soft totalitarianism” of America’s surveillance state, he’s gone from “yes we can” to “yes we scan.”

Anyway. I can’t lie: I’m less optimistic about “Anchorman 2” after watching this than I was yesterday. The teaser trailers were perfect but, as I’ve said before, if you think they can’t possibly screw up an “Anchorman” movie go get a copy of “Wake Up, Ron Burgundy” and suffer through the horrible tedium of some of the first movie’s deleted scenes. There is risk here. In particular, the set piece near the end of this clip of Ron and his girlfriend having dinner with her family feels like a slightly more outre version of a bit that “The Jeffersons” might have done 35 years ago. Even so, it’s bound to be funnier (considerably funnier) than, say, “The Hangover” because the first movie was mostly improv, I think, and when you have a nucleus this talented that’s free to riff, you’re bound to mine some gold. Give them a basic plot outline with skeleton dialogue, then turn on the cameras and film for, say, 20 hours. Inevitably there’ll be 90 minutes of good-to-great material in there. Won’t there?