Blades of Glory
Grade: F
On any given evening, I’m home watching “The Real World,” “Falcon Beach,” “Wildfire,” “The O.C.” (may it rest in peace), American Idol” and even “Dancing with the Stars.” (Go Apolo, go!)
So it says a great deal when something makes me feel so incredibly unclean and ashamed of myself. There’s trash, and then there’s trash you actually pay for. Think slinking out of a porn palace in broad daylight.
I know what you’re all thinking, and I humbly accept your derision. While I have never been to a Will Ferrell movie before (and vow that I never shall again) the choice was mine and mine alone, the buck stops here, I’m the Decider. If the man has a comedic bone in his body, it was certainly no where to be seen here – whether performing bombastically uncoordinated routines on ice, grabbing his crotch while slobbering over extra-bosomy groupies, intoxicatedly vomiting all over himself during a children’s show on ice…everything about him is utterly unfunny and mildly disgusting. If I really wanted to see a hairy and out-of-shape body for laughs, my bathroom mirror will suffice quite nicely, thank you very much.
There is much to satirize about the amateur figure skating universe – trust me on this, as I am a figure skating widow every Winter Olympic season. The appallingly garish costumes and lavishly inappropriate music selections, the stark black and white, overly produced featurettes on the competitors, the melodramatic commentary replete with life metaphors, the near sexual Svengalian relationships between coaches and their athletes, the overtly heterosexual comments escaping exceedingly homosexual mouths – it’s all hysterically ripe for the picking.
It is almost impressive that a movie spoofing the already absurdist subculture that is figure skating manages to be so exceedingly sophomoric and yet so stultifyingly uncreative, so grossly oversexed and yet so insufferably dull, so over-the-top slapstick and yet so completely devoid of laughter. What should have been as easy as landing your basic double axle ends up ass down on the ice, a wealth of shoddy writing, overblown overacting (drunken frat boys misbehaving at a kegger) and directorial laziness. It is the stereotypically bad SNL skit that would have been cut by Lorne Michaels long before it ever made air time. Watching a Zamboni machine for 90 straight minutes would have been more amusing.
Cameos by Scott Hamilton, Peggy Flemming, Dorothy Hamill and Sacha Cohen only goes to further illustrate why sports figures should never attempt to do movies (just ask Mitch Gaylord) actors should never attempt to figure skate (did any of these people even bother to take a lesson before filming began?) and agents really are money grubbing whores – it’s hard to imagine anyone even bothered to read the script before arriving on set.
An embarrassment of embarrassments.
On any given evening, I’m home watching “The Real World,” “Falcon Beach,” “Wildfire,” “The O.C.” (may it rest in peace), American Idol” and even “Dancing with the Stars.” (Go Apolo, go!)
So it says a great deal when something makes me feel so incredibly unclean and ashamed of myself. There’s trash, and then there’s trash you actually pay for. Think slinking out of a porn palace in broad daylight.
I know what you’re all thinking, and I humbly accept your derision. While I have never been to a Will Ferrell movie before (and vow that I never shall again) the choice was mine and mine alone, the buck stops here, I’m the Decider. If the man has a comedic bone in his body, it was certainly no where to be seen here – whether performing bombastically uncoordinated routines on ice, grabbing his crotch while slobbering over extra-bosomy groupies, intoxicatedly vomiting all over himself during a children’s show on ice…everything about him is utterly unfunny and mildly disgusting. If I really wanted to see a hairy and out-of-shape body for laughs, my bathroom mirror will suffice quite nicely, thank you very much.
There is much to satirize about the amateur figure skating universe – trust me on this, as I am a figure skating widow every Winter Olympic season. The appallingly garish costumes and lavishly inappropriate music selections, the stark black and white, overly produced featurettes on the competitors, the melodramatic commentary replete with life metaphors, the near sexual Svengalian relationships between coaches and their athletes, the overtly heterosexual comments escaping exceedingly homosexual mouths – it’s all hysterically ripe for the picking.
It is almost impressive that a movie spoofing the already absurdist subculture that is figure skating manages to be so exceedingly sophomoric and yet so stultifyingly uncreative, so grossly oversexed and yet so insufferably dull, so over-the-top slapstick and yet so completely devoid of laughter. What should have been as easy as landing your basic double axle ends up ass down on the ice, a wealth of shoddy writing, overblown overacting (drunken frat boys misbehaving at a kegger) and directorial laziness. It is the stereotypically bad SNL skit that would have been cut by Lorne Michaels long before it ever made air time. Watching a Zamboni machine for 90 straight minutes would have been more amusing.
Cameos by Scott Hamilton, Peggy Flemming, Dorothy Hamill and Sacha Cohen only goes to further illustrate why sports figures should never attempt to do movies (just ask Mitch Gaylord) actors should never attempt to figure skate (did any of these people even bother to take a lesson before filming began?) and agents really are money grubbing whores – it’s hard to imagine anyone even bothered to read the script before arriving on set.
An embarrassment of embarrassments.
.
More Movie Info: http://imdb.com/title/tt0445934/
posted by SternReviews @ 8:57 PM
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