So here’s the story. After about six weeks solid of Olympics, football, and general sport overload occasioned by an unexpected cycle of seven-day weeks writing sport columns for a living, the smoking remnants of my brain sued for divorce, and made me sit down and shotgun three movies in a row on pay TV by way of relief. This is what I saw. Once you see the titles, you’ll realise it was an unplanned journey.
BLADES OF GLORY (2007)
Frankly stupid, not unremittingly hilarious, but surprisingly watchable Will Ferrell movie, which as usual, is an extended one-idea comedy sketch with a feel-good plot mechanism implanted to hopefully turn it into a movie. This is the ice-dancing one where his character and the one played by Jon Heder (from that Napoleon Dynamite movie that everyone went five flavours of strawberry fantasia over, but I never summoned up the courage to see because everything about it promised a case of the cutes to skin-disorder levels) are ice dancing guys who get kicked out of the sport, but mount a comeback as the first male-to-male ice dancing pair.
As usual, in the chicken-hearted comedy movies of today, they can’t even completely commit to sending up something as ripe for a kicking as ice-dancing. However they do get rather more sly licks in on this score than might have been expected, particularly in the hyper-lame “modern” routines of the ee-vill ice-dancing couple played by Ferrell’s fellow Saturday Night Live alumni, Amy Poehler and Will Arnett. Naturally you have to have an ee-vill pair of rivals for our heroes to triumph over, because you can’t just do a comedy movie for laughs anymore. But admittedly on the level this is played throughout the movie, you can tell no-one took it particularly seriously, even on face value, which is a tremendous relief, since we’re not supposed to either. In Talladega Nights, as ironic as they might have been herniating themselves to be, they either didn’t herniate hard enough, or the simple fact was, the movie didn’t function without the failure-redemption feelgood mechanism. Blades of Glory is better on that score alone, but it’s amazing just how much of a difference that lack of pressure to care about barely existent characters makes.
Ferrell’s character starts off just as obnoxious as his role in The Wedding Crashers, and in just the same ways (i.e. all testosterone, root-rat, self-obsessed – in general extreme, but funny-resistant) but because his character is meant to “improve” and he can’t turn the other stuff completely off, the tension becomes funny, and he brings enough likeability to it to make it work. Heder carries the movie. His impossibly naive goofballness here is a product of an actor playing an inherently comedic role in a manner which suggests he doesn’t know he’s meant to be funny, and isn’t overtly working for funny. The other principals (except the actress who plays the straight role as his girlfriend, and Craig T. Nelson as his coach, who isn’t given anything all that funny to do, but looks hilarious if you’re used to seeing Craig T. Nelson as he normally looks in movies) are all playing in SNL comedy sketch mode, which tends to wear through at the knees pretty quick. Will Arnett has some good moments doing “slimy”, though.
I don’t have a copy of their codebook, so I don’t know why it’s meant to be that funny when the guys do girly kind of skating moves together and grab each other’s groins and all that high-larity. There’s moments where it is, and plenty where it isn’t. * Someone clearly put a lot of work into the outfits, anyway. The ee-vill skaters’ routine where they do the “gritty”, “urban” gimmick is pretty funny, however. That’s conceptual. It’s satirising something. It’s even satirising the very area that the movie is a comedy about. Almost a revolutionary approach by current-day comedy movie standards.
Ferrell is clearly very talented, but he and his movies routinely stray into an area that leaves me colder than football stadium chips – a kind of desperately loud “playing straight” on what is so clearly intended to be knee-smashingly hilarious material in a manner so telegraphed that house-cats could get what they’re doing. Mmm, keeping a straight face while telling a joke. Amazing stuff. You phone the patent office, and I’ll get the newspaper to hold the front page. They seem to be straining themselves to overplay the underplaying. Playing it this way is the opposite of how the Monty Python guys used to go about it on the TV show, which is probably why that material still stands out. I read someone recently saying how they thought the way to play a character in a comedy movie is that he shouldn’t be aware that he’s a character in a comedy movie. Sounds about right to me. It’s sure the difference between how Will Ferrell plays a role in this and his other movies, and how Jon Heder plays his in this one. **
But, compared to Talladega Nights and Anchorman – the former too busy being earnest and feel-good to send up NASCAR and the Southern white-trash ethic (although that was patently the hook it was predicated on, and the result was arguably more patronising, and certainly more boring, than the most excoriating satire could have been), and the latter too timid to find anything inherently amusing about the 70s other than fashion, and television egos in any manner, making you wonder why they even bothered – there’s a little punch and stink to the goofiness here, in a kind of Dumb and Dumber way. Dumb and Dumber might not be the Mount Everest of comedy archetypes – or even the Windy Hill of comedy archetypes – but it certainly towers over Anchorman.
The irony is that in straining a little less to be cuddly and feelgood, the movie is more likeable than those. Probably not a surprising irony though. I’m still not sure that Will Ferrell’s been funnier in a movie than he was in a minor (and heavily Monty Python-derived) bit in the first Austin Powers pic, and the SNL character he used to do as a Christian-type music teacher who thought he was hip but was impenetrably daggy was waaaay-hey-hey-hey funnier than anything he’s done in movies, but Blades of Glory is probably the movie of his I’ve most enjoyed.
Two amazing-or-not facts about this movie. It apparently took two guys to direct it and five different people to write it. The latter process must have been quite the gruelling lunch-break. On evidence to hand, the costumes and choreography probably involved roughly 800 times the labour.
Also my favourite gag in the movie, apparently a sly, semi-buried reference to Ferrell’s Talladega co-star, in which the name Sascha Cohen is given to a young girl figure-skater, turned out not to be a gag at all, unfortunately. Turns out there really IS a young girl figure skater named Sasha Cohen. Oh well.
(7 out of 11 Marge Pomerantz Heads on a Hubcap)
* (Part of the problem here is the assumption that Will Ferrell is invariably hilarious doing physical comedy. Actually, he is physically very adept, but not necessarily a particularly funny physical comedian. One scene to watch for this is the chase scene where he is pursued by Will Arnett, both on skates, and they have to continue the chase off the ice into a building, where, of course, the skates become an encumbrance rather than an asset. The scene is kind of funny because of context, and because of being a deliberately clunky and very slow chase scene, but Ferrell’s not all that funny in himself, given a golden physical comedy opportunity. You think of how a Peter Sellers or a Woody Allen might have played it (or possibly even Chevy Chase), let alone a Chaplin, Keaton, Stan Laurel or W.C. Fields, and you see the problem.)
** (Although parts of his show are certainly funny, Conan O’Brien may be my least favourite in the world for this approach. How much topspin do you need to put into delivering a line to let an audience know you’re trying to be funny while acting serious? The entire table tennis section of the Olympics didn’t have that much topspin. If he was any more arch he’d be part of a wall in an old castle. And even then he has to do that stupid braying girly laugh to let people know it was a joke. Even Australia Post doesn’t make this much hard work out of simple delivery.)
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MATERIAL GIRLS (2006)
This one’s so fluffy it makes Blades of Glory look like one of the more gruelling Sergei Eisenstein pictures. A couple of rich, spoiled California kids (Hilary and Haylie Duff, who are apparently not the Olsen twins and that’s about all I know) lose everything they own due to ee-vill chicanery, and have to learn to live like real people, and then fight for their father’s business – can I cut this short, and say it’s essentially Clueless without the high school intrigue, Alicia Silverstone’s apparently once-in-a-lifetime performance, Dan Hedaya as reliable comic back-up etc etc.
What it does have, in something of a major turnip for the books, is the actual Anjelica Huston, taking time out from being fabulous in generally disappointing or fairly ordinary pictures to be fabulous in a complete nerf-ball of a movie. As much as I like Meryl Streep in comedy roles, Anjelica Huston does her Devil Wears Prada routine here, only without the heaviness, and does it more playfully, and better. She’s having a ball with it, and the only problem is that there isn’t more of her in it. It’s actually pretty consistent in tone and easy to watch, which is presumably a tribute to director Martha Coolidge, since the gold’s hardly in the 100% off-the-rack plot, and seldom in the scripting. The Duff cats are bland but mostly non-irritating. Alicia Silverstone in Clueless they most emphatically are not, unfortunately. In an interesting gender-reversal on most movies of this kind, it’s the actors playing the male love interests, and their characters, that are insipid enough that if you added them to soda water, no discolouration or flavour change would be evident. Score one for Sista Power, or something. Other than Anjelica Huston, this has time-passer written all over it. The best you could say about it is that less neatly-manufactured time-passers are released on a daily basis. Don’t particularly go searching it out unless you’re an Anjelica Huston completist.
(6 out of 11 on the MPHOAH scale, mostly for Anjelica Huston)
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GIRL, INTERRUPTED (1999)
Might have done this one before, but saw it again as part of this strange-bedfellows threesome. Hadn’t intended to sit through it again, and stuck the distance, and it’s that kind of picture, which is unambiguously a compliment. Set in a 1960s loony bin, based on a true story, there’s a lot about this movie that seems like a teen girl version of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Instead of the latter’s pitting of the main character against authority, this is more the main character pitted against herself. Winona Ryder plays the main, sympathetic character and Angelina Jolie eats up the whole movie like chewing tobaccy playing either her friend/nemesis or the Mr Hyde side of her personality, depending on how you choose to interpret it. (Haven’t read the original book by Susanna Kaysen, but the James Mangold-directed movie version seems pretty emphatic about them being two sides of the one coin. This is the old Dostoyevsky “The Double” gimmick, as also “sampled” in the otherwise decidedly Dostoyevsky-free Fight Club. Anyway, I guess there’s nothing new in vaudeville.)
If you’d forgotten Jolie can act, seeing this is a great way to remember that. Winona Ryder has the relatively thankless job of carrying the movie without the major pyrotechnics, but she’s also gold in a more subtle way. I’d forgotten how powerfully Brittany Murphy registers as the girl released from the institution who is keeping it together on the surface but has enormous chasms of vulnerability. Apparently the rest of the business seems to have forgotten it too, since she never seems to get roles like this anymore. She also did a certain amount of the team-player, heavy lifting stuff (a la Winona here) in Clueless. The rest of the movie is stocked to the brim with quality character actors, and even Whoopi Goldberg, in one of her endless series of “I save the whole world again by sheer innate niceness – just watch me” roles is considerably less annoying than usual. The Leonard Maltin Movie Guide sez “Vivid” which is pretty much right on the money – particularly about its capturing of a late 60s feel in the scenes outside the institution – but I’d just add in there, “Involving”, which it also does quite a lot of. The intentionally hallucinatory climactic scene is maybe a little on the messy side – something about trying to resolve two main characters as one, or one as two, or two for tea and me for you, and it’s a decision that probably should have been made at a prior committee stage – but it just about gets there, I think, or at least I was more kindly disposed towards it this time than I’d remembered it. Otherwise, pretty darn good.
(8 out of 11 MPHOAH)
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