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MEMO FROM THE MELON BREAD TIME SPORTS DESK

I decided to venture out from the Sports Desk's usual headquarters, situated at the couch in my living room, to see Blades Of Glory. To be entirely honest, I've been feeling a little depressed lately, and I was hoping that a ridiculous comedy about male figure skaters might improve my frame of mind. After all, I once followed figure skating religiously; prior to this year, I had watched ever U.S. National Championship since 1988, every Olympic figure skating event since that year, and every World Championship since 1992. By the time I finally broke myself of that wretched addiction, I had reached the point where I believed myself fully capable of distinguishing between a lutz and a flip. I use the qualifier "believe" because I never really had the slightest ******** idea why one jump was different from another. I listened to the explanations, but sportscasters are the dullest creatures on earth aside from politicians (and easily their rivals in pomposity), so after a while my eyes glazed over and I never fully processed what they were saying.

But I never entirely lost my taste for skating, so I held out some hope that Blades Of Glory would be at least mildly entertaining. Rarely have I been so misguided in my optimism. This piece of s**t is so tedious, so visually unimaginative, and so devoid of humor it makes Doom look like a work of high cinematic art in comparison. You might argue that it's supposed to be a stupid goof and that means I shouldn't be so critical. That's the sort of argument the producers of these grotesque messes always drag out, so the critic appears "out of touch" with the "people". It's also a crock of s**t, because Blades Of Glory doesn't even meet the base requirements for a good stupid comedy. And if the "people" liked it enough to make it the #1 movie at the box office this past weekend, then they have cow fertilizer for brains. I actually heard a few audience members applauding as I exited this disaster, which just confirms my eternally low opinion of the American moviegoing public's taste.

Anyway, we seem to be going off the track a little... the entirely unnecessary story involves two former figure skating rivals (Will Ferrell and Jon Heder) who team up to become the world's first all-male pairs figure skating partnership. Naturally, this leads to a lot of jokes where they get bodily parts they'd rather avoid stuck in each others' faces. The movie seemingly wants to say that male figure skaters aren't all effeminate long-haired skinny guys in frilly outfits; but in doing so, it reveals its own undercurrent of homophobia. Why else would it strain so hard to make Ferrell's character into a womanizing doofus, or to give Heder's girlishly pretty character a female love interest? Oh, of course, because the idiot plot requires said love interest, the guilt-ridden younger sister of the evil brother-sister team Ferrell and Heder are competing against, to almost betray Heder as part of her siblings' complicated machinations. Movies of this sort don't need these ******** clichéd plots, they need absolute anarchy and crazed visual gags and nonsense. Instead, we get shot after shot of skates to the crotch and the world's worst ever chase sequence, involving Ferrell stumbling through a lobby and a ski shop while still wearing his skates.

There are so many horrors in this movie it's almost impossible to catalogue them all. There's Craig T. Nelson, with his hideous old-man mullet and one-note barking performance as the duo's coach; I guess since he starred in Coach all those years ago, the producers decided he was the go-to man for this part. There's a scene where Heder, handcuffed to the inside of a toilet stall, has to pull a roll of toilet paper (which, for reasons to stupid to detail, contains the key to his cuffs) towards him with his tongue; I rarely feel nauseous while watching a film, not even when confronted with the ugliest scenes of Lynch or Tarantino, but this one made me feel as though I might lose the contents of my stomach right there and then. (Since I was sitting next to my mother at the time, this would have been very bad.) There's a pointless running gag about Heder's stalker. And, as is par for the course in almost every film involving Ferrell, there's a scene where we see him nearly naked, as though the very sight of his sagging belly is hilarious rather than repulsive. (One of the reasons I loved Stranger Than Fiction was because, thanks to the nature of the film, he couldn't do that s**t in it.)

And that brings me to another strange aspect of this fiasco... Ferrell's played this character, in one variation or another, so many times he could do it in his sleep (and this performance doesn't feel like the work of an actor who was awake), and yet I felt he was miscast. Something is just profoundly off about his presence; there's a vast disconnect between the way he's acting and the character he's portraying. Then again, every character in the film is a cardboard cutout stereotype with only one distinct "personality" trait, meaning in reality none of them have any personality at all. The only lively performance in the entire debacle comes from Will Arnett, as the male half of the evil brother-sister team; and even he's a weak excuse for a villain.

If the skating had been filmed decently, there might be some redeeming value; but it looks worse than your average ESPN telecast, and doesn't even take advantage of all the camera angles I've seen in television coverage. And this strikes me as odd, because in so many respects the movie exudes a sort of weird reverence towards its subject that's entirely at odds with its alleged attempts at satire. It tries to make fun of figure skating while simultaneously embracing its clichés, and the result is incoherent and not funny at all.

The Sports Desk has decided, in light of the crapulence of this project, to not grant it a numerical rating. Whether this will become established policy for future reviews has yet to be determined. In the meantime, I've retreated to headquarters and intend to erase the bad taste of this film from my system by watching the final episode of Twin Peaks. On the other hand, since I had a nightmare a few nights ago in which Killer Bob ripped out people's entrails and slurped them up like spaghetti, perhaps that's a bad idea.