Genre parody comedies have been Will Ferrell's chief bread and butter, and with Blades of Glory, in which he co-stars with Jon Heder, he scores again. The movie—which spoofs the world of figure skating, a subject so ripe for parody it's amazing that someone didn't grab it earlier—is a laugh riot from beginning to end.
Blades of Glory, whose template borrows heavily from the skating film The Cutting Edge, focuses on the rivalry of two competing skaters. Jimmy MacElroy ( Jon Heder ) is the effete sophisticate who wears the peacock costumes and sports Dorothy Hamill's famous bob. Ferrell plays Jimmy's hard-rockin' bad-boy rival, Chazz Michael Michaels, who skates to rock music and is referred to as 'sex on ice.' After tying for a gold medal and getting into a spectacular fistfight on the awards podium, the two are stripped of their medals and banned from competition. Naturally, they'll end up as skating partners and best buds.
Trying to thwart them at every turn are their competitors, a creepy/funny brother-sister duo ( played in comical Batman arch-criminal style by real-life husband and wife Amy Poehler and Will Arnett ) . By the time we finally see Jimmy and Chazz performing their first routine, the pair has lost any semblance of fear at being labeled gay. They gleefully perform a routine that incorporates an arsenal of suggestive positions that will be extremely familiar to queer audiences. The routine is a spectacular success ( and the film's highpoint ) , and the movie moves into the typical last-act roadblocks before the final victory by our dynamic duo.
The debut script by Chicago natives ( and brothers ) Jeff and Craig Cox keeps the smart laughs coming ( while the skating routines and costumes are standouts ) and the gross-out, dumb dumb stuff to a minimum. The writers missed an opportunity to show Chazz and Jimmy influencing other male skaters ( gay and straight ) to pair up, once and for all melting the homophobia such a duo suggests. But the filmmakers do add a throwaway moment near the end of the film that will give the homo skittish something to contemplate. Having finally won the girl of his dreams, Jimmy gives her a big, sloppy kiss. 'You've been practicing!' she says in surprise. 'Yeah,' Jimmy shyly replies. 'Chazz taught me some stuff…'
Sex on ice, indeed!
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'Harsh times call for harsh measures,' a drunken James Mason said as he interrupted Judy Garland's Oscar acceptance speech at the climax of A Star Is Born. Incongruously, that's the line that kept going through my head throughout Richard Gere's latest star vehicle, The Hoax. The line perfectly applies to the outsized chicanery that Gere—as novelist and purported Howard Hughes biographer Clifford Irving—and his collaborator, Dick Susskind ( Alfred Molina ) , resort to throughout the course of the film. The movie, from Chocolat/Cider House Rules director Lasse Hallström, is a high-flying act that stays aloft and never collapses. I think it's the first great film of 2007.
The Hoax follows the four months in the early 1970s during which Irving, at his wits' end financially, convinced McGraw-Hill and the rest of the world that he was the vehicle through which reclusive billionaire Howard Hughes had chosen to relate his life story. The movie may contain Gere's greatest performance yet. As the compulsive Irving, a male Scheherazade who spins grander and grander tales eagerly accepted by his rapt audience, Gere is magnificent as he moves from exhilaration to the depths of depression with lightning speed. He is matched by his troubled cohort, Molina, in a typically complex performance.
William Wheeler's screenplay, which takes liberties with the events as novelized by Irving himself after the fact, gives the movie the black comedy treatment of other great 'stranger than fiction' tales. Moreover, Hallström offers Gere and the rest of the cast a field day. ( Standouts include a hilarious Hope Davis as Gere's agent and Marcia Gay Harden as his suspicious wife. ) This is a fabulously entertaining film.
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Eating Out writer-director Q. Allan Brocka returns with Boy Culture, a dramedy that first played here last fall at Reeling, Chicago's gay and lesbian film festival. The movie is narrated by X ( Derek Magyar ) , a gorgeous high-class hustler who hasn't had sex away from 'business' since he was 12. X's dilemma is that he's in love with his roommate Andrew, the just-out African-American hottie ( played by Darryl Stephens of TV's Noah's Arc ) , and wants to break his own rule doesn't know how to take business out of the equation.
In the meantime, X also finds himself intrigued with his new client, Gregory ( Patrick Bauchau ) , a wealthy, older French patron who just wants to talk until X truly desires him. There are further complications ( the unrequited lust of X's other roommate, etc. ) that are enacted as X vacillates between Andrew, Gregory—or neither. The sexy, dead-serious X has the arrogant attitude similar to the character Gale Harold played in the television series Queer As Folk—a decided turn-off. Though his musings about sex and love have some of the same insight as those offered by Jane Fonda's call girl in Klute, this is not to compare Magyar's delivery of them with Fonda's. ( Certainly, it's not on the same scale as hers. ) Rather, it is Bauchau and Stephens who give the film, wobbly in tone, a much-needed shot of vitality.
Boy Culture has been described as a step up, something with more depth for writer-director Brocka than his previous effort. However, a second viewing didn't warm it up for me. I much preferred the guilt-free, sunny sex romp of Eating Out to this world weary, high-falutin' stuff.
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First Snow, an intriguing psychological thriller starring LGBT audience favorites Guy Pearce ( The Adventures of Priscilla Queen of the Desert ) and Piper Perabo ( Lost and Delirious and Imagine Me & You ) also opens this week. In it, Pearce plays Jimmy, a cocky flooring salesman traveling the long-distance roads in New Mexico while trying to make a better life for himself and his girlfriend ( Perabo ) . On a whim, Jimmy has his fortune told while he waits for his car to be fixed. Soon after, the psychic's predictions come to pass and Jimmy goes into a tailspin as it appears his troubled past will collide with his future.
This interesting, offbeat, Hitchcockian indie from first-time writer-director Mark Fergus ( who co-wrote the script with Hawk Ostby ) is helped by expert casting and the film's other major character: the barren, foreboding New Mexico surroundings that threaten to swallow Jimmy at a moment's notice.
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