Blades of Glory

Will Ferrell is a hit or miss guy. I gave up watching “Saturday Night Live” a long time ago, so I don’t know much about his work there, but the clips I’ve seen are good. I first noticed him in Elf, which I liked a lot except for the ending. I liked him in Melinda and Melinda, The Producers, and Stranger Than Fiction. Didn’t like Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy, didn’t even finish it. I skipped Bewitched and Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby, though both are on my list of “Possibles to See When I’m Desperate.”
This is one of the good ones. I laughed a lot. Very, very silly, but most of it worked. Figure skating is pretty silly anyway, when you look at it dispassionately. I happen to enjoy it, but won’t argue with people who can’t understand what all the fuss is about. And it raises an interesting question: Why not have two guys, or two girls, skating together? One day soon a gay couple is going to come out of the icebox and demand to do this very thing. (As one “man on the street” says here: “As if figure skating wasn’t gay enough already.”) What are the snooty poobahs who run big-time Olympic sports gonna do? Resist, probably, but they always lose these things in the end. Right? They resisted blacks and they resisted women, and who are the big stars now? I’m looking forward to the day.
One of the more delightful things was how many real skaters were willing to participate in a film that they had to know poked fun at their sport. The announcers are Jim Lampley, who is channeling Fred Willard in Best in Show with his idiotic comments, and gold medalist Scott Hamilton, who also does this in real life. And sitting on the panel that disqualifies these two bozos for life for their outrage on the medal stand are Peggy Fleming, Brian Boitano, Nancy Kerrigan (Look out! Is that Tanya Harding creeping up behind her with a billy club?) and Dorothy Hamill. They all seem to be having fun. So did I.