Eugene Weekly : Movies : 4.12.07


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Blades of Glory Directed by Josh Gordon and Will Speck. Written by Craig and Jeff Cox. Cinematography, Stefan Kzapsky. Music, Theodore Shapiro. Starring Will Ferrell, Jon Heder, Will Arnett, Amy Poehler, Jenna Fischer, William Fichtner and Rob Corddry. Paramount Pictures, 2007. PG-13. 93 minutes. 44111

Having triumphed last year with Stranger than Fiction, a clever but overlooked comedy about a loser who learns how to live, Will Ferrell returns with Blades of Glory, a film about a loser who happens to ice skate. Essentially Dodgeball on ice — the worst of the recent dumb-guys-in-charge films, according to my scorecard — Blades of Glory is about the male/male figure skating team of Ferrell and Jon Heder, who join forces when they’re individually banned from competition. The film is Heder’s funniest work since Napoleon Dynamite, while at the same time a career low for Ferrell, whose debased, sex-addicted Chazz Michael Michaels is only funny when he’s bickering with Jimmy MacElroy (Heder). That’s because Chazz is a retread, a recycled cartoon: He’s the ice-skating version of Ricky Bobby, Ferrell’s imbecile character in Talladega Nights. Both are incredibly stupid narcissists who make us laugh (well, mostly) for everything they don’t understand. Read more…

 

Haight-Ashbury Quartet Four art film compositions by Loren Sears: “Be-In”(1967, 16 mm, color/sound, 5.5 min.); “Tribal Home Movie #2” (1967, 16 mm, color/silent, 6.5 min.); “Connie Joy” (1971, 16 mm, color/sound, 3 min.); and “Sevin Goes to School” (1971, 16 mm, color/silent, 3 min.).

Loren Sears’ art-film bent developed in high school when he glimpsed his first foreign picture at the Mayflower movie palace in Eugene. During the late 1950s and ’60s, small-town American theaters showed subtitled films by world-class directors such as Ingmar Bergman, Federico Fellini and Akira Kurosawa, and lots of people loved them. Sears doesn’t recall the name of the film he walked in on, but seeing the possibilities of cinema on the screen for the first time helped shape his life’s work. Read more…