The Masculine Glory of Figure Skating??

Mariah and I sometimes argue about whether figure skating is really a sport. I say no for a simple reason: sport involves direct and objective competition against others. In track, for instance, the athletes compete directly with each other to see who can get the best time. They can see the other athletes next to them trying to run faster. In tennis, one competes directly against the opponent across the net. But in figure skating, the skaters simply try to impress judges who, in turn, seem to give their scores for completely subjective reasons. Sure, there are certain penalties for falling and missteps, but then sometimes the judges seem to discount them or increase them. And what about artistic merit? That’s the most subjective thing on Earth. But let me be clear: I don’t intend at all to belittle the strength, dexterity, training, and general physical prowess necessary to do the things that figure skaters do; I simply do not consider that activity a sport because there is no direct, objective competition between the skaters.

Into this semantic mess comes Blades of Glory, a brilliant figure skating comedy starring Jon Heder and Will Ferrell. Mariah and I first saw it in Chicago with Megan on a day when JJ had so much to write about Hegel that he couldn’t come with us.. The film mocks all of the ridiculous crap about figure skating that, in my view, comes from the lack of direct, objective competition between skaters. For instance, it mocks the possibility of ties when officials give two skaters the same score by having Chazz Michael Michaels (Ferrell) and Jimmy MacElroy (Heder) both win the gold at the beginning of the movie. All of the shoving and jostling for position atop the gold medal platform eventually escalates into a full-out fight between the two rivals, hinting at all of the needless tension that must exist between all of these highly trained athletes who have no way of really competing with each other in a fair way for the medals. Between Michaels and MacElroy, each skater believes himself to have earned the medal and performed better than the other, but there’s absolutely no way to settle the dispute on the ice. In real sports, such a dispute would be settled by an overtime period, or a tiebreaker method involving the comparison of win-loss records against identical competition; it would be settled by actual athletic performance, not by a bunch of pretentious, politically influenced fops posing as judges at a table.

But a wonderful side-effect of the absurdity of real-life figure skating is that it puts Will Ferrell at his best. I cannot stop laughing when he slaps the table, or whatever surface is around, and yells “Boom!” after making an offensive or egotistical statement at his circus-style press conferences or during other opportunities to speak. However, the highlight has to be the unglamorous masculinity Ferrell brings to a sport whose male population (so the stereotype goes) generally includes only effeminate prettyboys like MacElroy. But with Michaels, the skating world gets a hairy, slightly chubby, sex-addicted bad boy. While the film suggests that the female population as a whole finds Michaels irresistible, he’s clearly not very attractive, and it’s in these kinds of absurd situations that Ferrell is at his best.

Admittedly, no blog about Blades of Glory written by a straight dude would be complete without at least a brief discussion of Jenna Fischer and her role as the sister of the evil pairs team Stranz and Fairchild. The mainstream discussion of her attractiveness always focuses on how she “dresses down” in The Office so as to look like “an ordinary woman.” While this suggests that “ordinary women” are somehow less attractive than airbrushed, dolled-up movie stars, I happen to think that so-called “ordinary women” are often quite attractive! And in Blades of Glory, Jenna Fischer has another opportunity to “dress down” because she’s playing the role of the supposedly plain sister of the glamorous Stranz and Fairchild. Of course, she’s terribly attractive in that role. Her everygirlness, if that term makes sense, is irresistible. She even manages to bring that characteristic to the scene where she gets all dolled-up because her brother and sister have guilted her into trying to seduce the sex-addicted Michaels in order to create conflict between Michaels and MacElroy, the all-male skating pair. At any rate, Jenna Fischer’s appeal in Blades of Glory, though comedic, does compare to other legendarily attractive female performances like Penelope Cruz in Abre los Ojos and Parminder Nagra in Bend it Like Beckham.

We’ll see how Blades of Glory holds up in the long run, but I suspect that it will take its place alongside titles like Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle, Grosse Pointe Blank, and Old School in the pantheon of great comedies that are always circulating in my DVD player.

Brian the Chicken Fryer?

On Sunday, I played Risk, the classic game of world domination. JJ, Megan, Mariah and I sat on a blanket in the park and let the sun warm our bodies as we slaughtered hordes of imaginary millions for our own amusement. A puppy someone else brought bounded around awkwardly nearby as its owner seemed to take pleasure in sharing with it what must have been one of its first park experiences. Even more nearby, a large group of twentysomethings arranged a first-rate picnic. They had a little hibachi, coolers, multifarious blankets, and more importantly, several kites, including a pink Barbie kite, which they proceeded to lodge in a tree, one of barky those millions that line the aesthetically pleasing modern shore of Lake Michigan north of Chicago. But why would I tell you people all of that? This doesn’t seem like that kind of blog, does it? Of course it doesn’t. And isn’t. But think about those twentysomethings. Think about the four of us, and think about the puppy’s owner. Does the fact that one of the twentysomethings is about to move to Nashville for his residency matter? Do we need to know that he’s in med school? Do you need to know that I teach English? Much like Martin Blank, “I don’t think necessarily what a person does for a living reflects who he is.”

Like Martin Blank, Tyler Durden in Fight Club holds a system of belief that doesn’t associate vocation with identity in the sense that most Americans do. Tyler Durden doesn’t care if you’re a waiter, an auto mechanic, janitor, a junior associate manager, or an accountant. That makes no difference to him. What matters instead is how effectively you can battle against the system in order to break free of it. By the end of the film, Tyler doesn’t pay big-time rent. He doesn’t own a car. He doesn’t want digital cable, or a clever end table in the shape of a yin-yang. Instead, he’s destroyed credit card companies and set the credit record back to zero. He’s managed to extort a year’s salary out of a despicable automobile company. He’s destroyed a number of those horrid chain retailers that make our landscape so disgustingly uniform that an intelligent person might no longer be able to tell whether he or she were in the suburbs of Seattle, Austin, or Newark. Our hero, Durden’s transcended the work week and made something interesting of himself. He is not Tyler Durden the waiter or Tyler Durden the Soapmaker.

I can only hope that in my future as an attorney, people will know me as Brian, not as Brian the Lawyer, and that at present, people know me as Brian, not as Brian the Disgruntled English Instructor. At the same time, how could our occupations, those things with which we spend exponentially more hours than we do with each other each week, not affect our identities? If I go to law school and spend 60 hours a week studying law, how do I avoid becoming Brian the Law Student? How much do you consider your identities to include your vocations? Does this bother you?

Uma Thurman in an ice fishing hut...what could be better?

If I'm going to talk about "going home" movies, or high school reunion movies, it's clear that I cannot neglect Beautiful Girls. Of course, the "going home" that takes place for Timothy Hutton's character is almost wholly different from what Martin Blank experiences in Grosse Pointe Blank. In Beautiful Girls, Willie (Hutton's character), goes home to a small town that seems to be populated almost entirely by his old friends from high school. He has remarkably interesting conversations with these people about all sorts of bigtime topics, and there are still old conflicts playing out that date from the high school days. And, as a huge bonus, this teenage girl named Marty (played by Natalie Portman) now lives in town and an old friend's cousin Andera (played by Uma Thurman) is visiting. So not only is Willie's old world still intact and populated by these interesting people from the good old days who still seem to have endless things to talk about together, there's the novelty of two new and equally interesting people. This sort of thing might seem a bit unrealistic to me because my hometown is completely devoid of such things, but perhaps it still exists in small towns like the one in Beautiful Girls. To me, the world of this film is at once quite depressing yet wonderfully comforting and appealing.

The depressing part, I think, starts with what Willie's childhood home has become. His father seems practically comatose (see the scene in which he asks Willie to watch some golf with him), and his brother is caught up in some sort of vulgar, adolescent funk. As Marty says, Willie's brother is missing "that thing that having a mom gives you." Clearly, this isn't much of a home to come back to. And then, there's the twofold reason for Willie's visit home. His career as a pianist in New York City isn't going well enough, and he's been offered a sales position. So he's come home to ponder "what he's going to do for the rest of his life" as well as whether or not he's going to marry this girl he's been seeing seriously in the City. I suppose that this mid-life crisis-like situation is rather depressing as well, but at least Willie has this fully-realized world of the past to revisit in order to decide what to do.

And what a great world it seems to be. I wish I could go back to Bethel Park and have such great conversations with interesting people I used to know from high school. One of the particular conversations from Beautiful Girls that sticks out in my head is the one between Willie and Paul (played by Michael Rapaport) during which Paul goes off on his monologue about supermodels. He says that they're bottled promise, promise of a new day, promise of a better time, etc. Of course, this comes off in the film sounding creepy and pathetic, but I seem to remember something about this from my college and high school days. In my bedroom or dormroom, I always had a picture or two of Natalie Portman up on my walls. I'd look at it for something like inspiration. She's so damn cute in some of those pictures, and then she's remarkably talented and intelligent as evidenced by her body of film work and her matriculation at Harvard. At the risk of sounding awfully tacky and sentimental, those little pictures of her got me through some tough study days and rough times. Am I the only one who's ever actually practiced this sort of quintessentially American thing? Did any of you do something similar? So anyway, for me, Natalie Portman served something like the same function that Paul's supermodels served for him in Beautiful Girls. Is that creepy?

And also, what about the little ice fishing date Willie has with Andera? They have this great conversation about how the grass is always greener on the other side relationshipwise, and I can't help thinking that it's true on some level. Familiarity seems to breed discontent for so many, such that after a person is in a stable relationship for a long time, he or she begins to get bored or "look around" as they say. But there's always someone else looking at that significant other of which person A is bored, thinking, "wow," and wishing he or she were in the so-called boring situation. But probably having that nice, crisp little conversation with Uma Thurman in an ice fishing hut would keep any "bored" man sane and happy.

"You can never go home, Oatman. But I guess you can shop there."

One of my favorite films of all time is Grosse Pointe Blank, a movie in which the male protagonist "goes home" for his ten-year high school reunion. For those of you who haven't seen the film in a while, John Cusack's character Martin Blank returns to his affluent suburban hometown outside of Detroit. His old girlfriend still lives there, as do a number of the people who seem to have figured prominently into the social world of his high school. Of course, he hasn't seen or heard from any of them in ten years and he vanished mysteriously on prom night. Plus, Blank gets to tell everyone that he's a professional killer at the reunion. What could be better?

Of course, it's impossible to "go home" like Cusack's character does, especially if one's "hometown" is an affluent suburb. For instance, if I were to "go home" to Bethel Park, I would find only one of my friends who figured prominently into my high school social world still living there. I would find that, in some cases, even people's parents have moved away. While I would still be able to drive around using all the back roads and recognize the landmarks, the place would not be anything like the home that Martin Blank finds ten years later in Grosse Pointe because I would know hardly anyone besides my parents and my lone friend who still lives there.

But Grosse Pointe Blank at least makes a nod to this by locating the ill-fated Ultimart on the lot where Blank's childhood home once stood. And his mother has gone senile. That, at least, is something. In addition to the line that is the title of this post, there's also the scene in which Blank tells Oatman, his shrink, that he doesn't know what he has in common with "those people" anymore and that he thinks the reunion would be depressing. "They've all made themselves a part of something and they can talk about what they do," he says, "and what am I going to say? I killed the president of Paraguay with a fork. How have you been?" So while the film certainly acknowledges the idea of change making a homecoming impossible, that homecoming still takes place and is still meaningful because Blank does end up re-uniting with his old girlfriend and seeing some people he used to know.

Perhaps the filmmakers can get away with this precisely because of the 10-year reunion, an event that could explain the lingering presence of so many old-school "pointers." There's Paul, who still lives in town and now sells real estate, Bob, who owns a BMW dealership, Ken, who seems to be some kind of lawyer, and of course Debi, who works at a local radio station. So even the people in the reunion seem all to have stayed in town. But it's with Debi that the most convenient "going home" twist takes place. Since a fire took place in her apartment, she's now living at home with her father, in her old bedroom which looks pretty much the same as it did in high school. So Martin Blank gets to visit her there, in that museum of personal history. Then he gets to pick her up at her father's house for the reunion to make up for standing her up on prom night to join the army. And to top it all off, he gets to save her father's life in that very home. Talk about "going home" and being able to sort things out. I wonder how things might have been different if she'd still been living in her own apartment when Martin returned to town.

Still, I'm left with one thought. Of course I love Grosse Point Blank because it's so absurd and funny yet still true on some kind of base level. But where's the movie in which some guy goes home to his affluent suburban town and finds that no one he knows is there and that the place means absolutely nothing to him now? Isn't that, after all, the fate of most of those kind of places for the people who grow up there?