I don't think she's right for you.

The first DVD I ever owned was Rushmore, that 1998 film starring Jason Schwartzman as Max Fischer and Bill Murray as Herman Blume. I remember thinking how cool and hi-tech it was that my new computer could function as a DVD player, and Rushmore was on sale, so I couldn’t resist. Still, nearly ten years later, Rushmore remains one of my favorites.

But what makes it so good? Perhaps the most distinct thing about Rushmore is that it has a central character who is a young adolescent, but who seems to have a talent for getting particular adults to treat him as an adult, to give him adult-like responsibilities and allow him to deal with R-rated material in the plays he writes and directs. After one play, which involved live gunfire and drug trade, Blume buys Max a whiskey at a fancy restaurant. And then there’s the irresistibly cool scene early in the film when Max expresses concern to his father that he’s spending too much time on extra-curricular activities and not enough time scoring chicks, which seems to Max to be all anyone cares about. You’re like one of those old clipper ship captains, Max’s father says, you’re married to the sea. Yes, Max replies, that’s true. But I’ve been out to sea for a long time. During this brief exchange, Max and his father stop just outside the door to their modest home, as though the dialogue were so important that it demanded their undivided attention, and as though Max had been a bachelor for decades.

The perfect compliment to Max’s teen precociousness is Herman Blume, a rich industrialist who often acts like a teenager. For instance, both Blume and Max have a crush on Ms. Cross, a teacher at Rushmore. Blume uses his cell phone to call Max and tell him that he doesn’t think Ms. Cross is that great and that she’s not right for Max. At the same time, he’s sneaking through the school grounds to peak at Ms. Cross through her schoolroom window. On his way, he speeds up momentarily so as to cross the basketball court just in time to reject a small child who’s taking a shot. There’s something wildly amusing about the sight of a grown man in a suit seriously rejecting a little kid back into what would be about the fifth row if it were an arena rather than a school playground. And of course, this is Bridger’s favorite moment of the film, and he likes to say “I don’t think she’s right for you” before breaking up passes on the ultimate field.

Along with Blume and Max comes an amazing cast of rad minor characters. There’s Margaret Yang, a role played by Sara Tanaka before her infamous role as Megan Huang in Old School. She’s just as precocious as Max, but cute and savvy to the ways of the public school where Max finds himself after being expelled from Rushmore. She flies a remote controlled plane and acts in one of Max’s plays. There’s Dirk Calloway, Max’s much younger best friend whose mom is rather hot, which generated the rumor that Max picked Dirk as a chapel partner simply to get a piece from Dirk’s mom in her Jaguar. And who could forget Mr. LittleJeans, the Rushmore groundskeeper who laughs in the most creepy and hysterical way at the end of Max’s play at the public school. All of these characters and others give life to Rushmore’s bizarre setting.

I suppose that what it comes down to is that Rushmore is funny, but not laugh-out-loud funny. It’s more like amusingly absurd; for that reason, it’s precisely the sort of movie I’d like.

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.

"I'm here for the gang bang."

There’s a scene in the film Old School, close to the beginning, in which something momentous happens. It occurs after Mitch Martin takes the early flight home from San Diego and catches his girlfriend Heidi “pre the act,” so to speak. Mitch walks into their bedroom and finds Heidi on the bed watching porn, and then sees two mostly-naked, blindfolded strangers come out of the bathroom ready to “doubleteam” his girlfriend. But the scene I’m really talking about, shortly after that traumatizing scene, is the one in which Mitch and Heidi are speaking in the kitchen after the blindfolded strangers incident. The doorbell rings, Heidi gets this “oh-no-I-forgot-about-that” look on her face, and Mitch answers the door. Outside the door, there’s a man with 70s looking curly hair and a cheesy outfit who says “Hello.” Mitch says “Yeah,” to which the man responds, in a very comfortable tone, “I’m here for the gang bang.”

So first of all, this tacky, doorbell ringing guy is actually played by Todd Phillips, the director of the film, who is credited for said performance as “Gang Bang Guy.” But more importantly, have we appropriated this Hollywood gem or what? Since Mariah and I live in a large apartment building, people have to call up so that we can buzz them into the lobby. It’s not uncommon, particularly for Jeff and Josh, to call up and say “I’m here for gang bang.” For me, at least, this NEVER gets old, and so I encourage all of you, next time you come over and need us to buzz you up, to say “I’m here for the gang bang.” It’ll lighten the mood and remind me of one of the greatest comedies Hollywood has ever produced.