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Review: Pom Wonderful Presents: The Greatest Movie Ever Sold
Reviews
Blades of Glory
Will Ferrell's glory days are over
By
PETER KEOUGH
|
March 29, 2007
BLADES OF GLORY
2.0
Stars
VIDEO: Watch the trailer for
Blades of Glory.
Will Ferrell plays a redneck star athlete who’s dumb and adored and loses his trousers a lot and meets his match in an effete competitor. It worked in
Talladega Nights
, but it doesn’t work here. Jon Heder, who plays prima donna superstar skater Jimmy McElroy, is no Sacha Baron Cohen, or even a Sasha Cohen (who appears as herself). And if you’re going to make a movie about the first male/male pair-figure-skating team, you have to make at least a few jokes about the gay thing, if not include it as a subtext, as
Talladega Nights
did with re- state politics and attitudes. First-time feature directors Josh Gordon and Will Speck pass on such sophisticated maneuvers, however, and rather than let the conflict between Farrell’s macho Chazz and Heder’s epicene Jimmy play out, they end it for no reason and with no resolution and resort instead to standard buddy-movie conventions. No guts and no glory, and not much in the way of comedy, either.
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The 100 unsexiest men 2007: 100-91
These guys couldn't turn on a radio
Ferrell behavior
Will Ferrell might spend a lot of his on-screen time with his pants off, running and screaming, but in person, promoting his new movie Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby , he can be as buttoned down as Tony Snow before the White House press corps.
Fractured fairy tales
Times are tough when the Dream Factory has a better grip on what’s going on than the people in Washington.
Semi-pro
This Will Ferrell send-up attempts to do for bush-league basketball what Bull Durham did for baseball and Slap Shot for hockey.
Step Brothers
Step Brothers should answer any doubts as to whether Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly are cinema’s reigning lovable losers.
Blue movie?
Despite what the people behind Talladega Nights might tell you, the film makes its target audience — NASCAR fans, rednecks, Red Staters of various descriptions — look like a bunch of idiots. Watch the trailer for Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby (QuickTime) Ferrell behavior: The star of Talladega Nights drives a hard bargain. By Peter Keough
Review: Land of the Lost
Even Matt Lauer deserves a better fate than to watch his career die at the hands of Brad Silbering.
Curious George
How do you convey the whimsical complexity of Margaret and H.A. Rey’s beloved chimp if the celluloid version can’t utter a word?
The 100 unsexiest men 2007: 10-1
These guys couldn't turn on a radio
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ARTICLES BY PETER KEOUGH
REVIEW: FOLLOW ME: THE YONI NETANYAHU STORY
| May 29, 2012
Whatever your opinion of the policies of Benjamin Netanyahu, Prime Minister of Israel, you can't deny that his brother Yoni was a hero, a courageous man whose conflicts and triumphs mirror those of his homeland.
REVIEW: MOONRISE KINGDOM
| May 31, 2012
Wes Anderson should always make movies featuring characters who are pubescent or younger — like Rushmore , which until this film was his best.
REVIEW: WHERE DO WE GO NOW?
| May 22, 2012
Lebanese director Nadine Labaki's whimsical film about internecine slaughter has a tone problem from the very start: a group of widows engage in a goofy line dance while the voiceover narrator bewails the death toll of religious warfare.
REVIEW: MEN IN BLACK 3
| May 24, 2012
Griffin (Michael Stuhlbarg), a fifth dimensional alien, can see the infinite possibilities each moment possesses and the infinite contingencies that caused it to happen.
INTERVIEW: RICHARD LINKLATER MESSES WITH TEXAS IN BERNIE
| May 16, 2012
No matter how far he strays, Richard Linklater's heart remains in Texas.
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PETER KEOUGH
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