Mr. Woodcock - Review

Mr. Woodcock. Does just saying that name aloud make you giggle? Then you might have the underdeveloped mental capacity necessary to truly enjoy this movie. You might also enjoy hanging out behind the building after school with mid-high students who are desperately failing at trying to insult each other and chortling over dirty slang terms for having sex. Actually, there’s not a whole lot of difference between that and watching this film.

There is a semi-sweet storyline in the midst of all the repetitive jokes and predictable setups. Inspired by his own efforts to overcome his traumatized childhood, John Farley (Sean William Scott) has written the latest cult-craze self-help book “Letting Go – Getting Past Your Past”. Most of Farley’s demons revolved around his abusive mid-high gym teacher, Mr. Woodcock (Billy Bob Thornton), a man who seems to enjoy embarrassing and belittling his students.

While on tour Farley learns that his little mid-western hometown has decided to bestow upon him its greatest honor: the Corn Cob Key (think key to the city, but with a giant ear of corn on the end). It’s handed out during the town’s annual Corn-ival, a festival full of corn-tests and corn-gratulations to the winners. Do you seem the theme there? It’s only one of several dull running jokes that the movie beats to death during the mind-numbing hour-and-a-half. Farley comes home only to discover that town has also decided to honor Mr. Woodcock, naming him Educator of the Year.

Much to Farley’s further dismay, his mother (Susan Sarandon) is engaged to Mr. Woodcock. Apparently she loves him for his meat. Of course, she’s referring to his talent for cooking steaks, but cue up another series of lame jokes repeated way too many times to be funny. Tossing all of his own self-help principles to the wind and making a complete idiot of himself along the way, Farley desperately tries to prove to his mother and the town just what a horrible person Woodcock really is.

As if it wasn’t bad enough that nearly every gag has been done in another movie before (and usually done better), every single setup is also absurdly predictable. It might have helped if Farley was the kind of guy you could rally around, but the character is too pathetic to cheer. All I could see through the whole movie was a grown-up Steve Stifler who was reprising his American Pie chore of running around complaining about the guy sleeping with his mother.

Sarandon and Thornton are no help either. It’s not entirely their fault as they both do the best with the material they’re given; but there’s the rub: the script is completely worthless. I can’t help but wonder if they were both drunk when they read it or maybe took the roles on a dare. Blackmailed maybe? I don’t care how many times Sarandon and Thornton have won or been nominated for an Oscar, there’s no excuse for wasting time on Mr. Woodcock

I’ll grant the movie this: it made me laugh once. I’m not sure if I laughed because it was the only gag I didn’t see coming from a mile away or if I was so desperate for a chuckle that I would have cracked at a knock-knock joke. If you’re willing to wait seventy minutes for a laugh or the name Mr. Woodcock alone is enough to keep your infantile sense of humor afloat, this may just be the film for you.

Blades of Glory - Review

Who would have thought that The Cutting Edge, the 1992 romantic drama starring Moira Kelly and D.B. Sweeney as bickering would-be Olympic figure skaters could ever provide a template for a Will Ferrell comedy? And yet it is all there in the spectacularly silly laugh riot Blades of Glory: The bitter enemies who soften when they are forced to work together, the wealthy father pushing his child to win the gold, the rival team that threatens the hopefuls' dreams, the dedicated coach, and the unprecedented maneuver that will either surely win the competition or maim or even kill one of the partners. Talk about your miracles on ice. Somehow the screenwriters have taken a drippy love story and utterly transformed it.

Not that Napoleon Dynamite's Jon Heder, in the rich kid role of Jimmy MacElroy, is anywhere near as snooty as Kelly. In his peacock costume, he may just cut a more delicate figure out on the rink. But Ferrell's Chazz Michael Michaels is, if anything, even fuller of machismo than Sweeney, coming across like Elvis Stojko's bad boy cousin, prone to sex addiction, alcoholism, and steroid abuse, a heavy-metal demon on skates. That Jimmy and Chazz hate each other is only natural, but when that enmity leads to a fistfight in front of a worldwide televised audience, they lose everything when each is banned from the sport for life.

Banned from individual competition that is, which is what sets the plot in motion when Jimmy discovers there is a loophole and that they can still compete in pairs skating. With only weeks to go before nationals and no female partners in sight, their only alternative is to skate with each other and become the first same-sex pair skaters in the sports' history. It is a thin joke to build a movie on, predicated on gay panic and the stereotype that somehow male figure skaters are not as masculine as athletes in other sports.

It would seem that the comedy would wear out long before the movie ended, and yet it doesn't. The writers do find a surprisingly many ways to milk laughs out of the situation, and directors Josh Gordon and Will Speck are blessed with excellent timing. Jimmy and Chazz's skating rivals Stranz (Will Arnett) and Fairchild Van Waldenberg (Amy Poehler), a quasi-incestuous brother and sister act, are hilarious in their own ridiculous subplot and even funnier on ice in their ludicrous (but brilliantly conceived) routines. If Jenna Fischer as their timid sister Katie (and Jimmy's love interest) does not fare as well, it is only that her pallid character is underwritten.

But Blades of Glory lives or dies on the strength of Ferrell and Heder, and they come through like the champs that they are. The movie takes advantage of the disparities between their sizes, their ages, and perhaps most importantly, their personalities, with Chazz's outgoing and aggressive bonhomie contrasting wonderfully with the shy, timid Jimmy. Both men are superb physical comedians who don't mind looking foolish. That lack of self-consciousness is an ace in the hole, building laugh upon laugh.

Sure, no one is going to remember Blades of Glory come Oscar time, but it's not that type of movie. But as a piece of popcorn entertainment, it really is cutting edge. If there was an Olympics for purely fun movies, this would skate away with one of those pretty medals.