You're my pretty lady

Rating: Null/10 (21 February 2012)

"Blades of Glory" is a formulaic but funny comedy starring Will Ferrell and Jon Heder as a pair of male ice skaters. The plot's "Dodgeball" meets "Cool Runnings" meets "Semi Pro" meets "every Will Ferrell" movie, but Ferrell manages to elevate things somewhat. He plays Chazz Michael Michaels, a crotch-grabbing, man-chest exposing "ice devouring sex tornado". Jon Heder, who took straight faced ridiculousness to remarkable heights in "Napoleon Dynamite", matches Ferrell's brand of dead-pan goofiness blow for blow.
There are several epochs of irony, one of which American comedy seems to currently be wallowing in (Ferrell is a caricature of a dopey American, blissfully unaware of how ridiculous he is to the rest of the world). First you had Socratic irony, which was really a form of rhetorical dialogue. From this – saying the opposite of what's true to underline the truth - you'd trace a line from Chaucer, to More, Sidney and Milton, arriving finally at Swift and Austen. Then you had Romantic irony, which was a sort of philosophical tool. German philosopher Karl Schlegel believed that it bestowed a "multiplicity of perspectives" from which the "truth could then be unlocked". Then you had a sort of post WW1 irony which was used as a tool of dissent to highlight the disjunction between, say, patriotic rhetoric and the reality of war. This led to a widespread use of irony as a means of puncturing deceitful propaganda. Up until this point irony always had some moral objective; it offered an overview, serving to cut through accepted wisdom and expose fraudulence. It might say "This belief is wrong", but it doesn't say "All belief is wrong". But then came the era of postmodernity, which trades in postmodern irony. Here, everything is exclusively self-referential, there is always an implication that art is used up (and so justifiably recyclable), and irony is used to undermine all sincerity, all possibility of truth, all emotion, all moral certainty, as well as to kill off the possibility of a meaningful moral position. Irony, then, is indistinguishable from cynicism. It now assert its right to have no position whatsoever. It now says "nothing at all". As Paul de Man pointed out, "this does not make it into an authentic language, for to know inauthenticity is not the same as being authentic."
Meanwhile, every comedy coming out of the US wears a badge of goofy irony, satire even, without actually being about anything. These scripts go far beyond making no effort to laughing about their lack of effort. Of course holding Ferrell responsible for a lack of radical comedy is silly, especially when you consider that his "The Other Guys" is pretty much the only watchable mainstream satire about the recent global financial crisis.
7.9/10 – Worth one viewing. See Ferrell in "Everything Must Go", based on a Raymond Carver story.