Blades of Glory

March 30 3007: The Final Year of Cinema Week 13

On May 14, 2002, the third studio album by Cam’ron, Come Home With Me was released. That June, a song from that record charted on the Billboard “Hot R&B / Hip Hop Songs” chart, peaking at #55. That song is titled “Welcome To New York City” and it’s fine. It’s no “Killa Cam” or nothing, but it gets the job done. It’ll get you moderately amped and you can dance to it and would be perfectly acceptable for a montage in a movie where Nick Cannon flies into JFK or something. The song is noteworthy though in that it is the first recorded instance of a neologism that would become ubiquitous in coming years, both as something spoken and as a cultural and philosophical concept. During the song’s outro, Cam raps “get the fuck off our dicks, no homo”. By 2007, this phrase “no homo” and the sentiment around it would be so firmly lodged in American culture that it would be apparently the basis for every mainstream comedy to come out, and Blades of Glory would be no exception.

Blades of Glory is the story of two professional figure skaters at the top of their game, Jimmy MacElroy (Jon Heder) and Chazz Michael Michaels (Will Ferrell). Jimmy is a highly conventional skater who is supremely talented, albeit a little on the repressed and sheltered side. Chazz is loud, brash, and uncouth, but is also a skilled skater and brings a novel and rebellious energy to the sport. At an international championship event in Stockholm the two tie for first place, but an on-podium fracas between the two causes them to be banned permanently from Men’s Singles Skating by the sport’s international regulatory body. Years later, alone and disgraced, Jimmy’s former coach (Craig T. Nelson) realizes a loophole: while they’ve both been banned from Men’s Singles skating, they both technically are still eligible for doubles skating. After seeing news footage of Jimmy and Chazz fighting backstage at a children’s ice show, Coach Goddard sees the possibility of Jimmy and Chazz as world championship doubles partners, if only they can get past their own mutual loathing for each other and the machinations of the current US doubles champions Stranz and Fairchild Van Waldenberg (Will Arnett and Amy Poehler).

On the level that it matters most, Blades of Glory works. It is a comedy, and it delivers laughs. It’s in no way smart. It’s not any kind of incisive biting satire or droll Whit Stillman / New Yorker style humor. It’s silly goofy shit but it’s silly goofy shit that managed to make me laugh enough times that I lost count of how often it happened, something that I have not been able to say of any of the big budget comedies from 2007 that I’ve seen so far. Jimmy MacElroy quietly sipping on a bag of Capri Sun™ as his adoptive father disowns him in his mid 20s is funny. The arc of mastering a forbidden skating move from behind the Iron Curtain that has always resulted in decapitation-by-ice-skate when attempted is funny. More than anything, Chazz Michael Michaels’s whole entire schtick as the leather-clad hard living bad boy of figure skating is very funny, especially as performed by Ferrell, the unquestionable master of this exact form of maximalist high concept comedy of the 21st century.

Where Blades is lacking is its constant gestures towards how funny it is that these dudes are doing gay stuff but they themselves are not gay. On the one hand, yes, figure skating is very femme coded. Many notable figure skaters are gay, including Brian Boitano, Johnny Weir, and Dick Button, arguably the most famous male figure skaters. The entire tension that creates the humor of Ferrell’s character is that he’s coded somewhere between the hypermasculinity of Jim Morrison and the hypermasculinity of Wilt Chamberlain but he exists in the world of figure skating. That tension creates the humor, and the scenes where Heder and Ferrell are making gross out faces because they need to touch each other just breaks the very same tension and eliminates any humor that might have been there.

It’s especially infuriating the way Blades treats its “no homo” humor because it innately understands a different way that tension creates humor and acknowledgement of that tension would eliminate it. That different kind of tension is that figure skating is inherently kind of silly, but these characters treat it incredibly seriously. Figure skaters wear sequins and tulle while they spin and twirl on the ice, but from the way Chazz and Jimmy talk about it they might as well be diffusing nuclear bombs. Where Blades shines is when something absolutely ludicrous is happening but the characters are stone faced. Stranz & Fairchild at one point perform a doubles act based on the affair between JFK and Maryln Monroe, complete with an on-ice pills overdose. There’s a chase sequence between Chazz and Franz through the streets of Montreal where they’re both wearing ice skates, rendering the chase painfully slow. And of course, the climactic move of Chazz & Jimmy’s routine is considered so intense because every previous time it had been attempted one of the partners had been decapitated by a skate blade. It’s all so very silly and stupid but also so very serious and that’s what makes it funny. The closest the film ever gets to acknowledging this is a running gag where all the characters within the world of figure skating have massive egos and giant rivalries, but all the characters who aren’t part of this world are completely ignorant of not only the beefs and drama, but even who these superstars of skating are. The tempest in a teapot nature of this tension is really really funny, but then I imagine what would happen if Craig T. Nelson started saying “c’mon boys it’s just figure skating, it’s not worth getting this worked up about it”. Breaking the tension would eliminate the humor. That’s why the “no homo” stuff is so maddening, it’s not just that it’s homophobic, it’s actively detracting from the humor.

By 2007, homosexuality had been used as a shorthand for deviance, evil, and disgust for over a hundred years in fiction. From the late 19th — early 20th century, gay characters in literature were wily and couldn’t be trusted, or were simply punchlines for being a kind of silly and frivolous sort of person, incapable of being taken seriously. The first openly gay character of the modern era in literature is Vautrin, a character in several novels by Honoré de Balzac, a ruthless criminal mastermind and murderer as depicted from 1835 – 1847. Subsequent depictions of gay men in the early 20th century by authors like Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler continued in this trend (as did their depictions on film). As such, insinuations of homosexuality in mainstream fiction were tantamount to character assassination. In the latter part of the 20th century, especially after the Stonewall riots and the subsequent Gay Pride movement the depiction of homosexuality in film and television began to veer towards more sympathetic and well rounded characters. The 1990s were a major turning point, when both the New Queer Cinema of auteurs like Gregg Araki and Todd Haynes began and mainstream cinema started actively portraying gay characters as sympathetic protagonists in movies like The Birdcage (1996) and Philadelphia (1993). Admittedly these characters were played by straight men depicting completely sexless relationships, but for once the heroes of the stories could be gay, and we as the audience were clearly meant to sympathize with them and put ourselves in their shoes. By the end of the decade Ellen DeGeneris had come out as a character on her eponymous sitcom and Rupert Everett had successfully stolen the hearts of America as the first gay BFF in My Best Friend’s Wedding (1997). It is at this point when queerness in mainstream media has its first glimmer of not being a negative trait.

From the 1990s onwards, gayness in fiction has been in this transitional and liminal space, where somehow audiences are meant to understand both that homosexuality per se is not bad, but being a straight person mistaken for a gay person is bad. This dual standard in humor has a clear starting point: the Seinfeld episode “The Outing” from its fourth season. In the episode Jerry is interviewed by a college journalist who mistakes the dynamic between him and George as that of a couple, and writes her profile of him including George as his lover. Jerry and George spend the remainder of the episode trying to reaffirm their heterosexuality, often with the refrain “We’re not gay! Not that there’s anything wrong with that!” This cultural shorthand only grew in the next 15 years, as I’ve encountered seven movies from 2007 so far with some level of “no homo” content (Alpha Dog, Smokin' Aces, Starter for 10, Wild Hogs, 300, I Think I Love My Wife, and Blades of Gory) and two big budget comedies where “no homo” accounts for a substantial plurality if not the outright majority of the foundation of the jokes (Wild Hogs, and Blades of Glory).

On one level, something has clearly changed, if only because of how different all these jokes hit watching them in the future in 2025. It’s tough to say exactly how. By 2011 the phrase “no homo” itself had clearly begun to run its course, as evidenced by the song of the same title released by the comedy hip-hop trio The Lonely Island about a gay narrator who’s trying to hide his gayness by repeating “no homo” constantly, but even that song is using the same double standard. Being gay: not funny, but pretending not to be gay when you are: funny. On the one hand, recent movies like Booksmart (2019), Bottoms (2023), and Bros (2022) prove that one can successfully have a big broad comedy with gay people in it and not have the jokes hit with a “no homo” thud. In fact, such jokes are broadly absent from mainstream comedies. On the other hand, queerphobia is clearly not dead, as evidenced by the astonishing rollback of trans rights in the past few years. It’s tough to imagine someone in 2025 using this kind of “being gay is okay but being mistaken for gay is funny” joke, which feels like progress; maybe it’s time for a new figure skating comedy?

Rating: ★★★☆☆ Not awful, but not spectacular either. A solid showing. Maybe I’ll watch it again in 20 years while I fold laundry and have a completely okay time doing so.

Economics: Blades of Glory opened at #1 at the box office on March 30, 2007, ahead of Meet The Robinsons, a movie that allegedly exists. It would go on to make $150 million globally plus $50 million in DVD sales against a $61 million budget. It continues to be thought of as a “middling” success in the career of Will Ferrell, and is also considered to be a turning point in the career of Jon Heder, where despite the fact that he was in a movie that made money that people broadly liked-if-not-loved he went from “promising young comic star on the rise” after Napoleon Dynamite (2004) to “guy who will never replicate the success of Napoleon Dynamite” after this.

Alternate recommendation: Some of you will read this and think “maybe I should watch Blades of Glory” and that is understandable given that I said it was funny. But if you’re looking for figure skating, takedowns of macho bullshit, and humor, may I suggest you do what I did after finishing Blades of Glory and put on a genuine masterpiece that deals with figure skating, takes down macho bullshit, and is hilarious, and that is I, Tonya (2017). Unlike Blades of Glory it is funny without being homophobic, will reappraise Tonya Harding in your mind (unless you’re my wife and were on here side since 1989 and never wavered), and has at least three Oscarworthy performances even though it only won one. Also unlike Blades of Glory it is currently streaming for free on Tubi.

Other 2007 films visited this week:

The Lookout: Academy award winning screenwriter Scott Frank’s directorial debut about a young man from a wealthy Kansas City family (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) who suffers a traumatic brain injury as a teen and as a result finds daily life difficult and alienating until he falls in with a crew of ne’er do wells with a plan to rob a bank where he works. Gordon-Levitt’s performance doesn’t really work as a person with brain damage and the plot doesn’t really gel, but it does have the barest skeleton of what could have been a better movie. Features Jeff Daniels as a blind gourmand and a guy who looks like Geddy Lee as “Bone”. Also lol Gordon-Levitt’s character is named “Chris Pratt” and this movie came out two years before Chris Pratt became a going concern. ★★☆☆☆

Starter For 10: Somehow forgot to write about this one the week I watched it. James McAvoy stars as a collegebound teen attending Bristol University who is looking for an education, love, and a chance to appear on the quiz show University Challenge. The film deftly handles issues of class and sexual politics while also genuinely being a fun rom com. Also stars a pre-superstardom Benedict Cumberbatch as a fussy quiz-coach and a pre-superstardom James Cordon as a working class goon. ★★★★☆

Next Week: Grindhouse