Let's all go to the movies

I don’t know if seeing a couple of Hollywood movies over the weekend counts as “local arts,” but since I will lamentably have to miss the upcoming student film festival, we’ll roll with it.

Friday night, I saw Grindhouse, the Rodriguez/Tarantino (/Roth/Wright/Zombie) double feature, which may be the fastest three and a half hours in recorded history. I have never sat that long in a movie theater without checking the time.

Both films were throwbacks to vintage horror films but managed to be somewhat postmodern in their portrayal. Though the movies screamed “1970’s,” from the wardrobe to the sets to the cars, neither director had any qualms with anachronism, as characters make use of cell phones and talk about Osama bin Laden.

Further, grainy film stock and faux-damaged reels served both to give the film a decades-ago feel and to present the stories in a less conventional narrative format.

On Saturday, I went to see Blades of Glory. I was extremely conflicted going in: members of the cast had me unsure of what to expect. Nick Swardson and Will Arnett can make me laugh with whatever they do, but Will Ferrell is pretty hit-or-miss and Jon Heder is usually just miss.

Will Ferrell as a realistic human being is usually a waste of time. The characters he played in Stranger than Fiction and Kicking and Screaming are too regular for Ferrell’s comedic abilities to shine through. In a movie like Anchorman, Ferrell as a completely out of touch, over the top, completely preposterous character is gold. Chazz Michael Michaels of Blades of Glory, from his nymphomania to his childish bickering with Heder’s Jack MacElroy, was much closer to the latter.

While the movie was one of Ferrell’s funniest, the most turbulent scene of the film came when Jack MacElroy was about to kiss Katie Van Waldenberg. In the context of the movie, this was fine.

What made this troubling was that these characters were played by Jon Heder (star of perhaps the most overrated and inexplicably popular movie of all time, Napoleon Dynamite) and Jenna Fischer (who plays Pam on “The Office,” also known as “The only show on television that’s worth watching on a weekly basis”).

Because of characters they’ve played in the past (and in Fischer’s case, still plays), I have diametrically opposite opinions on these two people, and watching them kiss was nearly unwatchable.

Grindhouse and Blades of Glory might be about as different as two movies can be (even though I spent a lot of time laughing during both), but they were equally enjoyable.