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Old February 8th, 2018 #1
steven clark
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Default I, Tonya

This is a film about Tonya Harding, and it's personal for me. I remember her claim to fame, and my mother became addicted to watching figure skating at that time, becoming a Nancy Kerrigan groupie.
I avoided the movie because I thought it would be sleaze, but I, Tonya is actually a good film and will give WN some food for thought.
Tonya Harding is portrayed as a working class kid driven to skating by her mother, the most monstrous, God awful bitch I've seen in movies for a long time. Her mother slaps Tonya, insults her, makes her skate until she pisses, all the time saying she's doing this to make Tonya tough. At a skating event, she even hires a lout to heckle Tonya.
It works, and Tonya has a lot of talent as a skater. She also has drive, and even drops out of school to keep skating. Her mother is as crazy as ever, constantly smoking as well. The actress who plays her keeps the madness in narrow eyes and a constant drone...sort of like crazy people we've all known, and in fact both women remind me of the family my brother married into.
Tonya learns to shoot from her father, a decent but cold guy who finally takes off. When Tonya's mother stabs her with a knife...well, Tonya stays, and meets the second nut in her life, Jeff Gillooly, a meek, nice guy...until he slaps her around. Tonya slaps back, and a lot of critics claim this is funny. No, it's not.
Tonya continues skating and breaks records, but her blue collar/redneck life is looked down on by judges, who want skaters to be nice and represent middle class values. They prefer Nancy, who plays the game of Miss Pretty. Tonya keeps on skating and showing them, and somehow, 'the incident' comes to pass...where Nancy Kerrigan is attacked. The movie shows it masterminded by Shawn Eckhardt, Tonya's body guard, played by a guy who looks like John Candy's brother, and a loonie who claims to be a counter terrorist expert, among other dubious titles. He has some goons attack Nancy (the plan was originally to write death threats), and the plot crashes and burns like a dozen or so conspiracy theories we see on the net.
I liked the way Tonya is depicted, as surviving between terrible and ridiculous, and showing how her flaw was not running away from people like her mother and Gillooly, but how you get emotionally attached to people like this. it's messy, but it's life.
The film was directed by an Australian. It captures the blue collar world pretty well, and I like how it's an all white cast (except three cops are played by blacks). The director does the usual hate conservatives...in Eckhardt's room (he lives with his parents), there is a large poster of Reagan to remind us how stupid he is, and the movie has Tonya and Gillooly address the camera as they're older...arty touch, and Tonya says how there is no real truth, only what we experience...a way to get her off the hook in the vicious and brainless attack on Nancy?
But I think the film shows blue collar life with sympathy and understanding. As Alex Linder says, we should be receptive to films that do this.
I do think the Eckhardt scenes are funny, and he reminds me of a lot of people in our movement, who talk about how tough they are and how knowing, but when the FBI comes, he tries his little tricks, then breaks down and rats, and wears a wire to trap Gillooly. Too many jerks like this in our movement.
Interesting the director is Australian, much like the director for another film, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, is Irish. American directors seem to have written America off, like Alex said, the people who run America have declared war on the people who are America.
The only thing I wish is the ending hadn't been so downbeat. Tonya actually has become a welder, painter, has a marriage and a child, and hunts with a bow. She also saved a woman's life once by using mouth-to-mouth.
Also, after she was disqualified from skating in America, she was offered a chance to skate for Australia but turned it down, because she said she was American and only wanted to skate for her country.
So, for all the baggage in her life, that's a silver lining.
 
Old February 8th, 2018 #2
Emily Henderson
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I, Tonya was garbage, and tanked at the box office, which it deserved.

The woman who played her mom is a good actress, though, did a good job showing the cuckoo quality of the woman.

Tonya wrote down the times and location of Nancy's practice sessions, confirmed by a handwriting expert to be in her handwriting, and threw it in a dumpster where a woman called police and it was retrieved.

To this day she says she 'had no idea where she practiced', a lie.

Yes, her mom was probably an insane bitch, and Tonya inherited every drop of the insane bitch DNA most likely.

Nancy was not only attacked, then put all over media until people got tired of seeing it and blamed her, when all she did was skate and get attacked by a nut. Then media, in all its niceness, attacked her and made fun of her.

The FBI tapes that the Kerrigans listented to show Tonya is a liar, and knew far more than she admits. The first plan was to shoot Nancy with a high powered rifle, and fatboy actually talked them out of that, said all they needed to do was make sure she couldn't skate.

Realize: Eckardt suggests a car crash, even murder by sniper fire, but they other dudes didn't want to do that, they settled on trying to shatter her knee.

That's disucssed here and has been in a couple of the more honest documentaries:
https://www.freep.com/story/news/loc...ine/866861001/

Horrible.

Fast Forward to them actually letting the insane nut go to the Olympics and represent our country, where she embarassed the USA with her 'my shoe-lace is too short I can't tie it!' fiasco.

She caused Jose Chiounard to have to skate early, which disrupts a skater's equilibrium and give's Tonya the better slot of skating last in group 2. Once again, manipulative bitch gets her way and hurts other people in the process.

Then Oksana Baiul, with her two-footed landings, got the gold. Not Oksana's fault she was just a kid, but it was unfair, as many coaches and judges attested to. And we know from what came out in later years how corrupt the judging often is, since they got called out on it in the pairs competition, having to issue two golds due to the pre plotted cheating in favor of Russians Berezhnaya and Sikharulidze against the Canadian Pairs team, Sale and Pelletier.


Nancy was not just 'pretty': anyone who knows figure skating knows -heck, whether they know the sport or not- that Tonya is a hunched over slob. A triple axel is one jump---that she never did consistently, btw---but she was fat and lazy, smoked cigarettes, and always had a prima-donna 'wardrobe malfunction' at competitions, including the Olympics. One time she had a dress malfunction, another time a 'skate blade broke', etc. She was totally maladjusted, no doubt due to a combo of DNA and upbringing.

BTW: Nancy's dad worked several jobs round the clock so she could skate. Tonya's poverty status doesn't excuse her shit character.

Tonya was a grown woman. Plots to assault your competition should have meant one thing for her: jail.

Good that she lost the ability to coach kids or skate. Her own fault, not her mom's, and sure as hell not Nancy's.

This movie is a whitewash of the kind of person Tonya really is, a woe is me for criminal trash. It's something I hate about 'In Cold Blood' after having really liked the movie, in which I do think the acting is absolutely brilliant, but the idea that people are not responsible for their behavior when grown, and should be given a pass for upbringing, is a point I think is totally fallacious in such films.

They don't like to look at the biological aspect: sometimes all the love and kindness in the world wouldn't change a person. This is why kids like Tonya, taken away from horrid parents, are sometimes just biologically similar to the parent, and not good people, and sometimes not. A very individual thing, varies from family to family, person to person.
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Last edited by Emily Henderson; February 8th, 2018 at 01:02 PM.
 
Old February 8th, 2018 #3
Ray Allan
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A few months after the 1994 Winter Olympics, I watched a quickie made-for-TV movie called Tonya and Nancy: The Whole Shocking Story or something like that. I thought Tonya Harding was more entertaining as a wrestling manager.
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Old February 8th, 2018 #4
Emily Henderson
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Ray Allan View Post
A few months after the 1994 Winter Olympics, I watched a quickie made-for-TV movie called Tonya and Nancy: The Whole Shocking Story or something like that. I thought Tonya Harding was more entertaining as a wrestling manager.
She had a brief boxing 'career' also, and tried her hand at rapping.

Had she not been greedy and dishonest, she actually was the first woman to land a triple axel in American National's, and could've potentially medaled. But the Ladies from all over the world were better skaters. Had Chen Lu done a perfect performance, for example, she could've beaten everyone easily, she had a triple lutz triple toe combo back when that was uncommon, and she was a beautiful skater. Nancy would've had a hard time beating Lu, but Tonya was far beneath Chen Lu, Chiounard, Sato, and many others, even on her best day, because of the overall sloppy quality of the skating, and her being someone who rarely skated clean consistently.

They always rehash her sorry butt right around Olympic time, which is combo funny and disgusting since it's now time to 'feel sorry' for this woman who was a thug, who was caught lying repeatedly. Her not coming clean to all makes her still a thug, she should feel grateful she is out and about.

Boxing and pro wrestling are still a bit too classy for her, she should've stuck to rapping....although Lil Wayne might want to wear knee-guards.
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Old February 8th, 2018 #5
steven clark
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Default I, Tonya

Good replies. I still enjoy the film's depiction of blue collar life, and again, it's a comment on getting away from bad people. Like I said, it reminds me of the family my brother married into…just a bunch losers and underachievers, but my brother goes along. Like a lot of people in such situations, he got trapped and became passive. Now, he's 71 and stuck with taking care of a 7 year old girl the mother, a pothead, doesn't want, and the father isn't too keen taking care of…he's an ex-Marine who got a medical discharge and now married a black woman and has her kid. That's the happy family he wants.
MY brother's wife manipulated him into all of this, and he seems accepting.


It's also interesting that this is a film by an Australian. The film Three Billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri is by an Irishman, and no, I won't see or review it. it's about another wacky woman, and of course deals with 'racism'. When I saw a preview of the leading woman kick a teenage girl in the balls, I decided it wasn't for me.

Three Billboards is garnering prizes and critical acclaim. Seems like the ruling class wants to hear racism and nasty, misanthropic feminism wherever they can. Noted too that in the winter olympics, a black guy was chosen to carry the torch, and some in the teams are complaining of bias.

Well, sure. It's clear the system wants whites destroyed. They make no bones about it, now.

Films always like to take losers and, if not glorify them, tell their story. It's kind of the 'win by losing' philosophy explained in Hear the Cradle Song, where Christianity is shown to favor losers and downtrodden, and by being one of them, you 'win by losing' and so get God's favor.

These two films have been called movies of the Trump era, which shows what the ruling class thinks of us, much like the Clint Eastwood film Gran Torino, with its love of Laotians and Clint dying for them, was called the first movie of the Obama era.
 
Old February 8th, 2018 #6
Emily Henderson
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Quote:
Originally Posted by steven clark View Post
Films always like to take losers and, if not glorify them, tell their story. It's kind of the 'win by losing' philosophy explained in Hear the Cradle Song, where Christianity is shown to favor losers and downtrodden, and by being one of them, you 'win by losing' and so get God's favor.

These two films have been called movies of the Trump era, which shows what the ruling class thinks of us, much like the Clint Eastwood film Gran Torino, with its love of Laotians and Clint dying for them, was called the first movie of the Obama era.
^^That's a rather brilliant statement, well-said and it's quite true.
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