Girls, You Have GOT To See This!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

                                    "I Tonya" is everything one could want from this film--tough moving, trash talking Tonya, in all her White Trash glory.  Yet the movie is not the camp fest many of us, including myself, were led to expect, but a relatively real telling of the saga of one who aspired beyond her social station.  And much of the humor in this film comes from Allison Janney's scene stealing turn, as White Trash mother, LaVona Harding.

                                     The movie is perfectly cast, from the two ladies, to Sebastian Stan and Paul Walter Huser, as those two redneck goons,  Jeff Gillooly  and Shawn Eckhardt.  What a bunch of losers!

                                      The scenes of Tonya and LaVona are straight out of a lower class version "Gypsy."  One has to  hand it to LaVona, for recognizing her child's gift at an early age, and pushing her for it.   As Louise says in the musical, "No kid does it on their own," so LaVona was clearly the driving force.  And, like Mama Rose, she did not know when to quit.

                                       I don't know how much actual skating Margot Robbie does here, but her feats of skill are as impressive as Natalie Portman's in "Black Swan."  Tonya's problem the film would have one believe, was two fold--self awareness on the ice, and a lack thereof off.  No wonder she keeps saying things are not fault. By the end of the film, I was not so sure, either.

                                         There is also, in the present day sequences, a bit of "This is my world, the rest of you just live in it," attitude from Robbie, as Tonya.  Hard and tender, simultaneously.  Writer Steven Rogers and director Craig Gillespie have created not a caricature, but a character made up of  both convictions and contradictions.  In other words, a fully fleshed out individual.

                                          They also get the skating world right--the glowing, bright whiteness, beneath which lurks such a dark veneer of competitiveness, disloyalty and betrayal.

                                           Though Tonya, gets her full due here, the most telling moment for me, as a member of the audience, was a series of clips, shows news anchors of the day, but much younger.

                                              When the then youthful image of Matt Lauer appeared on screen, the entire audience booed and hissed!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!