Celluloid Heroes

There’s still some juice in these legs, and I can still take a few. Baby, please. Just let me take ‘em in the ring. At least I know who’s hitting me.

Ron Howard has a reputation for excessive sentimentality in his films. I’ll reserve judgment on whether this is deserved for another time, but if it is true, Howard was the perfect director for Cinderella Man. This mostly accurate story of real life boxer James J. Braddock (Russell Crowe) needs a filmmaker willing to yank on the heartstrings like a team of Clydesdales. This film is so consciously old fashioned that it really ought to have been filmed in black and white in the old 4:3 Academy aspect ratio.

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That’s no sacrifice. That’s revenge.

The suicide bomber has to be the most impenetrable enigma to the western mind. I don’t think we can even comprehend the idea of a young person, presumably healthy in body and mind, purposely throwing away his or her life just to kill a few people who are often not even a party to the conflict in which the bomber is engaged. We can wrap our brains around the concept of a soldier sacrificing himself as he runs up Omaha Beach into the teeth of a German machine gun nest, but there are two key differences. One, his death is not the goal but just a consequence and, two, the people getting killed on the other side are soldiers as well.

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