You really think your family’s lookin’ out for you?
I think we’re wasting money on all the “Just Say No” programs we think are going to keep kids off drugs. Two hours with someone like Dicky Eklund (Christian Bale) should convince anyone that drugs are a one-way ticket to nowhere. The first time we see him in The Fighter, the ex-boxer is living for two things: his rose-colored memories of the time he knocked down Sugar Ray Leonard and his next vial of crack.
I’m your brother and you ask me that?
Raging Bull is an unforgettable portrait of man who seemed to lack the capacity and imagination to ever be happy. It’s not a film you watch to be uplifted or reassured about the human condition. The most pleasant thought you can take away from the story of Jake La Motta (Robert DeNiro) is how fortunate you were not to be one of his friends. Or him.
Stacked next to La Motta, DeNiro’s other great role for director Martin Scorcese, Travis Bickle, is a poster child for well-adjusted contentment. (more…)
Nobody ever lies about being lonely.
In lesser hands, this movie would have been one long soap opera, but this adaptation of James Jones’ rather bawdy novel
The world ain’t all sunshine and rainbows.
Now here is a movie that never should have worked. By all rights, a sixth entry in a film series that long since run out of steam and sullied the name of the original classic should be a dog, a direct-to-DVD stinker that makes you willing to deal with the devil to get two hours of your life back. When I first heard that sixty-year-old Sylvester Stallone was resurrecting this character, it seemed at the time like the pathetic vanity of a movie star refusing to face the fact of his own mortality. The sight of him strapping on the gloves again should have been laughable.
So what happened?
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.
You’re standing outside my church, comparing God to Rice Krispies?
Million Dollar Baby is a film that has such implicit faith in its characters that it allows them to inhabit an unvarnished reality almost completely free of Hollywood artifice. You never get the sense that you’ve seen these people in another movie, but rather that director Clint Eastwood has simply taken his camera out and pointed it at them, including one guy that looks a lot like the director.
