Warrior (2011) (Thursday, January 26, 2012) (148)

I had no interest in seeing Warrior when it came out. It looked like any average boxing movie that have been made over the years (there have been a lot of them recently). But then it got an Oscar nomination for supporting actor for Nick Nolte, so I decided I'd give it a change. Well, it's really nothing more than your average boxing movie - though this time it's not boxing, per se, but mixed marshal arts (MMA).

The film follows two brothers, Brendan Conlon (Joe Edgerton) and Tommy Conlon (Tom Hardy), who live in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh respectively. They were both raised partly by their drunk dad, Paddy (Nolte), who was an ex-Marine and a high school wrestling coach. It seems at some point their mother took them to the West Coast, from where they split up. Later, Brendan became an amateur MMA fighter and Tommy went to the Marines and served in Iraq.

Back to the present day, they are both having a hard time in life, both underemployed and looking for a shot of cash to make everything better. They both begin training for some big super MMA tournament that apparently people care a lot about (because that's just like it would be if this happened outside of a movie!). Against big odds they both make their way to the final match where they have to face one another. Oh - and there's something about both of them dealing with their drunk dad, who is soberish but still a jerk.

There's really nothing special about this movie, aside from the fact that it runs about 130 minutes, which is way too long. All the traditional tropes of fight movies are present here, the pretty but powerless wife/girlfriend, the underdog gaining respect by brawling, the fighter who is also a physics teacher (no, he doesn't also play the violin).

Nolte is fine here, though there's really no reason for him to have gotten the Oscar nom. He's basically playing himself again, drunk who can sober up here and there, but is generally a psychologically underdeveloped man. He's not a leader and hero the way Mickey from Rocky is, nor is he an outright scoundrel. This is much more of a boxing movie for kids who prefer MMA to boxing than any sort of interesting or compelling narrative.

Stars: 2.5 of 4

The Fighter (Saturday, December 18, 2010) (157)

It seems like these days every year has to have a boxing movie - or at least a movie about poor white people in Massachusetts. This year that film is The Fighter. It is basically just a boxing movie with almost nothing more interesting about it than that.

The story is about Micky Ward (Mark Wahlberg), a white boxer in Lowell, Massachusetts, who has had a good, but less than totally impressive career. He's training for an upcoming fight that his mother Alice (Melissa Leo), who is also his manager, has set up for him. He has two trainers, a local cop and his brother, Dicky Eklund (Christian Bale), a former boxer who is a local hero because he knocked down Sugar Ray Leonard once in a great fight. Now Dicky is a crack addict who never shows up on time to train his brother because he's either smoking crack or stoned from smoking recently.

At the opening of the film there is a crew from HBO Sports shooting a documentary on Dicky, about how he went from such a promising boxer to a crackhead wasteoid in just a few years. Dicky thinks the whole time that they are doing a profile piece on him as a champion, but they are really just focusing on his addiction.

Micky meets Charlene (Amy Adams), a bartender at the local watering hole, and they fall in love. She's very concerned that he's flushing his talent away working with the losers in his family. One night, Dicky gets in a fight and a chase with the cops and Micky comes out to help him. He gets his hand broken and has to rebuild his career, including taking better control of his training and management. This upsets the balance of his family, who all defend or ignore Dicky's addiction and puts Charlene at odds with his mother and sisters (he has, like, eight sisters... which is actually sorta funny... in a good way).

More than anything else, this film has gotten a tremendous amount of press for the acting - mostly the performances by Christian Bale and Melissa Leo. I was honestly not totally impressed with either of them. They're both very showy roles that allow the actors to dive into a big pool and get wet. I think the best performance in the film is Amy Adams as Charlene. She's a very smart woman who knows what she wants and can generally get it. She has an wonderfulness about her (Adams is cute, after all), but a very endearing frankness as well (she has a tramp stamp tattoo, which suggests a less-than-angelic side). She's a sweetheart who will tell you to go fuck yourself is she needs to. She totally lights up the screen whenever she's on. It's a much more subtle performance than the others, and I think much better.

(I should say here that Bale's performance is very good, but it feels more like a very good impersonation of a guy who is rolling on crack. I never saw the depth in his characters as I did in Adams'. In the opening moment of the film, however, when he's being interviewed by HBO, he is really amazingly believable as a guy on drugs.)

The biggest problem with the film is the script, which is really badly organized, relies mostly on terrible boxing movie cliches (He's a boxer and he gets his hand broken! Oh no!), has lots of terrible dialogue (there's a scene with Dicky telling Micky, "I coulda been a contender!") and is mostly really boring sequences much too heavy on dialogue that doesn't move the story along. There is not that much boxing in this film (basically three bouts).

Director David O. Russell actually does a beautiful job technically with the boxing scenes (and with lots of the technical things here). Most of the boxing matches are seen through a TV signal - as if we were watching the fights on our couch in our living rooms. This is a very clever, original twist to the boxing movie. There is a lot that is made about Micky getting a fight on HBO (especially after the doc on Dicky hurts him so badly), that when we see him in his big match, we watch it as if it was on TV. Very clever.

One other really nice moment by Russell is in the bar when Micky first meets Charlene. There is a wonderful amount of background noise that surrounds them (it's almost reminiscent of Altman's sound use in McCabe and Mrs. Miller), and as they begin talking and she warms up to him (because he's goddamn charming), the noise recedes and you just hear the two of them talking. It's an elegant and nice effect.

As nice a job as Russell does with most of the film, this never really feels like a David O. Russell movie. I think of him as a master of black comedies. Even his most serious stuff (Spanking the Monkey and Three Kings) are very, very funny and are told with a wink throughout. This is much too serious and feels sorta like a director-for-hire piece rather than a Russell piece. He doesn't really do historical stories (Three Kings is a fictional fantasy piece set in a historical time and place).

Mostly this is just a particularly uninspired piece. It's not bad at all, it's just not much of anything. I feel here like I feel with a lot of movies, that I would rather just watch a documentary on Micky Ward rather than have to watch this. The film is as much about his brother (it is really about Dicky totally) and his crazy mother and family as it is about him. It doesn't really know what it wants to be, a boxing drama, a tale of drug use, a story of an effed up family. It's sorta none of those in the end.

Stars: 2 of 4

Boxing Gym (Friday, October 22, 2010) (138)

Fredrick Wiseman has a beautiful and incredibly pure documentary approach. He basically turns on a camera in a location in front of whatever he's looking to shoot and captures whatever is in front of the lens. After he's amassed a certain number of hours of footage (normally more than a hundred hours) he carefully edits it, creating a film that is more experiential than necessarily narrative. There is basically no editorial commentary in his works, no directorial voice and whatever dialogue shows up is just what the people in front of the camera are saying, totally unscripted. This is a document in its most raw state.

In his most recent picture, Boxing Gym, Wiseman looks inside Richard Lord's boxing gym in Austin, Texas. We see the passage of several weeks (or months) as people come in to train, either learning to box for the physical workout or training for professional fights. We see men and women, kids, fathers, mother and grandfathers, Whites, Blacks, Latinos. Everything we see is inside the gym (with a few shots in the parking lot where clients run short sprints).

The film is basically divided into short chapters, each about six or ten minutes long. They function almost like shorts, with the common theme of boxing. There is no particular plot that pushes the film along. As with a collection of shorts, there are certainly some interesting (if light) parallels that link one sequence to another, but the order is essentially emotional, which is to say somewhat arbitrary and hard to verbalize. Most takes are long, running several minutes each, leading to a very peaceful tone overall.

One of the most interesting elements of the film are the sounds we hear inside the gym and Wiseman's use of the poly-rhythms of the boxers punching bags or trainers' gloves. Boxing training is an act of repetition and we get the wonderful sense of the patterns inside each training routine. It is interesting when the patterns change - when there is a cut from one boxer to another - and how that affects us in the audience. Add to this the sound of electronic alarms letting the boxers know that a certain amount of time has passed and they can move on to another exercise, the film is a percussive symphony.

What makes the film so enjoyable is that the members of the gym form a nice community and all seem like friendly people. It is clear that they come from very different backgrounds, but they workout together on this neutral ground. At one point in the middle of the film, the Virginia Tech shooting takes place. The members gather around one man, who seems to have had a relative in the middle of the action, recounting the story. They are all sober, curious and all have very real reactions. Through this scene, throughout the whole film really, the people seem oblivious to the camera that follows them. This adds a level of real-ness that is hard to capture in our very mediated, reality-TV-based world. This is true cinema verité - and it is incredibly beautiful.

Stars: 3.5 of 4