Paul Haggis often has a way of beating his audience over the head with cultural rhetoric, particularly if we look at Crash as an example. At the same time, a film like Million Dollar Baby – while ostensibly about pugilism and then euthanasia – is actually much more about our cultural obsession with violence, but the hypocrisy […]
2011 came to and end, and now it’s time to recap those things we saw, those things we enjoyed, and those things we abhorred. In the next few weeks, there will plenty of dicussions and conjecture about what will win, who will win what, and who should have been given a chance to win something, but before […]
Despite its title, The Boxer might be the antithetical pugilist-movie. There is a boxer, Danny Flynn (Daniel Day-Lewis), and he does box, a little. At the same time, Flynn’s boxing is less a profession, and more a metaphor for the waning but never dying conflict between Irish Catholics and Protestants. And, it feels as if this […]
Might as well keep up tradition here on Gladiators. The nominations for Best Picture were announced yesterday, and while The Town was a surprising omission, the ten nominees are at least worthy of a haiku — though I’m still skeptical about the validity of The Kids Are All Right. Just saying. Black Swan She transmogrifies to sultry insanity and sex […]
Dec22
The Fighter – A Novel Approach to the Boxing Genre, Also a PSA and the Pilot for The Lowell Shore
For the second time in two weeks, I will do my best to avoid puns during this post, particularly the ubiquitously uncreative “knockout” that has been used in most every review whether it be about Mark Wahlberg’s performance (really) or most often Chistian Bale’s. For starters, The Fighter could have been terrible, and there were so many […]