Drama

The Fighter

/ / Movie Reviews
  • Title: The Fighter
  • IMDB: link

Far more about family than boxing, The Fighter stars Mark Wahlberg as Mickey Ward, a middling junior welterweight professional boxer from Lowell, Massachusetts, who grew up with several sisters and an older half-brother, Dicky Eklund (Christian Bale), a once talented boxer who wasted his career away on crack and tomfoolery.

Everyone is well-cast and the performances, especially that of Bale, are top notch. The film includes clips of the real Mickey and Dicky during the closing credits and Bale is spot-on in his portrayal. The biggest surprise for me, however, was Amy Adams putting out a strong performance far outside her comfort zone by playing against type.

The script has been kicked around Hollywood for the better part of the decade with several names attached to direct (Martin Scorsese, Darren Aronofsky) and star (Brad Pitt, Matt Damon). Eventually David O. Russell was given the chance to direct Wahlberg and Bale. Maybe they should have waited a little longer.

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Black Swan

/ / Movie Reviews
  • Title: Black Swan
  • IMDB: link

Darren Aronofsky is a weird dude. Talented, but weird. The latest from the director who has given us The Fountain, Pi, and Reqiuem for a Dream is a journey into madness. Black Swan, his companion piece to The Wrestler, examines the the insular world of ballet through the tormented mind of a rising star.

Nina (Natalie Portman), a sheltered but talented ballet dancer, is on the cusp of stardom after being chosen by a demanding director (Vincent Cassel) for the lead role in his new interpretation of Swan Lake. The pressure of the role added to the smothering affection of an over-attentive mother (Barbara Hershey), and the arrival of a talented new dancer (Mila Kunis) begin to fracture Nina’s world as she starts to have experiences that cannot be rationally explained. These include, but are not limited to, hallucinations of strange bird-like creatures, seeing herself on the street, a growing paranoia, and an odd rash on her back as well as fingers which bleed without cause. No one else notices what is happening to her.

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127 Hours

/ / Movie Reviews
  • Title: 127 Hours
  • IMDB: link

There are certain movies that become impossible to separate from your specific movie-going experience. 127 Hours is such a movie for me.

I had heard the advance hype on Danny Boyle’s dramatic and joyous 127 Hours from the festival circuit: People are passing out in the theater because one particular scene in the movie is so intense.

Without giving too much away, the film is based on the true story of college student Aron Ralston (played by James Franco), who found his right arm trapped under a boulder on a solo mountaineering weekend in a remote Utah canyon. The infamous scene occurs towards the end of the film.

Through a combination of sound effects and music (along with the added dread of knowing what was coming for the 80 minutes leading up to the scene), Boyle created a sequence that had me raising one hand in front of my face. There is certainly a bit of a gory element to it, but that is unavoidable—and I humbly submit that it’s not the gore that is so affecting.

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Fair Game

/ / Movie Reviews
  • Title: Fair Game
  • IMDB: link

Although Fair Game has the dubious honor of sharing a title with a truly awful Cindy Crawford/William Baldwin flick, thankfully that’s all the two movies have in common. Based on the true story of Valerie Plame, Fair Game focuses on the consequences of one man standing up for what he believes in, a talented woman who loses her job and reputation by no fault of her own, a government hell-bent on destroying the lives of two respectable citizens simply to change the news cycle, and how easily one piece of information can change everything.

Naomi Watts stars as CIA undercover operative Valerie Plame. After her husband Joe Wilson (Sean Penn) takes an information gathering assignment to discover if Iraq is buying yellow cake uranium from Niger, he’s horrified to learn the truth of his findings have been perverted to help justify the United States going to war with Iraq.

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Delivered with Conviction

/ / Movie Reviews
  • Title: Conviction
  • IMDB: link

Conviction is based on a true story about a man (Sam Rockwell) wrongly convicted and sentenced to life in prison for a murder he did not commit. His sister (Hilary Swank), beginning her quest without even a high school diploma, spends the next several years of her life raising her two sons and struggling through college and law school to become the lawyer her brother needs. What may sound like a bad TV-movie of the week turns out to be so much more.

Screenwiter Pamela Gray and dirctor Tony Goldwyn deserve a fair amount of credit for finding a way to share this story without over-simplifying events or falling into an all too easy trap of caricature and cliché.

The film’s central core is the relationship between a brother and sister who love, rely, protect and never give up on each other. It’s the strong performances of Swank and Rockwell (as well as Bailee Madison and Tobias Campbell as their younger selves) that grounds the film as a compelling drama rather than just a feel good story about one woman’s fight against insurmountable odds.

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