The Fighter (2010)
Directed by David O. Russell
Boxer "Irish" Micky Ward's unlikely road to the world light welterweight title. His Rocky-like rise was shepherded by half-brother Dicky, a boxer-turned-trainer who rebounded in life after nearly being KO'd by drugs and crime.
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Hence the “Rocky” franchise, and hence the conventional climax of “The Fighter,” with Micky confronting an Irishman named Shae Neary (Anthony Molinari), who appears to be hewn from basalt.
Nor does he fill his story with phony, “Rocky”-like uplift.
The primal thrill of great boxing movies - Body and Soul and The Set-Up, Rocky and Raging Bull, Million Dollar Baby and Somebody Up There Likes Me - cannot be denied.
(The anti-Rocky, Raging Bull garnered precious few kudos back in 1980; great filmmaking aside, theres nothing feel-good about Martin Scorseses portrait of Jake LaMotta.)
, whose career, as managed by his scabrous mom Alice ( Melissa Leo ) and cokehead trainer and older half brother Dicky Eklund (Bale), is rocky (and "Rocky") at best.
So in that sense, Rocky, The Wrestler, Fat City, Cinderella Man, Requiem for a Heavyweight, and even a Mike Tyson documentary are all more or less the same.
Boxing has often been the subject matter of many films but few have captured the good and the bad of the sport as clearly as The Fighter, which can stand up to comparison with classics such as Martin Scorsese’s Raging Bull and Mark Robson’s The Harder They Fall.
The primal thrill of great boxing movies - Body and Soul and The Set-Up, Rocky and Raging Bull, Million Dollar Baby and Somebody Up There Likes Me - cannot be denied.
(The anti-Rocky, Raging Bull garnered precious few kudos back in 1980; great filmmaking aside, theres nothing feel-good about Martin Scorseses portrait of Jake LaMotta.)
That's because we've already seen many of the boxing movies – from "The Set-Up" and "Somebody Up There Likes Me" to "Rocky" and "Raging Bull" – that "The Fighter" draws on.
Russell, cast, and crew supply local color till it's coming out our ears, but Micky's story is no threat to, say, Million Dollar Baby, let alone Raging Bull.
Instead of stylizing Micky's fights "Raging Bull"-style, Russell goes for naturalism: using TV cameras and setups to capture the big bouts, even employing the real HBO analysts who covered Ward's matches in real life and having them recite the actual commentary they said the first time around.
The primal thrill of great boxing movies - Body and Soul and The Set-Up, Rocky and Raging Bull, Million Dollar Baby and Somebody Up There Likes Me - cannot be denied.
Russell, cast, and crew supply local color till it's coming out our ears, but Micky's story is no threat to, say, Million Dollar Baby, let alone Raging Bull.
Directed with gritty confidence and a sly underlying sense of humor by David O. Russell (2004's " I ♥ Huckabees "), the film is slightly more conventional but still reminds of 2004's " Million Dollar Baby " in the way that boxing is used as a mere front for the complicated human account at its center.
The boxing drama has been a cinematic mainstay for decades with “Rocky” and “Raging Bull” and “Million Dollar Baby” being three of the benchmarks.
Six years ago Clint Eastwood 's "Million Dollar Baby" showed up late in the release calendar and walloped enough fans of boxing melodrama cliches to send it straight to the Academy Awards .
Cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema shoots him in a constant state of isolation and worry, harkening back to the way he photographed the young protagonist of the 2008 Swedish vampire film Let the Right One In.
Still, look for “The Fighter” to be a major player at the Oscars, with Adams, Leo and Bale shoo-ins, along with cinematographer, Hoyte Van Hoytema (“Let the Right One In”), who never fails to capture Lowell and its impoverished neighborhoods with a you-are-there clarity.
Russell and his cinematographer, Hoyte Van Hoytema (the Swedish teen vampire romance Let the Right One In), record the thunderous punches and rib-crunching clashes with an authenticity that's visceral, jolting.
Dutch cinematographer Hoyte Van Hoytema (Let the Right One In) gets high marks for his sensational ability to capture a seamless story with so many engaging elements, including the love of the sport of fighting and family as well as the financial dependability that encapsulates it all.
Props to Dutch cinematographer Hoyte Van Hoytema, who shot Let The Right One In.
Russell is a consistently interesting director and this is a movie with strong but non-flashy visuals, provided here by cinematographer Hoyte Van Hoytema, who did such a spectacular job on "Let the Right One In."
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Boxing has often been the subject matter of many films but few have captured the good and the bad of the sport as clearly as The Fighter, which can stand up to comparison with classics such as Martin Scorsese’s Raging Bull and Mark Robson’s The Harder They Fall.
I keep wanting to call David O. Russell’s “The Fighter” by the name of another movie, Jim Sheridan’s 1997 “The Boxer.”
Some manage to be great ("Rocky," "Raging Bull") and others fairly good ("The Boxer," "Rocky Balboa"), but most range from mediocre to awful or, maybe worse yet, instantly forgettable.
When Micky takes his date Charlene (Amy Adams) to see “Belle époque,” the screenwriting brain trust (Scott Silver, Paul Tamasy and Eric Johnson share the credit) decides it’s insufficient to simply show Micky’s inability to pronounce the Spanish title of the film or to stay awake during it.
Charlene has her opinions about the foreign film Belle Epoque when Mickey tries to impress her on a date.
Micky and Charlene go on a hilarious first date to an art cinema showing Belle Epoque, but he admits it’s only because he’s embarrassed to show his face at their local hangouts.
Although Bale gets the juiciest scenes, Wahlberg makes just as big an impact with fewer jacked-up flourishes - like when he takes Charlene to "Belle Epoque" (which he pronounces "epicue") and, when a fellow theater patron mentions that the cinematography is supposed to be beautiful, he responds with a shy, "Oh, cool."
The primal thrill of great boxing movies - Body and Soul and The Set-Up, Rocky and Raging Bull, Million Dollar Baby and Somebody Up There Likes Me - cannot be denied.
Presaged by the Group Theaters 1939 production of Golden Boy, postWorld War II boxing films like Body and Soul, Champion, and The Set-Up were all about class struggle, specifically the brutality of the capitalist system and the pathos of the proletariat; with few exceptions, Hollywood boxers were tragic figures until Sylvester Stallone changed the game, upping the genres ethnic ante and opting for a Cinderella structure, to create one of the greatest success sagas in American movies.
Whatever you think of real-life boxing, there’s no question that as a movie genre it has brought out some of the best in actors and directors, from “Golden Boy” and “Body and Soul” to “Rocky” and “Raging Bull.”
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The primal thrill of great boxing movies - Body and Soul and The Set-Up, Rocky and Raging Bull, Million Dollar Baby and Somebody Up There Likes Me - cannot be denied.
Presaged by the Group Theaters 1939 production of Golden Boy, postWorld War II boxing films like Body and Soul, Champion, and The Set-Up were all about class struggle, specifically the brutality of the capitalist system and the pathos of the proletariat; with few exceptions, Hollywood boxers were tragic figures until Sylvester Stallone changed the game, upping the genres ethnic ante and opting for a Cinderella structure, to create one of the greatest success sagas in American movies.
That's because we've already seen many of the boxing movies – from "The Set-Up" and "Somebody Up There Likes Me" to "Rocky" and "Raging Bull" – that "The Fighter" draws on.
And Micky Ward is not a bad subject for a movie, especially in the wake of The Fighter executive producer Darren Aronofsky’s film The Wrestler.
Once more, as in "The Wrestler," we have in our midst a movie about fighting as – what else? – metaphor.
Taking a cue from The Wrestler , David O. Russell stages his comeback to the screen (its been six years since I Heart Huckabees) with a burly tale of underdog pugilism, throwing in some junkie-redemption shtick just to be safe come Oscar time.
So in that sense, Rocky, The Wrestler, Fat City, Cinderella Man, Requiem for a Heavyweight, and even a Mike Tyson documentary are all more or less the same.
“The Fighter” isn’t this year’s “The Wrestler.”
It's also not another "The Wrestler” or “Raging Bull.”