The Fighter – Was it good?

What an awesome movie….and I HATE sports films. Hate them.

Hoosiers? Sucks.

Rudy? Don’t get me started…

Cinderella Man? Eh…

Who cares if a team or person wins a sport. I don’t really even like Rocky. I’ll watch when it is on, but c’mon, does anyone really care about a boxing match?

Raging Bull is one of the best movies ever made because it focuses on one human being and how his greatest gift is always his greatest downfall. Very Shakespearian.

What makes The Fighter so good is that it isn’t about the boxing but about the people around the boxer. The fights could not have been shown and the movie might have been as effective. It is a character drama based around a family who is trying to pull themselves out of lackluster lives.

The film centers around Mickey Ward and his brother Dick Eklund. In college I saw Eklund in the documentary their making in the The Fighter called “High on Crack Street”. It was required viewing in college. The real life Dick seems to be a little more hardcore then the one depicted by Bale.

Regardless, Bale is uncanny as Dick. It might be the best performance made this year and the first great one of his career. He has never really had a performance I’ve been floor by. Sure, he is really good as Batman, but c’mon, it ain’t Daniel Day-Lewis shit.

Here he seems to be at the top of his form. There is even a moment where he is so skinny and smiling so big he looks JUST like he did in Empire of the Sun. Maybe you’ll see the part.

Wahlberg rocks the Mark Wahlberg character, which is always awesome. It made him a star and for some reason always works. His soft spoken but bad boy delivery of lines is timeless.

His physical preparation for the movie is what is shocking. Bale will get all the kudos for his appearance, but he just didn’t eat. Wahlberg had to train day-in-day-out to mimic the fighting style of Ward and keep the body necessary for a believable boxer.

Director David O Russel actually took a fairly unusual approach to the boxing sequences and shot them in video. Making them seem more immediate and emulate the look of television. I don’t know if it has been done before, but I’m convinced it added to the veracity of the film.

All-in-all cool stuff. It was a fucking awesome year in movies. I was disappointed by True Grit, but pleasantly surprised by The Fighter. It was entertaining for the whole two hours and I was sad the movie was ending.

Cool.

A/5

-Collin