The Wrestler (2008)
I'm loaded in all six compartments with prejudice on this one. Be ready to bite the bullet. So, Darren decided to make it more real for us than we know it is. Half an hour into this film, and I was still watching the gratuitous violence and wondering. Wait, let me summon up the right American phrase? Guts and Glory? A world weary, slow- witted, once successful wrestler who has to put up with the vagaries of creativity in the world of pro-wrestling. Blades, staples, forks, what have you. Beats me why I have to watch and sympathize with a third of screen time about this medieval sport. Oh no, not a sport, but a show - that the performer puts up for his followers. The blood he purposefully gushes for his fans. This shit he puts up with just because it's the only thing knows to do for a living. The only respite being the cheering he gets in the ringside and back in the wings from fellow performers. What the bleep. Him trying to apologise and get back into his daughter's life after god knows how long is the so not convincing middle of the film. Marisa Tomei, his love interest has nice tits. And if she was a career stripper instead of an actor, she'd make it to Vegas as a star with the Cirque Du Soleil. I don't know about this being the Mickey Rourke performance of a lifetime. It's not even the accurate working class hero that we try so hard to make out to be - what with his binges of drinking and sex with a girl his daughter's age. He does'nt come across as a hercules of the human condition. And because he can't even pick up the pieces in his life, he reconciles to being the fading star carrying the burden of WWF. And goes on to live his death wish in the end. I don't mean to be a prissy prude and this might have been a cockle-warming candidate for the bleeding heart non-critic that I once was, but this movie made me want to puke the beer and glazed chicken wings I had for dinner.