Brent Bozell vs. Grover Norquist

If you ask me, one of the BIG reasons that the Democrats have become so sidelined as a political force is because, within the two-party system, the Republicans are currently stuck in the midst of a continuing split into two parties in it's own right: Old-guard, small government, low-tax conservatives on one side; and the so-called "Religious Right," who's leaders actually support big-government intervention so long as it's enforcing their fundamentalist ideals on the American public, which has all but declared "ownership" of the party after the exit polls claimed that "moral values" voters saved Bush's tush in the last election, on the other side.

Now, two of the most visible and extreme proponents on these two-sides-of-the-same-side have declared open conflict on one another: L. Brent Bozell, leader of the Parent's Television Council; and Grover Norquist, the famed archconservative and top-dog of Americans for Tax Reform. At issue is TV Watch, an anti-censorship lobbying group fronted by a patchwork of television industry bosses to fight against the expansion of powers by the FCC to "police" the airwaves. Bozell's PTC rightly views TV Watch as a direct enemy of their agenda, and they've been knocked for a loop by TV Watch's public relations coup of getting Norquist to speak out on their behalf to Newsweek magazine.

Here's Norquist on the matter:
“People are saying, ‘This is puritanical Puritanism.’ No, it’s still socialism, dressing it up and getting a minister to say it doesn’t change that."

Now, Grover stands far more to the right than I do for the most part, but when the man is right the man is right, and he's totally right.

And here's Bozell's typically-hysterical response (scroll down to "Norquist vs. Public Opinion"):
http://www.mediaresearch.org/archive/entcol/welcome.asp

Bozell is so upset because Norquist marks the first major dissenter from the "moral values" party-line. Norquist is approaching this as a pro-business advocate, arguing for the TV nets to have the right to live without government interference in their business. If it catches on, it's going to spark a major battle for which "side" is really running the show: REAL conservatives of the pro-business side, or the anti-freedom "religious" crowd represented by the PTC. And guess what: Bozell KNOWS this is a fight he might not win, and that news is as BAD for him as it is GOOD for the United States.

If you've read this blog frequently, you already know my position: ALL government regulation of television, radio or film content is un-Constitutional, a violation of the First Ammendment and thusly wrong. The FCC has no authority to do anything other than make sure broadcasters conduct ethical business practices, they were NEVER meant to become arbiters of public taste. All government regulation of arts or entertainment should be stripped from federal and state law, and content "policing" should be returned to the private businessmen who operate the TV nets, radio stations and movie theaters.

To those of us who still value freedom, conservative, liberal or otherwise, this is all a good thing: It's time that American businesses stood up to the FCC for their rights to make and sell their products without interference by the government or puritan busybodies like the PTC, and it's about time for the "conservatives" to stand up alongside their traditional businessman allies and do the right thing for America.

The battle continues.

Read more »

REVIEW: The Adventures of Shark Boy and Lava Girl

Most films for children, even the good ones, are concieved and made almost-exclusively by grownups, and often grownups in committee at that. For good or ill, thats the truth. Always one to go against the grain, Robert Rodriguez here offers something just slightly different: A movie for kids that plays on a kid's general level of pace a logic, features an almost-exclusively child cast (all but one of the grownups are secondary characters) and which was thought up by a kid.

The story goes that Rodgriguez, modern Hollywood's ultimate champion of do-it-yourself filmmaking late of "Sin City," was so impressed by the creativity of his son Racer (brothers' names: Rocket and Rebel, really) in the imagining of a pair of made-up pre-teen superheroes that he encouraged the boy to expand their adventures into a feature-length story. Rodriguez then adapted Racer's imaginings into this film, made on the quick using the director's beloved digital cameras, greenscreen-sets and homemade special effects. He's also elected to release it in 3D, that reliably gimmicky technology that Rodriguez is still much more fond of than me (though it's more pleasant here than in his prior outing, "Spy Kids 3D."

Despite the title, the film is really centered on gradeschool-age Max, (Racer's middle name), a hyper-imaginative introvert who's detailed yarns about the titular dreamed-up superhero duo have earned him the scorn of the bully Linus and grave prodding to get "real friends" by his teacher Mr. Electricidad (George Lopez, in one of four roles in the film.) At home, his parents are on the cusp of the cusp of divorce (Mom's too much the businesswoman, Dad's too much the dreamer) and Max just wants to run off to his made-up escapist fantasy of Planet Drool rather than face another day of it.

Which, you'll have guessed, is exactly what happens. Shark Boy and Lava Girl come crashing (literally) into Max's school and spirit him off to Planet Drool, where he's needed to lead the kid resistance against evil Mr. Electric (Lopez, morphed into a digital monstrosity that looks too much like Modok to be an accident) and a mysterious supervillian who's turning Max's dreamscape from good to evil. Much chasing, fighting, bad-guy outwitting and magical-object hunting follows; the young heroes battle monsters made out of giant electrical plugs, rescue captives from a non-stopping rollercoaster and cross a river of milk running through a landscape of cookies.

The reason this all works in spite of.. nay, because of it's silliness is because everyone involved appears to be taking it all with total sincerity. The film isn't trying to be self-aware or ironic about how it unfolds, it plays like a narrative dreamed up by a little boy which is precisely what it is. The film gives it's target audience heroes their own age, drops them into a youthful dreamscape and lets things play out without a hint of grownup irony: Baddies are throttled and traps are escaped to a soaring action-epic score, and the young actors solemnly intone their Roy Thomas-esque heroic declarations with straight-faced gravity.

Let it also be said that young Racer has a keen mind for the invention of superheroes, his creations (an amphibious, anti-hero orphan raised by Great Whites and a morphing, magma-throwing alien respectively) are a lot of fun as characters. 13 year-old martial-artist Taylor Lautner, especially, seems to be having an insane amount of fun as Shark Boy, to the extent that he may end up the film's breakout star (which would make this the youngest an action star has debuted in a long time.)

This movie is fun, but it's really not made for me or anyone over the age of the main cast. Not really. Adults may tolerate it, and I enjoyed it... but this is one for the kids in the purest sense of the idea. And the kids it's made for should have a blast with it.

FINAL RATING: 8/10

Read more »

REVIEW: Mr. & Mrs. Smith

Note: The following may be considered a spoiler to people who have not seen any trailers for this movie yet. You have been warned.

The big scene that "everyone will be talking about" from "Mr. & Mrs. Smith" comes a little over an hour in, and goes something like this: John and Jane Smith, an upscale suburban couple who's marriage zipped through the intersection of Boring and Distant years ago, have just discovered that each is (unbeknownst to the other) a top-secret asassin working for a competing agency, find themselves alone together at home. Each acting under a "kill or be killed" order from their respective Shadowy Employers, they trade fire in a John Woo-reminiscient gunbattle that tears their Ikea showroom of a house to pieces. When the ammo runs out, they break out the martial-arts, exchange beatings that Danny the Dog might gladly skip, arrive at a stalemate and... drop the weapons, tear off their clothes and have the best sex of their marriage (best sex of anyone's marriage, from the looks of it.)

I'm not kidding.

So, then... now that everything that ever need be said about the psychology of the Hollywood action-scene has been said... where do we go from here?

The big story surrounding the release of "Mr. & Mrs. Smith" has been that, for the first time in many moons, a studio has been openly concerned about the potential for a rumored offscreen cast dalliance to harm the boxoffice grosses: i.e. the notion of celeb-o-philes "boycotting" the release in protest of Brad Pitt divorcing actual-wife Jennifer Anniston for movie-wife Angelina Jolie. I have a hard time believing that there are enough people that broken up about this to matter, but in case you DO exist please put that issue of "Us" down slowly and repeat after me: It was only a TV show. Jennifer Anniston is not REALLY a "Friend" to whom you owe some kind of personal loyalty. You don't "know" ANY of these people. Their lives have no actual relevance to you. Please, please, please seek help.

At this point, boxoffice or not, all this "Access Hollywood" nonsense has managed to shift the focus away from the actual merits of the film itself. (And why not? Since it's such a mystery why a wealthy and powerful superstar would run off with a globe-hopping sexual-decathlete, after all...) Which is a real shame because the film itself is actually quite good. It's a big self-conscious lark, of course, a knowing farce that coasts along on star chemistry and the structural conciet of merging the stock-scenes of a romantic comedy with the stock-scenes of an action shoot-em-up: The Smiths argue over the proper operation of a mini-van... in the middle of a car chase. They engage the various troops sent to kill them... in a department store. Get it?

None of this adds up to, or is meant to add up to, a tremendous amount. It's a silly star-vehicle that bleeds it's premise for all it's worth and doesn't aim for any kind of higher purpose: The only time it even steps outside it's own central joke comes way into the 3rd act, and it's for a background gag involving a bit-player's T-shirt. Director Doug Liman has, yes, more good-movie street cred than you'd expect from someone helming so proudly commercial an enterprise as this, but that's sort of the point: Liman's auteur-instinct makes it all look far too good to be a fluff movie, the same way Pitt and Jolie look far to good to be just another bored married couple. (Jolie, in particular, looks once-again impossibly beautiful to the extent that, were there a complex plot to be distracted from, no one would be able to recall it.)

This is a studio cash-magnet movie, no two ways about it. It exists for no other reason than to draw as much of your money onto itself between now and this Wednesday when "Batman Begins" comes out. But it's a topscale action pic, the comedy works and yeah, the leads do have a certain remarkable chemistry, and did I mention Jolie turns up in a rubber dominatrix bodice? It's filmmaking-as-product, but I got what I paid for.

FINAL RATING: 7/10

Read more »

REVIEW: High Tension

WARNING: This review may contain information that may be regarded as "spoilers," read at your own risk.

Let's get this part out of the way: YES, this film is French. If you're planning on skipping it solely because of that, out of some kind of obnoxious instinct you've mistaken for patriotism, I'm begging you: Take the 90 minutes you might otherwise have spent watching this film and grow up.

Now, if you're planning on skipping it because you don't enjoy subtitles, I can offer this: Though most theaters are advertising the film as "French with subtitles," a curious technique has been employed to dub roughly 70-80% of the spoken dialogue into English: A single added line of dialogue turns a main character and her family from native French citizens into American expatriates, allowing for nearly the entirety of the film's talk-heavy first act have all it's actors speaking English. After that, the French-speaking characters take over for the most part... but by then the film is largely running and killing, without time for talk. This accomplishes it's primary goal of rendering the film more "accessible" to English-speaking audiences, but it also may have the curious effect of turning what was intentioned as a French spin on the American "slasher" genre into, for some, a kind of parable about an innocent American family being (literally) torn to shreds by a perverse French psychopath.

Depending on your genre-preferences, you may or may not recall a French film released a few years back to major fanfare but lukewarm U.S. boxoffice called "Brotherhood of The Wolf." Only a minor hit Stateside, internationally the film represented and indeed was intended to represent a throwing down of the gauntlet by the French film industry i.e. it's lack of "street cred" in the blockbuster business. Director Christophe Gans was famously told by his producer to "beat the Americans at their own game," and he didn't just beat us... he kicked our ever-living ass.

A Hollywood-style "summer" action-adventure in the vein of "The Mummy" but bloodier, sexier and smarter than the Hollywood equivalent would ever be permitted to be (everything worth understanding about the difference between America and France can be understood in the truth that the French produce ultraviolent movies but feign a marked disdain for the actual violence of war, whereas America puts tremendous stock in it's martial prowess while maintaining a puritanical censorship of films, TV and radio,) "Brotherhood" was a direct and bold statement from the French film industry to Hollywood: "From now on, anything you can do we can do also... and maybe better." "High Tension," ("Haute Tension" in it's native France and, for some reason, "Switchblade Romance" in England,) viewed as a presence on the world-cinema stage, is something of a followup to that original challenge: "Yes, we can even make these!"

"These," for the record, being the venerable American genre-staple of the rural "slasher" horror flick. The film takes a "Friday the 13th"-style lumbering unkillable super-killer, gives him the keys to the big-rusty-truck-from-hell from "Jeepers Creepers" and sends him to a very "Texas Chainsaw"-reminiscient farm county in the south of France. A pair of female college students, Marie (Cecile de France) and Alex, arrive at the home of Alex's family to study (it becomes immediately apparent that Marie is mostly there to study Alex, the subject of her unrequitted sapphic crush) only to have their plans cut short when a hulking ogre of a serial killer invites himself into the house.

Posessed of the standard-issue "Jason"-level super strength and situational weapon skills, the killer spends a good deal of time turning Alex's mother, father and younger brother into Fangoria photo-spreads while Marie darts through the shadows trying in vain to call for help. When the killer kidnaps Alex, Marie follows him and the film descends into a tense chase-and-stalk piece where the innability to find help slowly turns Marie into an impromptu action-heroine; eventually employing an improvised weapon that'll likely go down with "Evil Dead 2's" hand-mounted chainsaw and "Shaun of The Dead's" cricket bat in the pantheon of horror movie weaponry.

Aside from it's French origins and the overtness of it's lesbian-longing angle, the film isn't really trying to break much new ground. It's extremely unnerving and unpleasant, builds it's titular tension well, and features it's share of novel kills and inventive bloodletting. That's about the most one can honestly ask of any "slasher" movie at this point, whatever country it comes from. The point here is to make France a player on the horror scene, not THE player.

By now, you may or may not have heard that the film eventually arrives at a kind of twist, and you may or may not have heard that it's decidedly a "love it or hate it" addition to the overall film. At the risk of spoiling it for you (your genre-acumen will determine how quickly you figure it out, if at all) I'm going to say nothing about it save that it both adds a lot of texture to the film but also subtracts a certain quotient of logic. I'll leave it up to you to figure whether you think the loss is worth the gain.

Bottom line: Solid slasher entry, more remarkable for where it's come from than the condition in which it's arrived. Worth a look.

FINAL RATING: 7/10

Read more »

DVD REVIEW: D.E.B.S.

Premise: "D.E.B.S." is a secret government organization that uses a code hidden in the SAT to recruit beautiful college-age girls as master spies. Under the guise of an elite private academy, the "D.E.B.S." agents carry out their missions in form-fitting "schoolgirl" uniforms (yes, plaid skirts and kneesocks just like your thinking) and battle supervillian Lucy Diamond, who is also a stunning college-aged young lady (didn't ya just know it?) When a raid goes bad, top D.E.B.S. recruit Amy confronts Lucy solo and makes three amazing discoveries: A.) Lucy is a lesbian. B.) So is she. And C.) They've both fallen madly in love at first sight. Heroine and villianess thus begin a secret courtship of covert hanky-panky behind the backs of their innevitably-dissaproving respective "sides."

Having read that premise, what kind of movie are you imagining "D.E.B.S." to be? What sort of audience do you guess it was made for? Surely, based on the above description, and the obvious market appeal for gun-toting lipstick-lesbians in fetishized schoolgirl costumes, you'd be totally within reason to conclude that "D.E.B.S." is softcore porn, another "skinemax" offering from the Seduction Cinema crew with Misty Mundae scissor-kicking her way through another glib spoof of genre film.

You'd be totally within reason to conclude this... but you'd be wrong.

What a delightful little surprise, indeed, that this film is almost a full-fledged opposite-number to the kind of straight-to-DVD masturbatory aide that it's premise would suggest. "D.E.B.S.", instead, unfolds as a sweet-natured PG13 teen comedy. It's "sex" scenes are so innocent and chaste that, were the participants a heterosexual couple, it could easily achieve a PG rating and a rotating spot on the Family Channel with the deletion of a few minor curse words. It's characters may indeed be costumed as objects of male fantasy, but the story they inhabit and the gags strung around it are aimed squarely at girls the approximate age of the heroines, and maybe younger. It's visibly low-budget, and it's "comedy" renders the "Austin Powers" cycle a paragon of subtlety by comparison, yes... but damn if it isn't infectiously smile-inducing.

Equally remarkable alongside the film's eschewing of explicit showiness in it's lesbian romance angle is it's wish-dream lack of concern with the "lesbian" part of the equation: Few of the characters are ever surprised at Amy's outing, and those that are express such as a momentary "huh, how 'bout that?" manner and move on. At no point in the film are we given the indication that anyone is really bothered or even especially interested that Amy's love-interest is another woman, (save for Amy's bewildered former boyfriend, who pronounces the predicament "kinda hot,") the sum-total of their objections are that Lucy Diamond is, y'know, their mortal enemy.

I'm not, you may be aware, usually prone to talking up a movie based on it's possible use a tool of social-benefit, but y'know something... there are a lot of gay teenage girls and young women out there. Many of them are confused and even scared, despite all our much-touted strides toward tolerance, I can't help thinking that they may not exactly be filled with reassurance or confidence at their own normalcy or ability to lead happy lives by, say, the dark nihilism of "Bound," the "lesbo-show-for-the-guys" mentality of "Girls Gone Wild" or the gloomy soap-opera of "The L-Word." (And how do you think young gay males see their futures as "related" by the films of Gregg Araki or David DeCocteau?)

But here is a movie, as frothy and silly as any "normal" romantic comedy, as lighthearted and youth-appropriate as "Legally Blonde" or "Mean Girls," where the lesbian characters are presented as just a cute, more-than-a-little-ditzy couple. There's no lumbering monsters of intolerance to slay, no horrible hateful society to overcome. In the world of "D.E.B.S.," the idea that there could be anything "wrong" with Amy or Lucy's sexual preference just doesn't seem to exist. So yeah, it's a fantasy. But it's a fantasy worth working toward, and it's a fantasy that I'm willing to bet a good number of young women would like to see made real... or at least as real as a jokey movie they can rent. Now, here it is.

Oh... speaking of fantasies made real (and in case you be misled that this film has nothing to offer a male audience) one of the sidekick D.E.B.S. is played by Devon Aoki, late of "Sin City." Miho, "the one with the swords." Yeah, now you remember. Anyway, she's playing a sexaholic recruit who, while Asian, is apparently French and speaks with a "Fringlish" accent.

Yeah, you read right: Asian goddess, schoolgirl uniform, French accent. Guys, if you need to take a minute or two on that one, I understand :)

FINAL RATING: 7/10

Read more »

REVIEW: Lords of Dogtown

Ever since "Boogie Nights," the default arc for recent-history biopics has been as follows: The hero(es) begin living lives of utopian happiness in the "carefree" 1970s, and come crashing down once their various lifestyles are tainted by the stain of 1980s capitalist "greed." Previously, the "empty" hedonism of the Disco Age was shown as the "dark finale" of the "peaceful" 60s, as seen in the 80s fantasy musical "The Apple" where 60s-style folk singers lead a rebellion against a facist Disco-themed world government. That may have worked before, but to a generation for whom the "flower children" have grown up into "the system," it just no longer washes.

And so we have the "Boogie Nights" model: The sex, drugs, glitter-fueld and responsibility-free 70s are the days of wine and roses, and if only they could've gone on forever instead of being cut down by recessions, Reaganomics and AIDS. The heroes are happily living out perpetual adolescence, only to be "cruelly" smacked down by sudden and horrible adulthood. How perfectly this resonates with a certain bulk of "Generation X," so often raised themselves in utopian extended childhoods by hippie-turned-yuppie Boomer parents only to be shocked upon entry into the real world, has everything to do with why the model keeps getting used.

"Lords of Dogtown" tries, with varying success, to press into this model the story of the rise of modern skateboard culture through the eyes of the "Z-Boys" skate pioneers in Venice Beach, California. The characters and rough outline are sketched from an excellent documentary from a few years back, "Dogtown & Z-Boys," which should be considered required viewing if you wish to understand a single thing that happens in this film and are not already intimately familiar with the Venice Beach skate culture.

Briefly: The "Z-Boys" are Venice Beach surfer teens who, upon the invention of eurythane wheels, learn to "surf" on concrete with skateboards. Their feats of acrobatic derring-do turn skateboarding from a niche non-sport into a cultural phenomenon, but it also turns them into marketable celebrities. Eventually endorsement deals, shifting loyalty and the pressures of grownup life destroy their innocence, break the group up, contribute to the dreaded "commercialization" of the skate culture and yadda yadda yadda...

Meanwhile, the "Boogie Nights"-mandated soundtrack of classic rock hits blares on over the soundtrack, and eventually the film becomes and endless swirl of skateboard terminology and name-dropping. Certainly, those with a pre-existing fascination for the sport and this formative era may indeed find all this fascinating, and I enjoy a good show of skateboard stunts as much as the next guy... but it's finally just hard to care about much that happens here.

Which is not to say that the material can't be made interesting. On the contrary, writer Stacy Peralta (one of the founding Z-Boys) directed the "Dogtown" documentary which was riveting because it featured the real participants in the action, and their nostalgia was infectious. Here, with actors in the roles and a narrative drama-structure imposed, it's just hard to develop a lot of interest.

Yes, very sad and very happy things happen to the characters, but it just can't escape the problem that a story of a niche sport going mainstream is not in itself really very interesting to watch. It must have been fascinating to live through, and the documentary allowed the audience to experience that. The film, while earnest and made with great sincerity, just cannot accomplish the same thing. It's like watching people's vacation videos: No matter how interesting a place they may have traveled, the footage almost never conveys what it must have been like to be there.

FINAL RATING: 5/10

Read more »

REVIEW: Cinderella Man

Let me get this out of the way first: Now that the "superhero" movie is a full-on part of the mainstream Hollywood genre quilt, it's time to reconsider the use of titles that end with the word "Man" for 'normal' movies. Yes, yes, I know that it's what the actual guy was nicknamed, but still... even having seen the film, I can't hear the uber-serious trailer naration solemnly intone "Russell Crowe IS... Cinderella Man" and not immediately picture some bizzaro-world cinematic image of Crowe, clad in some Neal Adams imagining of a pink ball gown and magical power-granting glass slippers leaping toward the screen amidst a pounding Hans Zimmer hero theme announcing the arrival of Cinderella Man to strike fear into the hearts of similarly-costumed evildoers. But that's just me.

And hey, y'know... Cinderella Man might even be a pretty amusing superhero in his own right, no? Think about it: His powers could only last until midnight, his car/jet/motorcycle/whatever could transform into a pumpkin, the Fairy Godmother could hang around for sage advice like Shazam does for Captain Marvel... hell, the whole secret-identity thing is even already right there in the story!

...or not. Aaaaaaanyway, regarding the actual movie:

You've probably seen the trailers, and you've probably heard the buzz, so then you probably already know the pitch: True-life story of how over-the-hill, down-and-out prizefighter James J. Braddock's amazing comeback was taken as an inspiration to fellow poor common-folk during the Great Depression. "Seabiscuit" for boxing. "Million Dollar Biscuit." You also, thusly, are aware that it's directed by Ron Howard, who's natural knack for telling these kinds of stories is immediately in it's favor even as his occasional tendency to overdose on sentimentality often makes such stories precariously-balanced as actual films.

Everyone's "genre acumen" is different, but most American filmgoers by now generally "know" what to expect from inspirational Great Depression movies: Gray, high-contrast exteriors and hazy, muddy hued interiors that serve to make the film look "authentic" (read: reminiscient of grainy photographs of the era that form our only remaining link to it,) plucky proletariates pontificating pugnaciously in exaggerated ethnic dialects (so that we remember that this takes place in the time before Italians, Irishmen and WASPs were grouped singularly as "white guys.")

Also making their mandatory appearance are cigars, breadlines, riots, unionizing, begrudging charity-accepting, kids playing in alleys, throwaway dialogue about shantytowns and Commies for the history teachers in the audience, and LOTS of tough-looking actors in wool caps modeling five o'clock shadows while stomping "determinedly" from place to place. And since it's additionally a boxing movie, you can bet the film remembers to meet it's quota of slow-motion, slow-claps, hushed crowds rising to their feet, bar patrons going wild during the radio broadcast and my personal favorite: Press conferences edited to the rythym of flashbulbs.

Just like no one is surprised anymore when a hand-held camera is employed in the midst of a war movie, no one should be surprised that the above genre-staples make up the bulk of "Cinderella Man's" technical side. What's surprising, and frequently delightful, is how expertly Howard has used nearly every trick in the Depression movie book to such full effect: Everything about the look and feel of the film is so cozy and comfortable that it immediately becomes "real" in a way that a more offbeat historical biopic couldn't be. It makes you feel like you've "been here" before, via the watching of previous films about and from the era, and in no time nearly all lingering vestiges of movie-ness vanish; Notions of soundstages and Russell Crowe give way to Madison Square Garden and Jim Braddock, and we're off to the races.

Those who take joy in pointing out that Howard is no kind of cinematic innovator consistently miss the point: What he is is a cinematic refiner. While the vanguards of the "film school generation" (sing it if you know it: Spielberg, Scorsese, Lucas, Coppola, etc.) that shepherded his entry into the directing game are one-by-one settling into their "grownup" roles as auteurs, Howard remains Hollywood's ultimate sorceror's apprentice: The director-as-professional-student. His best films unspool as the sum-total of lessons learned about the genres, styles and techniques he works in; and "Cinderella Man" plays like his Master's Thesis on Depression-era underdog tales.

In the leads, Howard has assembled a top-tier cast that are all so profoundly well-suited to their roles that the very phrase "on the nose" seems far too loose to apply: Renee Zellwegger inhabits period dress and spits out lines with poverty-class spunk with a naturalism lately found only in British starlets. Paul Giamatti, always the best of character-actor sidekicks (even in films where he stars,) who needs only the proper hat to instantly "belong" in any historical era. And of course Russell Crowe, who's name immediately leaps to mind for the role of a hard-bitten Depression-era boxer who gains a punishing left hook from doing shipyard work one-handed for a damn good reason. If these folks weren't already such well-known talents, one could easily be forgiven the assumption that the filmmakers had cast the roles strictly on who most perfectly looked the part and got great actors as a bonus.

As with much of the film's technical mechanics, the actual arc of Braddock's story will come as little surprise to anyone who's seen an underdog boxing movie before; the fact that the tale has all the right beats of mythic familiarity is the reason a film was made out of it. This isn't a film that wants to surprise or shock from scene to scene, it mainly wants to direct our attention to the manner in which largely "innevitable" sequences play out: Instead of trying to turn the various decisions Braddock makes and the direction in which they drive the film into a succession of twists and "think about it" gotchas, we're invited to pause and consider the logic and personal morality that informs them.

(A lone, and I think necessary, exception to this occurs early in the 3rd act, in a scene where Braddock is shown fight footage of heavyweight champ Max Baer killing an opponent in the ring in order to discourage him from facing Baer for the title. As others avert their eyes, Braddock insists, stone-faced, on seeing the footage again and again. At first it appears the film is indulging in a moment of "Billy Jack"-style "this-guy-is-a-badass"-ery, but the eventual payoff is far more revealing and interesting. Trust me on that.)

The film does sport one curious thematic decision, bound to be it's most controversial element and possibly it's only serious semblance of a flaw, in it's presentation of heavyweight champ Max Baer as a showboating sadist. It's understandable that the film would require it's only human "villain" (the real "heavy" is, of course, the Great Depression itself.. but as Braddock says in the film "you can't fight stuff you can't see") to be a first-rate heel in order to properly offset the almost overwhelming goodness of it's hero. (Jim Braddock is the sort of biopic hero who "must" really have been like this, because no screenwriter would ever invent a character of such Job-like moral resolve and expect to be taken seriously.) But some have questioned, not without cause, if the Howard etc. have gone too far in turning Baer, a colorful figure with his own movie-ready tales of sports heroism behind him before the events of this film, into a more-or-less one dimensional bad guy.

Let it be said of the character that the filmmakers at least demonstrate a working awareness of the historical Baer's more nuanced qualities: The Jewish Star of David he had emblazzoned on his boxing trunks following a career-making takedown of a German champ touted by the emerging Nazi government as the embodiment of Aryan superiority remains intact (if not ever made an issue of) in the film, as does Baer's noted preference for celebrity and public-spectacle over actual pugilism (he wanted to be an actor, and eventually starred in several well-regarded boxing movies.) And actor Craig Beirko does a fine job of imbuing the character with flickers of greater depth than afforded by the screenplay or his relatively limited screentime.

NOTE: A few years back, Baer's match against the German champ was made into an HBO movie called "Joe & Max," which is an overlooked sports film in it's own right and makes a fine companion to "Cinderella Man." It's available on DVD.

What will remain the primary bone of contention over the character is the film's imagining of Baer taking a certain sadistic pleasure in having "killed" two opponents, the "extreme" end of his well-documented class-clown antics. Baer's real-life son, Max Baer Jr. (yes, Jethro from "Beverly Hillbillies") contends that his father's antics actually resulted from guilt at having taken a life in the ring. For me, it comes down to this: Giving more nuance to Baer as a character would probably have made "Cinderella Man" a better film, but choosing not to has not made it less of a good film.

Minor issues (issue, really) aside, this is a movie thats every bit as good as it so earnestly wants to be, and often times a lot better. Far and away the first solid awards-season contender of the Summer cycle, and very much worth your time. Reccomended.

FINAL RATING: 9/10

Read more »