Much Ado About MMA

All I know about the 2011 movie Warrior is that my brother said it was a good movie that he said made people cry even if he didn’t. I looked up the trailer and found out that it was an MMA movie which only means one thing: that it’s about MMA or mixed martial arts. But Warrior is more than just an MMA movie- it’s a 2-hour long cliche infused with the MMA backdrop theme. Joel Edgerton plays Brendan, a physics teacher and former MMA fighter. When the folks at the bank tell him they’ll need to foreclose his house, he then becomes motivated to make some extra cash in order to escape from filing bankruptcy. He isn’t about to back down so he decides to go back to being a fighter to make an extra buck. Think John Q, The Wrestler, and Million Dollar Baby rolled into one, only the sport is MMA. Then enters a subplot about his long lost brother, Tommy (played by Tom Hardy), who, too, is a former MMA fighter and an ex-Marine haunted by his tragic past. He and his brother Brendan soon meet at Sparta, the Superbowl of MMA.

Nick Nolte plays Brendan’s dad and former trainer. Here, Nick Nolte is his Nick Nolte self (read rickety and sad). There is a dramatic scene where father and son (Nick Nolte and Tom Hardy) ensue their family drama which ends in Hardy throwing coins at Nolte. It was in this moment where I thought it’s sad seeing people onscreen being mean to their fathers, but it’s even sadder seeing people being mean to Nick Nolte. Anyway the point of my writing is that I enjoyed watching this movie albeit the closely shot fight sequences and cheesy split screen treatment for the training sequences.

The real point is that who cares if Warrior was a 2 hour long cliche? Everything else with a similar theme was. Joel Edgerton as Brendan is the hero I never expected and Tom Hardy was the tragic antagonist/protagonist I never thought was possible. We want to relate to our heroes in movies. The struggle was clear (a little too clear) and because of this, we saw that there truly is no heroism without failure risked or faced. Warrior isn’t a consistently good movie but that’s almost beside the point: the excitement is sustained by a brilliant idea (even if it’s “just an MMA movie”), a new variant on the classic theme of the underdog and his rise to glory.

Or maybe I just loved the use of the songs in the movie, ‘Start a War’ and ‘About Today’ by The National. What can I say, they’re my favorite band.

An Update

It has been too long since my last post here. I finally bought this book by Pauline Kael, a film critic who has reviewed hundreds of movies I’ve never seen but whose writing style I adore. She writes about movies in a way that I wish I could, but alas, the only thing I can really say about what she says about movies is “my thoughts exactly.”

This entry will serve as a placeholder for myself to note that I should rediscover and rekindle how excited I used to get about movies in general. Seeing movie posters, new movies trailers, knowing what movies are coming up and movies that have yet to be discovered. Kael writes “People go to the movies for the various ways they express the experiences of our lives, and as a means of avoiding and postponing the pressures we feel. This latter function of art – generally referred to disparagingly as escapism – may also be considered as refreshment, and in terms of modern big city life and small town boredom, it may be a major factor in keeping us sane.”  Kael wrote this in the 50s but this still holds true up til today. Now let me catch up with keeping my sanity.

Why We Must Wash Our Hands

There’s so much and so little that the movie Contagion (2011) tells. From the guy who brought Sex, Lies, and Videotape close to my heart, here comes Steven Soderbergh in his newest directorial foray, Contagion. With an all-star cast and a tried and tested storyline, Soderbergh brings us this disjointed mess of a film. The whole movie seemed quite random, filled with establishing scenes and disconnected subplots. And as such, there is actually nothing to spoil in this movie; nor is there anything that kept me on the edge of my seat- in fact, the whole movie kept me slumped in my seat waiting for the whole thing to end.

Contagion shows no clear deterioration of society and in the end, there is no catharsis. It doesn’t resolve anything that goes on for the past hour and thirty minutes, neither does any unifying theme stand out. To top it all off, it had a completely wasted all-star cast. Each character could’ve been removed without consequence and nothing would’ve mattered. Kate Winslet was somewhat forgotten somewhere in the middle. Matt Damon was a sad man all throughout. Gwyneth Paltrow’s acting prowess came out in photographs. Laurence Fishburne might as well could’ve been a character on TV. And the amazing Marion Cotillard was wasted. None of these characters were intertwined and none of them seemed worth caring for at all. You kinda just sit and wish that they’d all die at some point, just to make something happen.

Then something hit me right in the middle of writing all this down. I realized I care about movies too much to see them go to waste like this. If any more movies like Contagion start spreading like the plague (sorry, I had to), next time, I’d rather not know.

Retribution with a Pipe Wrench

I can imagine that Super (2010) was a tough movie to advertise as it was the perfect mix of comedy, tragedy, thriller, and drama, all rolled into a superhero plot splashed with an insane (and unpredictable) amount of gore. I was duped into thinking that Super was similar to Kick-Ass (2010), but it’s far from it. The similarities between the two movies ends with having ordinary people (read: losers) fight crime without special powers.

When Frank’s (Rainn Wilson) wife leaves him for the drug dealing Jacques (Kevin Bacon), he turns to religious inspiration in becoming a superhero. His mind is literally touched by the giant finger of God in a mildly grotesque scene that paves the way for the rest of this dark comedy. As a superhero, Frank’s weapon of choice is a pipe wrench. It’s a silly choice but it doesn’t look so silly once he starts bashing people’s faces with them till they start bleeding uncontrollably. It’s not a pretty sight. Actually, nothing in this movie is pretty to look at. Every subsequent crime fighting scene that goes on robs you of reasoning cos it’s so viciously funny in a very sadistic way (Shut up, crime!). Thankfully, there is justice for poor Frank in the end, albeit a tragic twist. This film isn’t for everyone but I’m glad it was for me.

On Kid Wisdom

I’m sick of seeing kid wisdom in romantic comedies. We already saw this in Love, Actually- and seeing it in that movie was enough. We saw it again in Definitely, Maybe. And again in 500 Days of Summer. We’ve seen it in almost every romantic comedy where adults are faced with love problems and it takes a bit of “kid wisdom” to smack them into their senses. But the thing with kid wisdom is that I don’t understand it. Is it supposed to be funny? Are we supposed to laugh seeing a 13-year-old preach about being in love and finding your soulmate and never giving up? It’s not cute and it will never be. It gets even more annoying when the adult protagonists realize that the kid wisdom makes sense and deliver the cliche line, “Kid, how old are you again?” (this has got to be one of my favorites).

There’s a lot of kid wisdom in Crazy, Stupid, Love; in fact, one of the main characters, Steve Carrell’s son Robbie, is the source of all that kid wisdom. It’s a real shame the final shot of this movie was of Robbie exuding the kind of “everything’s gonna be alright” look through his shaggy locks and annoying smirk. If it isn’t obvious by now, I really hate kid wisdom in movies, especially when it makes me forget about how excited I was about Josh Groban’s feature film debut. sad, sad