Friday, June 03, 2005

Cinderella Man


I’ve been gypped. I went to see Gladiator with boxing gloves, but instead I saw one of the best movies of the year. Ron Howard could’ve made James Braddock (the Russell Crowe character) a milkman and it would still have been a great film. Everything, the acting, directing, editing, was top notch in this movie.

The jig is up! Russell Crowe cannot only act, but with this performance, can easily be classified as one of the best of his generation. The way he transforms himself from the Hero into an Everyman is something to see. Crowe and Cinderella Man are right up there with Marlon Brando and On the Waterfront. It is that good.

Renee Zellweger- ain’t she something! I always thought of her as a lightweight, “the girl next door” for romantic comedies, but no more. She held her own with Russell’s performance. Renee emits this quiet strength and love that keeps the family together. It makes bachelors like me wish she were our wife.

Let me give you my two cents on the fight scenes. As a boxing fan, they are as phony as anything I’ve ever seen. Yet this is one of the few movies that had me sitting on the edge of my seat. This is even with the fact that I already knew who won the fight! That is one heck of a trick! But then again, it is one heck of a movie.

Lords of Dogtown

All this movie gave me was flashbacks of the seventies. The fashion, the cars, the music of the seventies… boy did they really suck!

Stacy, dude, you should stick with the documentaries. You’re really groovy with those.

If you haven’t seen Riding Giants or Dogtown and Z-Boys yet, go and rent them. Unlike this flick, they’re really bitchin.

To be fair, it was an accurate portrayal of kids of that era. Stacy Peralta captured their rebelliousness (i.e. obnoxiousness) their free spirits (i.e. immaturity and promiscuous sex), and their love of the LA surfing/skating scene. Considering the amount of time kids today play video games and surf the net (i.e. e-masturbating), who can say we’re any better.

Stacy captured the essence of that time and what it was like to be a teenager. The problem is that it’s not supposed to be a documentary. I never felt a bond to the characters, it was hard to figure out who the real protagonist was, and what the director trying to say with this. It was basically a re-enactment of Stacy Peralta’s life in 1976. Unfortunately, that is not the same as a movie.