Boxing Movies

I'm not a big fan of boxing movies. I'm not sure why, because I generally enjoy sports movies and their general themes of hard work and persistence paying off in the end. But I don't really follow boxing in the real world so it's never been that attractive to me on screen. In fact, and I know this may disqualify me from publishing this blog in the first place, I had never seen Rocky, or any of its sequels, until my wife brought home Rocky Balboa this week. By operation of the online queue, we also ended up with Cinderella Man, resulting in a mini boxing movie marathon.

Boxing is a brutal sport, no doubt, but in the movies it's downright barbaric. Part of my distaste for this subgenre results from the utterly unrealistic, over-the-top boxing sequences. I have seen boxing matches. The reason Mike Tyson won fights in two minutes during his prime was that no human can stand to be punched that hard in the head more than a few times in a row. Not so in Hollywood. Forget for a minute that Sly Stallone is SIXTY YEARS OLD (!), no boxer, even in his prime, could ever take the kind of beating Sly takes from actual boxer Antonio Tarver in the role of horrendously-named Mason "The Line" Dixon. ( I mean, come on, who came up with the name of this character? There is nothing in the film that makes any sense about this name...it's completely ridiculous.)

Of course, there is only one actual boxing scene in Rocky Balboa, and it's way at the end. The first 80% of the movie consists to Sly demonstrating the dangers of mixing of plastic surgery and steroids, while mourning the death of his wife and telling boxing stories to patrons at his restaurant. I would call the film boring, if not for the fascination of watching Stallone and continually wondering how he managed to get this movie made. I actually felt sorry for him.

Cinderella Man was entirely different, if only in the sense that the story was compelling, engaging, and made me care about its characters. The boxing, of course, still went way too far, and I won't even get started on my loathing of Renee Zellweger as an actress (I'm sure she a very nice person, though...). The movie was great, in spite of its troubles, because of the incredible story of Jim Braddock. I went in without knowing the story at all, which probably is essential in a movie like this. Otherwise, the build-up could seem overly dramatic and contrived, I suppose, but without any background I thought it worked very well. I know that a film has done a good job telling a story when I get up and start researching it on my own. (Other examples: The World's Fastest Indian; Gangs of New York.)

Ushpizin (2005)

My mom brought this movie up to STL on a recent visit. I was a little skeptical because I'm not a devoted follower of orthodox Jewish cinema, but we took a chance on it. What's two hours, right? It was well worth the time, and I had to apologize to Mom for doubting her. The movie follows the struggle of an aspiring rabbi and his wife as they deal with poverty and the tests of faith that it brings. Aside from the facinating view of orthodox life in Jerusalem, this film has a lot to say about everyone' struggle to know and understand God's will, regardless of religious tradition.