Sports Archives - FILM FREAK CENTRAL

Oh, no! Two vampires!: Zendaya getting a double hickey in Challengers

Challengers (2024)

May 7, 20242024, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Italy, Romance, Sports, Theatrical

**/****
starring Zendaya, Josh O’Connor, Mike Faist
written by Justin Kuritzkes
directed by Luca Guadagnino

by Walter Chaw Challengers feels…what’s the word, is it “coy?” It’s a tease, a jape, a roundelay and a smug one. It promises the world and delivers a quintessence of dust: a movie about tennis where the balls are blue. The best part is near the end, when two once and future lovers consider each other from across a swirling maelstrom–a scene of heightened emotions right there on the verge of magic realism that reminded me of better movies like Adrian Lyne’s Unfaithful and Jacques Tati’s M. Hulot’s Holiday and even Bronwen Hughes’s wildly underestimated Forces of Nature. What a pity the resolution to said scene is a heatless tumble in the backseat of a beater. It’s possible that consummation in the sexual sense is meant to take a backseat to ecstatic metaphor–that fucking is secondary to dazzling cinematography and a sweaty clinch in front of an adoring crowd. That would explain why the non-tennis sequences are equally sparkless: the two-thirds of the book you skim to get back to the good bits. Off the court, it’s an irritating, underwritten melodrama played by two fantastic actors and one who purses their lips and concentrates a lot, husky-whispering like late-career J-Lo when trying to convey seriousness. The one who seems altogether unworthy of the attentions of the other two points on this love triangle, so that any hint of romantic suspense has fled. Of course the boys should be together: the boys are the sexy ones in perpetual heat. What are we even doing here?

Telluride ’23: Nyad

September 13, 20232023, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Drama, Film Festivals, Sports, Telluride

*/****
starring Annette Bening, Jodie Foster, Rhys Ifans, Johnny Solo
screenplay by Julia Cox, based on the book by Diana Nyad
directed by Jimmy Chin & Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi

by Walter Chaw Film festivals are expensive and not profitable. They underpay their staff, which mostly comprises volunteers and a nomadic group of technicians who follow festivals around the country like roadies on an eternal tour, and they suffer from the need to please their wealthiest supporters, who, for the most part, have more money than taste. Certainly, they have more desire to be coddled than hunger for risk-taking. That’s why, every year at the Telluride Film Festival, one of the most prestigious film festivals in the country, there’s an entry like thrill-seeker documentarians Jimmy Chin and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyl’s Oscar-bait biopic Nyad. Last year it was Empire of Light, and the year before it was King Richard, and the year before that it was Judy. In 2017, there was that Battle of the Sexes thing about Billie Jean King, the only one I’ve mentioned to get zero traction at the Academy Awards. Each of these movies is as functionally formulaic as a suppository: machine-tooled and well-lubed, with only one measure for its success or failure. It either wins the middlebrow’s greatest honour, thus enriching its producers, or it fails to do so. But are these movies any good? I wouldn’t know how to begin to answer that question. Is a suppository good? I dunno, man, I don’t spend much time thinking about a capsule I shoot out of my ass annually around this time of year.

Telluride ’23: Cassandro

September 3, 20232023, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Drama, Film Festivals, Mexico, Sports, Telluride

*/****
starring Gael García Bernal, Roberta Colindrez, Perla de la Rosa, Raúl Castillo
written by David Teague & Roger Ross Williams
directed by Roger Ross Williams

by Walter Chaw Playing out as an exhausted vanity piece on the one side and an exhausted sports biopic on the other, Roger Ross Williams’s Cassandro essays the life and early career of flamboyant, El Paso-based luchador Saúl Armendaríz, who, under his nom de guerre “Cassandro,” became the first openly gay exóticos character in Mexican wrestling allowed to actually win matches. Armed with the “Mexico tint” coined by Steven Soderbergh in Traffic, a lot of Dutch angles, and an inexplicable 1.44:1 aspect ratio that makes everything seem like it was shot on an iPhone, Williams nudges the film along from one stale trope to the next like an old frog disinterestedly leaping across lilypads. There are flashbacks to Saúl’s childhood in which his “really into Jesus” dad, Eduardo (Robert Salas), feeds him doughnuts, not knowing his son will one day be an emblem of the love that dare not speak its name; interludes with Saúl’s figure-hugging-animal-print-dress-wearing mama Yocasta (Perla de la Rosa) that show her son to be a good boy; and then montages where Saúl trains with badass Sabrina (Roberta Colindrez) and starts climbing the Lucha Libre ranks. Cassandro, in other words, has nothing to say and doesn’t say it with any particular innovation, either. What a shame.

Air (2023)

May 16, 20232023, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Sports, Streaming

*/****
starring Matt Damon, Ben Affleck, Jason Bateman, Viola Davis
written by Alex Convery
directed by Ben Affleck

by Walter Chaw The irony of a film celebrating the taking of chances being so absolutely afraid to take any chances is so conspicuous it feels a little like bullying to point it out, but here goes: Ben Affleck’s Air is the flabby, out-of-shape version of Moneyball, aspiring only to appease the narcissists it essays and the billion-dollar corporations with which they have developed disturbing symbiotic relationships. It’s not boring, exactly, though it is like that story your grandfather has told you a dozen times already: you listen patiently for the climax you know is coming in order to time your surprise and delight appropriately. Some movies in this vein, like Miracle, are pretty good. Others, like Hoosiers, are pretty awful. All of them are watchable pabulum, pre-chewed and partially digested. It goes down without much swallowing and goes out without much noise–and every six months, there’s another one. Interviews with Affleck and his muse Matt Damon have found them breathlessly recounting how scripter Alex Convery was watching an ESPN “30 on 30” documentary when he had the “eureka” that the story of Nike guy Sonny Vaccaro (Damon) would “make a great movie!” An uncredited rewrite by Affleck/Damon incorporated notes from roundball legend Michael Jordan hissownself, elevating the roles his mother, Deloris (Viola Davis, whom Jordan cast), and Olympics coach George Raveling (Marlon Wayans) played in Jordan’s decision to sign a sponsorship deal with Nike. Et voilà! Not a “great movie,” let’s say, but definitely a movie.

Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves (2023) + Champions (2023)

April 8, 20232023, Action, Adventure, Australia, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Comedy, Disability, Drama, Fantasy, Iceland, Sports, Theatrical, UK, VOD

DUNGEONS & DRAGONS: HONOR AMONG THIEVES
**½/****
starring Chris Pine, Michelle Rodriguez, Regé-Jean Page, Hugh Grant
screenplay by Jonathan Goldstein & John Francis Daley and Michael Gilio
directed by Jonathan Goldstein & John Francis Daley

CHAMPIONS
**½/****
starring Woody Harrelson, Kaitlin Olson, Ernie Hudson, Cheech Marin
screenplay by Mark Rizzo, based on the Spanish film Campeones written by David Marqués & Javier Fesser
directed by Bobby Farrelly

by Walter Chaw I like squad movies, always have. Heists, war, impossible missions, underdog sports teams, collections of samurai or cowboys, miscreants or heroes, misfits generally and specialists sometimes. When it came time to make a sequel to Alien, Walter Hill understood James Cameron’s pitch as exactly this formula the great Howard Hawks had perfected: the squad film. I think it works as well as it does because the requirement to craft three-dimensional heroes is lessened in favour of reliable, audience-pleasing character types. Each player has a skill–a personal Chekhov’s Gun, if you will. It’ll only be a matter of time before they use it. Jonathan Goldstein and John Francis Daley’s Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves (hereafter D&D) is one recent example of the squad flick; Bobby Farrelly’s Champions is another. Both are about bands of social outcasts who learn to appreciate how their respective skills complement one another along the way to greater lessons about the world and its navigation. One sees a team of Special Olympics athletes led by an unctuous, quippy white guy; the other sees a team of nefarious and/or magical ne’er-do-wells led by an unctuous, quippy white guy. Only one of them, though, dares to deviate from the winning-means-everything formula, measuring its victory in the celebration of a friend’s sense of self-worth and confidence. Which is not to say that one film is significantly better than the other, or even that they have different aims, ultimately. Rather, I only mean to suggest that the degree to which one is lauded and the other derided probably has a lot to do with internalized bias and very little to do with any meaningful distinctions in what these movies substantively are.

The Novice (2021)

December 16, 2021****/****, 2021, Authors: Walter Chaw, Sports, Streaming, Theatrical, Thriller

****/****
starring Isabelle Fuhrman, Amy Forsyth, Dilone, Jonathan Cherry
written and directed by Lauren Hadaway

by Walter Chaw Lauren Hadaway’s hyphenate debut The Novice is so good, so self-assured, so kinetic and so very much about something that, all hyperbole justified, it heralds the arrival of an important new artist. Garnering instant comparisons to Whiplash for its heart-attack-fuelled kineticism and hyperfocus on the obsessive, gnostic practice of an obscure discipline and to Black Swan for similar reasons as well as its troubled female protagonist, The Novice‘s closest analogue for me is actually Andrew Niccol’s Gattaca, a film about the pursuit of knowledge and sublimity free of the depressingly quotidian limitations of the body. The Novice itself is free of Damien Chazelle’s preening and the literalness of the hero’s emotional fracture in Black Swan. Rather, it preaches the gospel of being fine with who you are not despite how fucked up and “intense” you might be, but because of that. At the end of all that auto-excavation, it says that the self, whatever its attendant flaws and hardwired weaknesses, has intrinsic value, and the knowledge of that value comes with immeasurable power. The title of Hadaway’s film recalls the Christian concept of the religious “novitiate,” that period where a person called to servitude enters into intense study, constant prayer, forced brotherhood, and an invasive interiority, all to prove whether or not they will be welcomed into the fold. In The Novice, the novitiate is Alex Dall, and the “fold” is everyone at her school who thinks she’s some kind of freak.

Telluride ’21: King Richard

September 6, 20212021, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Drama, Film Festivals, Sports, Telluride, Will Smith, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Will Smith, Jon Bernthal, Tony Goldwyn, Dylan McDermott
written by Zach Baylin
directed by Reinaldo Marcus Green

by Walter Chaw You know what this movie is. You know the major beats, you know the resolution, and in those rare instances when something happens you maybe don’t expect, you know immediately how it will resolve. There is no surprise to movies like Reinaldo Marcus Green’s King Richard by design, not misstep–they are by their nature for the least discriminating audience, the ones desperate to avoid challenge, thinking, reconsideration, discomfort. It is Taco Bell on vacation. You go there for a reason and none of it has to do with the quality of the food. It’s the disgusting robe you’ve had since college that your wife begs you to throw away, but you don’t. King Richard is garbage that people like, machine-extruded pap, hardwired and cynically engineered to garner a certain level of prestige. It’s the uplift picture multiplied by a minority voice. It’s ugly manipulation, more horse-betting than art–though the gamblers would argue that what they do is science rather than just venal calculation.

Days of Thunder (1990) – 4K Ultra HD + Digital; Top Gun (1986) + War of the Worlds (2005) – 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital

May 18, 20201980s, 1990s, 2000s, 2020, 4K Ultra HD, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: Tony Scott, Sci-Fi, Spielberg, Sports, Tom Cruise

Please note that all framegrabs are from the 1080p version of Days of Thunder

DAYS OF THUNDER
**/**** Image A- Sound B+ Extras D+
starring Tom Cruise, Robert Duvall, Randy Quaid, Nicole Kidman
screenplay by Robert Towne
directed by Tony Scott

TOP GUN
**/**** Image B Sound A+ Extras A
starring Tom Cruise, Kelly McGillis, Val Kilmer, Anthony Edwards
screenplay by Jim Cash & Jack Epps, Jr.
directed by Tony Scott

WAR OF THE WORLDS
***/**** Image A+ Sound A+
starring Tom Cruise, Dakota Fanning, Miranda Otto, Tim Robbins
screenplay by Josh Friedman and David Koepp, based on the novel by H.G. Wells
directed by Steven Spielberg

by Bill Chambers Days of Thunder was not a crapshoot; the dice were loaded. Almost the entire creative team that made Top Gun a hit–the illustrious Robert Towne filled in for the screenwriting duo of Jim Cash and Jack Epps, Jr., and none of the soundtrack artists were invited back–was reuniting to do for NASCAR what the earlier film had done for the U.S. Navy’s Fighter Weapons School. Star Tom Cruise had become even more popular in the intervening years, earning an Oscar nomination for Oliver Stone’s Born on the Fourth of July. Producers Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer had such an unparalleled track record, having shepherded Flashdance, Top Gun, and the first two Beverly Hills Cops to commercial success, that Paramount confidently renewed their contract at the start of production. As recounted in Charles Fleming’s unsparing High Concept: Don Simpson and the Hollywood Cultures of Excess, under the terms of their renegotiated deal (a “visionary alliance,” as Simpson-Bruckheimer insisted it be called in the trades), they would receive $300M for five pictures–any five pictures–over five years, as well as a host of unprecedented perqs, including creative autonomy and fully-furnished home theatres installed at the studio’s expense. Days of Thunder would be the first production of this visionary alliance. It would also, quite ludicrously, be the last.

Sundance ’20: And Then We Danced

January 28, 20202020, Authors: Walter Chaw, Coming of Age, Drama, Film Festivals, France, Georgia, Romance, Sports, Sundance, Sweden

***/****
starring Levan Gelbakhiani, Bachi Valishvili, Ana Javakhishvili, Kakha Gogidze
written and directed by Levan Akin

by Walter Chaw I don’t know that Levan Akin’s beautifully-shot, sensitively-performed And Then We Danced does anything especially novel, but it lands everything it attempts. That’s an apt metaphor, I think, for a film about an elite Georgian dance troupe that ends with an audition where our hero, Merab (Levan Gelbakhiani), Curt Schilling-bloody-socks his way through a gutsy routine. It plays out a lot like the audition in Luca Guadagnino’s Suspiria reboot in all its physicality and injury fear/revulsion, just as the rest of it plays out like Guadagnino’s Call Me By Your Name in the broad strokes of its gay coming-of-age melodrama. And Then We Danced is derivative, sure, but at least it’s derivative of the right films.

Fantasia Festival ’19: The Art of Self-Defense

July 16, 20192019, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Fantasia Festival, Film Festivals, Sports, Thriller

**/****
starring Jesse Eisenberg, Alessandro Nivola, Imogen Poots, Steve Terada
written and directed by Riley Stearns

Fantasia Festival 2019 runs July 11-August 1 in Montreal, Quebec. Visit the fest’s official site for more details.

by Walter Chaw Riley Stearns’s The Art of Self-Defense is the easier-to-digest version of a Yorgos Lanthimos film, but only star Jesse Eisenberg knows it. He’s in The Lobster; everyone else is in an ironic-slopping-over-into-arch indie exercise that presents toxic masculinity and rape culture as something with a potentially upbeat outcome. It’s a fairy tale, in other words–the kind sanitized for your protection, although the occasional flashes of ultra-violence suggest that it was something darker in an earlier conception. What remains is a sometimes mordantly funny social satire that loses first its steam in its middle section (when a post-workout massage doesn’t pull the trigger it should have pulled), then its nerve with a resolution that actually feels pandering and weak-willed. The picture wants very much to console, yet there’s no consolation. I guess the real lesson learned is that the temperature of the room isn’t real interested in hearing how everything’s going to be all right. The key moment left hanging is a confrontation in a parking lot with a random dude who slaps a bag of groceries out of our hero’s hands. It’s aggression from nothing, humiliating for a character we’ve come to like, and evocative of a greater world outside where it’s already too late: The monkeys run the monkey house, and they’re rabid and hungry. Manufacturing a happy ending from this mess is insulting.

Hot Docs ’18: We Could Be Heroes

May 4, 20182018, Authors: Bill Chambers, Denmark, Disability, Documentary, Film Festivals, Hot Docs, Hot Docs 2018, Morocco, Qatar, Sports, Tunisia

**½/****
directed by Hind Bensari

Hot Docs, the Canadian International Documentary Festival, runs April 26-May 6, 2018 at Toronto’s Bloor Cinema. Visit the fest’s official site for more details.

by Bill Chambers Oy, that title. It thankfully proves somewhat ironic, although disability docs would be wise going forward to avoid sentimental trigger words like “heroes,” Bowie homage or not, if they don’t want to be stigmatized as inspiration porn. The problem with We Could Be Heroes is that it’s easier to peg what it isn’t than what it is. Director Hind Bensari follows Moroccan athlete Azzedine Nouiri as he trains for the 2016 Rio Paralympics. He’d already set a world-record for shot put at the 2012 games, but some extracurricular research tells me that Englishman Scott Jones bested him just a year later. Bensari prefers an elliptical, direct-cinema approach that forgoes these expositional niceties, which I think is a misstep when we see wheelchair user Nouiri ambulatory without any sort of elucidation. There are spectrums of disability that transcend the naked eye, but try telling that to the idiots who memed a woman in a wheelchair standing up to reach a bottle up high in a liquor store with jokes about her faking it. Nouiri is not faking it–classified as an F34 athlete (meaning he has “moderate to severe hypertonia in both legs”), he credits his disability, in a rare autobiographical aside, to keeping him off drugs in his junkie neighbourhood, though that begs the intervention of a filmmaker follow-up question, too. (“Why?”) Bensari respects her subjects’ reserve to the point of seeming incurious to a near perverse degree. As a conspicuously-disabled individual who’s subjected to 20 Questions pretty much every time he leaves the house, I wish more people were like her; as someone tasked with reviewing We Could Be Heroes, I wish she were less reverential. She has a habit of lingering long enough to normalize her subjects, which some may find suitably profound, but not a Frederick Wiseman length of time, which would allow the idiosyncratic details of the challenges they face to emerge organically.

Telluride ’17: Battle of the Sexes

September 5, 20172017, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Comedy, Film Festivals, Sports, Telluride, Telluride 2017

½*/****
starring Emma Stone, Steve Carell, Andrea Riseborough, Sarah Silverman
written by Simon Beaufoy
directed by Valerie Faris & Jonathan Dayton

by Walter Chaw A movie that will make no one uncomfortable while reassuring the most blinkered that they’ve given at the office, Battle of the Sexes could be directed by anyone, star anyone, and it would still be exactly the same edgeless, meaningless, obsequious, instantly-obsolete artifact, desperate to be loved, expecting to be feted come awards season. It’s the casserole recipe that won in 1950, and Emma Stone continues her terrifying run as Audrey Hepburn’s career by ticking off her Children’s Hour/LGBTQ-sensitivity check-box. Stone’s blank, not “effortless” but rather “not trying” and “under-written” performance, is essentially a black wig, glasses, and a half-open pucker. Her Billie Jean King is a cipher who mouths platitudes about “equality” when what she really means is that she’s a vacuous narcissist who steamrolls everyone trying to help her in a movie that is, in fact, as woman-hating as the men it sets up as straw…well, men. To be clear, Billie Jean King beating Bobby Riggs in an exhibition match does not mean that women and men are “equal.” It doesn’t mean they’re unequal, either. It actually means nothing. Indeed, that King, at the age of 29, in peak condition and at the pinnacle of her profession and training hard, beat a 55-year-old former world champion whom the film takes pains to reassure is not only not training, but also drinking and womanizing and popping mysterious pills while doing a full-blitz promotional campaign (he played the entire first set in a branded windbreaker), says the opposite, I think, of the intended message. Understand that at this point in the sport, in 2017, it’s not controversial that women and men do not compete at the same level. You’re getting mad, I can tell. This is Serena Williams, the undisputedly greatest woman tennis player in the history of the sport, in 2013 on “Late Night with David Letterman”:

Cars 3 (2017)

June 20, 20172017, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Disney, Family, Pixar, Sports, Theatrical

**/****
screenplay by Kiel Murray and Bob Peterson and Mike Rich
directed by Brian Fee

by Walter Chaw I don’t understand very much about the Cars universe. I don’t understand its rules. Do the sentient cars feel pain? What part of them needs to “die” in order for them to die? The implication is that the voice actor needs to die, but even then the Paul Newman-voiced “Doc” is resurrected (along with Tom Magliozzi’s “Rusty”) in Cars 3 through the miracle of old voice outtakes and flashback sequences. It raises questions about sentience in a Blade Runner sort of way. It invites speculation that this is all a post-apocalyptic nightmare in which our “smart” cars have either outlasted, or outwitted, their primate creators. I wonder, too, about how they reproduce, as these films have always been clear that there are “children” in this universe. Or are they like child vampires: wizened monsters trapped in infant chassis? When I look at a sentient ambulance in this one’s central “Flesh Fair” demolition-derby sequence and how its patient bay is built for a human-sized customer and not a car, well…it raises questions. And let’s talk about the idea of a demolition derby in a film populated entirely by thinking, feeling cars. What would the human equivalent to this be? Thunderdome? It’s worth a conversation, though it’s not the conversation Cars 3 wants to have.

The Swinging Cheerleaders (1974) – Blu-ray + DVD

August 4, 20161970s, 2016, Arrow Video, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Esoterica, Sports

***/**** Image A Sound A- Extras A-
starring Jo Johnston, Rainbeaux Smith, Colleen Camp, Rosanne Katon
written by Jane Witherspoon & Betty Conklin
directed by Jack Hill

by Bryant Frazer At some point during the free-for-all brawl that climaxes The Swinging Cheerleaders, I remember thinking to myself, “This has got to be one of the most American movies ever made.” I was reacting in part to the iconography–cheerleaders fighting policeman fighting college footballers, almost in the manner of a silent comedy, as Scott Joplin plays on the soundtrack–but also to the mood of the film, in which converging themes of corruption and cynicism lead to an eruption of chaotic, comic violence, and open-hearted jocks make way for joyous optimism to prevail.

Point Break (2015) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

July 26, 20162015, 2016, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, DVD, Sports, Thriller, ZERO STARS

Pointbreak1

ZERO STARS/**** Image A Sound A+ Extras F
starring Édgar Ramírez, Luke Bracey, Teresa Palmer, Ray Winstone
screenplay by Kurt Wimmer
directed by Ericson Core

by Walter Chaw Not enough can be said about Kathryn Bigelow’s action sense. The honkytonk slaughter sequence in Near Dark, from the first moment (when the vampires crest the hill) to the last (when the lone survivor defenestrates), is a triumph of design, of score–including the high lonesome tones of a George Strait classic on the jukebox–and editing and execution. It’s that perfect economy of ideas-into-motion that indicates her cult classic Point Break, too–that, paired with absolutely perfect casting, from Keanu Reeves’s Everybody’s All-American football hero-turned-FBI dude Johnny Utah and Patrick Swayze’s blissed-out charismatic leader all the way down to Gary Busey and Lori Petty, the best supporting staff a film about a surf-zen cult-cum-bank-robbing crew could ask for. It’s a lovely marriage between ludicrous high-concept and the period immediately following the 1980s, which found the country in a reflective mood, perched there on the verge of upsetting the primacy of film for the coming digital age. Bigelow’s Point Break was a showcase for practical stuntwork and, philosophically, a nice metaphor for the excess of the “greed is good”/City on the Hill period drawing to a close. The bad guys rob banks to pay their way to enlightenment. Of course it all ends in tears.

Creed (2015) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

March 2, 20162015, 2016, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, DVD, Sports, Stallone

Creedblu1

***/**** Image A- Sound A Extras B
starring Michael B. Jordan, Sylvester Stallone, Tessa Thompson, Phylicia Rashad
screenplay by Ryan Coogler & Aaron Covington
directed by Ryan Coogler

by Walter Chaw I love this movie. I do. It’s not perfect. The love interest is underbaked and the fight choreography of the final match is unfortunately disjointed. But I love this movie–unconditionally, I guess. The story goes that Ryan Coogler, the young director of Fruitvale Station, pitched Sylvester Stallone on the idea of rebooting Rocky with Apollo Creed’s son. (Something the Indiana Jones series needs to do with a grown-up Short Round, by the way.) The auto-critical analysis of the film is that it’s essentially a father/son intrigue, which lends some insight into the Rocky/Mickey relationship of the original Rockys, and there are enough references to same to gratify the cultists. What I liked most about Stallone’s willingness to take a shot on a fresh idea from a minority perspective–this is the first instalment of one of his two venerable franchises not to spring from a Stallone-written script–is that it feeds into the idea of Stallone as an auteur maybe, a canny cultural anthropologist definitely. Every Rocky, every Rambo, is distinctly a product of its time. I don’t feel qualified to talk about this, but to the extent that I understand the theory, I’m sold.

Concussion (2015)

December 26, 20152015, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Sports, Theatrical, Will Smith

*/****
starring Will Smith, Alec Baldwin, Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Albert Brooks
written and directed by Peter Landesman

by Walter Chaw Peter Landesman's deeply compromised Concussion so shockingly exposes and excoriates the negligence of the NFL in protecting its players that it's constantly advertised during NFL games. The whole thing feels like a redacted security document: It's choppy, skips over entire plot points, short-sells the issues, and gives equal time to celebrating the beauty and the glory of football as it does to how football turns a scary percentage of its players into confused, manic, suicidal zombies. Save for a few minutes spent with Pittsburgh Steelers centre Mike Webster (David Morse), living in a truck and gluing his teeth into his head with superglue, we don't get much of a glimpse at the symptomatology of "CTE," the repeated-trauma disease discovered by Nigerian-born Dr. Bennet Omalu (Will Smith), who's introduced listing off his accomplishments to declare himself the "smartest person you've ever probably met or will probably ever meet." Concussion is what Spotlight would have looked like had it been made by Cardinal Law: you know, some stuff happened, but the Catholic Church is MAJESTIC. To be fair, we don't get much of a glimpse of anything–not even the romance between Omalu and his ward-cum-lover-cum-spouse (Gugu Mbatha-Raw, so astonishing in Belle and Beyond the Lights; welcome to the mainstream, Gugu!), which is treated in a curious, epileptic shorthand. She's a homeless refugee. She's very religious. Oh, now they're dancing and, um, fucking, and married and, wait, pregnant and married. Wait, now she's doing that wife-in-Bridge of Spies thing where she's protecting the family and… And Concussion is terrible.

Creed (2015)

November 25, 20152015, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Sports, Stallone, Theatrical

***/****
starring Michael B. Jordan, Sylvester Stallone, Tessa Thompson, Phylicia Rashad
screenplay by Ryan Coogler & Aaron Covington
directed by Ryan Coogler

Southpaw (2015)

July 23, 20152015, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Sports, Theatrical, Thriller

*½/****
starring Jake Gyllenhaal, Forest Whitaker, Naomie Harris, Rachel McAdams
screenplay by Kurt Sutter
directed by Antoine Fuqua

by Walter Chaw TV-writer Kurt Sutter breaks into feature-screenwriting by amalgamating Taxi Driver with Raging Bull in a movie that has the distinction of being not only the second film of 2015 with Fiddy Cent in it for some inexplicable reason, but also the second film that Jake Gyllenhaal shares with a little slow-motion girl on a trampoline. Southpaw has the distinction, too, of being the second picture in a row following Nightcrawler that is absolutely not the equal of Mr. Gyllenhaal’s performance in it. Antoine Fuqua’s latest is a rote, by-the-numbers sports melodrama that ultimately lacks the courage of its convictions, meaning that although it’s shooting for Rocky and Requiem for a Heavyweight, it ends up as Real Steel. It wants to be gritty like the American ’70s, see, but if Disney made ultra-violent boxing movies, this is exactly what they’d be like: dead mother and all. The real wonder of it all is that Fuqua manages to match every one of Sutter’s overused sports clichés with an overused Scorsese homage. That’s the real toe-to-toe slugfest, sports fans.

Unbroken (2014)

December 24, 20142014, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Coen Brothers, Drama, Sports, Theatrical, War

*/****
starring Jack O'Connell, Domhnall Gleeson, Miyavi, Garrett Hedlund
screenplay by Joel Coen & Ethan Coen and Richard LaGravenese and William Nicholson
directed by Angelina Jolie

by Walter Chaw I genuinely believe that Angelina Jolie means well. She's like the distaff Sean Penn. Unlike Sean Penn, she probably shouldn't direct more movies. Jolie does her research by going to the places she makes movies about. She cares. She adopts children from those places. She takes embarrassing publicity photos with her subjects, sometimes, that indicate not malicious self-promotion, but rather an unaffected, Costner-esque surprise and wonder. She's growing in her morality before our very eyes, and it's great, but her second time up to the plate, Unbroken, is naive and simpering. The only thing remotely interesting about it is that its subject, Olympic athlete and WWII POW Louis Zamperini (Jack O'Connell), after getting tortured by the Japanese for a while, decided post-war to embrace Billy Graham and forgive his torturers. That bit, the interesting bit, is left to a few lengthy end-title cards. It's sort of like reading the Old Testament and calling it good and, um, wanting to post the Ten Commandments in schools instead of the Sermon on the Mount. Never mind.