Tag: The Wrestler
Movie Review: Darren Aronofsky’s Mother!
About ten years back, I went to a play at one of my local rep theatres. If I remember right, it was an American premiere, but I suppose that doesn’t really figure into the story. The next day, I was inspired to send a $100 contribution to the theatre, with the accompanying note. “I saw…
Dangal: The perfect Bollywood film for the uninitiated
There is a general resistance to Bollywood cinema in Western countries. This isn’t so much because of any strong objection to them, as it is because their structure is so fundamentally different from the output of Hollywood. They are frequently quite long, invest heavily in a sense of the melodramatic, and perhaps most significantly, the…
Interview: Nick Barkla on Inside Fighter
Inside Fighter is the kind of uncontrived and intimate cinematic portrait – free of pretence or judgement – that acts as a reminder of the possibilities of the documentary form. For each and every second of the film’s relatively brief 51-minute running time, it is clear that first-time director Nick Barkla has entered into the…
Shattered Masculinities: Muscular pulp and feminine tears
There is something incredibly fascinating about images of shattered masculinity on the big screen. The notion of testosterone fuelled hyper-men imploding into impotent puddles of muscular pulp and feminine tears seems to have fuelled the popular imagination of filmgoers since the medium’s earliest beginnings – most especially in the United States. It seems that, even…