From the director who brought you films such as Requiem for a Dream and The Fountain, comes the story of a professional wrestler who gets too old to wrestle, and tries to live his life outside of the ring. Mickey Rourke, you might remember him as the biggest badass ever in Sin City, portrays the main character Randy “The Ram” Robinson, and his fall from fame after a heartattack prevented him from wrestling again. As time goes on, he begins to lose sense of his identity, and he tries his best to battle with himself in finding out who he really is and what matters most to him in life.

The director, Darren Aronofsky, has been someone who I’ve had mixed feelings about. After seeing Requiem, which focuses on the terrible effects drugs can lead to, I wouldn’t even let myself take advil for weeks in fear that I might get addicted and start selling myself on the street for just one more pill. Maybe I’m exaggerating….but that movie definitely was made so well that it left me feeling very uncomfortable and fearful of any illegal substance. It was a remarkable movie to say the least. I then ventured to see the film he made before that called Pi about a man who figures out a way to crack the pattern of the stock market by using the pattern of the number pi through a series of a calculations. How fun! This sounds like it could be an awesome Bruce Almightyish kind of Jim Carrey movie with tons of laughs, but actually it is dark….very, very dark. This film, though it was made with much less money and wasn’t as good of quality as Requiem, was still entertaining none the less. But his most recent film, The Fountain, starred Hugh Jackman and some other girl who are in love throughout time, in the past, present, future, and I don’t know what other time. I’ll just say I was really confused throughout the whole thing even though it was visually beautiful. In the end though, I can’t really say I enjoyed it much.

Yet, this film looks to be nothing like any of the ones I just mentioned. It seems to just be a profile on one man and the troubles he faces. My friend, who was also apprehensive about seeing an Aronofsky film, saw a prescreening of the film and said it was one of his favorite films this year. I feel that if Hulk Hogan came out with a documentary in 5-10 years detailing his life after his son’s imprisonment and the divorce from his wife, that it would look very similar to this film. I have high expectations for the movie, and I hope Rourke and Aronofsky don’t trick me into a match and totally piledrive my head into the mat which would leave me regretting ever even associating myself with them. Gosh why would they do that to me? Well hopefully, they’ll let me be their tag-team partners. The film opens to limited audiences on December 31, and then to wide release on January 16, 2009. In the words of ring announcer Michael Buffer…”LET’S GET READY TO RUMBLEEEEEEE!”