Hi Y’all. I took another long break since my last post. I apologize. This semester is starting off a lot harder than I thought it would…But I’m ready for it! I’m going to fight my way to get as many good grades as I can, and not get too overwhelmed by my jobs and classwork. Now that you know how hard I’ll be working, I should let you know of another fighter. That fighter I speak of is Mickey Rourke’s character Randy “The Ram” Robinson in the award winning film The Wrestler. Though it didn’t win Best Picture at the Golden Globes, Rourke received the award for Best Performance by an Actor in a Drama, and is now nominated for a chance at the Oscars. I agree that he did a very fine job in this role, and totally absorbes himself into the character.

Now, the other day I told a coworker of mine that though I liked the film a great amount, that the movie was in the end “just a story of a wrestler.” To that, he replied that that’s like saying that “Forrest Gump was just the story of a mentally challenged person.” That being one of my favorite movies, I retract my statement, and I apologize to that person because I realize that there is much more depth to this film than that.

The film tells the story of Randy “The Ram” Robinson’s life 20 years after his hayday in the prowrestling spotlight. Presently, he works part-time at the grocery store, tans, gets his hair bleached, and works out in his free time, and on the weekends he gets the opportunity to relive his glory days wrestling in front of school gymnasiums filled with at most 100 people. His one love in his life is being in the ring and doing what he does best: puting on a great performance. Though he doesn’t receive the big money that he once earned when he was a younger and more popular wrestler, he is barely able to pay the rent for his trailer home, he still makes sure to keep wrestling an integral part of his life, even scheduling work around the wrestling schedule.

The Wrestler reveals a side of professional wrestling that is usually shielded from the audience. While many are under the assumption that the sport is fake and that no one really gets hurt, we go behind the scenes to see that this isn’t necessarily true. Before matches, the wrestlers plan out their fights and warn each other what moves they are going to do. Just because its planned, though, doesn’t mean that it doesn’t hurt. It takes a true performer to put on these stunts. And now with our age of constant violence in all forms of the media, wrestling has to keep up with this generation of people who want to see more and more blood. In one of the most memorable scenes, we see the pains Ram must take to shock the audience; The Ram even goes so far as to receive shots from a staple gun all over his body.

The emotional aspect doesn’t just stay with the man’s love for the game. We find that Robinson is alone in this world. Though he has friends and past associates from his illustrious career, he has no one to love on a more intimate level. At one point, Robinson had had a daughter named Stephanie, played my Evan Rachel Wood, who had grown up with little of her father’s involvement. Now, Robinson is hoping to reestablish a connection with her. The other person in his life is a stripper named Cassidy, played by Marissa Tomei who is topless nearly the whole movie, that he has a friendly relationship with in a club. He feels a personal connection to her, and is almost to a certain extent possessive over her. Robinson tries to make this relationship more than just a stripper and client exchange, but as Robinson moves along in his life, he finds that it’s a lot harder than he thought to depend on anything but wrestling in his life.

The film is very good and should definitely be seen at least once. Mickey Rourke embodies the role of a down-on-his-luck wrestler, and makes the viewer feel his pain and struggle. Starting this Friday, January 30, The Wrestler will thankfully be playing at Boardman’s Art Theatre.

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!”