After absorbing the hype about Mickey Rourke's Herculean performance in Darren Aronofsky's The Wrestler (supposedly a mixture of Godfather-period Brando, Rocky-era Sylvester Stallone and Jesus himself) and becoming intrigued by the campy-cum-heartbreaking premise of a has-been pro grappler trying to make good, I finally headed off to the big screen and witnessed Rourke's theater of pain.
And while reviews have brought expectations down to earth, citing the film (accurately) as an ultimately been-there-done-that re-telling of a tried-and-true fallen-warrior saga, nothing could have prepared me for the degree to which The Wrestler sucked. Not even the 35-page manual in my cupholder titled, Preparation Tactics For The Suckage Of The Wrestler.
As for the star of the main event, Rourke is the only aspect of the film that doesn't dwell in heavy-handedness. His performance is anything but showy, and doesn't need to be. Aronofsky lends the picture its poetics with his trademark style of uncomfortably gritty grotesquerie and tragic surrealism. But he and screenwriter Robert Siegel also turn The Wrestler into an exercise in manipulation that puts a stranglehold on your emotional and sensory thresholds. The outcome is predictable from the near get-go, but the filmmaking pair still mercilessly puts viewers through the formulaic paces of the movie's narrative arc.
We're first permitted a glimpse of hope during the mid-flick reconciliation with Robinson's daughter Stephanie (played with believably guarded gusto by Evan Rachel Wood) and near-consummation with stripper muse Cassidy (portrayed with a lack of naturalism distractingly antithetical to Rourke's immersion into Robinson's over-tanned-and-time-battered visage). And we're then subjected to our protagonist's rapid, perversely graceful descent into flatlined self-loathing and, eventually, a uniquely morbid kind of isolated martyrdom.
Welcome back to one of NSCDUV's most beloved daily features, which takes aim at the most confounding, misleading or abruptly hysterical info-bar synopses of the day's cable programming.
And while yesterday saw High Fidelity re-envisioned as the tale of a man who can finally start living after recovering from a bizarre psychological condition, today the Info-Bar transforms a hitman-style thriller into a tour of male bonding.
The fullbore and boring backlash against Judd Apatow and his coterie of cloddish co-conspirators is well underway. Now, we could poopoo the manner in which he milks the Man-Boy Matures genre (Superbad, 40-Year-Old Virgin, Knocked Up, et al) until the cows come home, but that would be mixing our milk metaphors with our meat metaphors, and that ain't grammatically Kosher.
So instead of badly butchering the man, wheezing out a few tired sentences that sentence all reading them to The Pit Of Despair, we'd rather focus on the medium and not the message. To be Frank Gifford, I'd have to cheat on my shrew of a wife, but to just be frank, the message is basically adolescence writ large anyway, and rehashing it only envelops the proceedings in the smokecloud of obfuscation.
A quick survey of Apatow's cinematic oeuvre shows that "oeuvre" is a pretty pretentious word when it comes to describing the film properties he's helped to develop. What we have are a bunch of generically plotted, broadly acted, amiable comedies that feature incredibly-gifted improvisers.
Isn't the word recklessly kind if ironic when applied to driving incidents, given how easily it would be to plop a "w" in front of it? Well, maybe not ironic, but there's something kind of funny about it. You get what I'm siizzzaying.
Anyhow, just when we were mid-yawn over the information surrounding Matt Dillon's relatively goody-two-shoes speeding arrest, ex-NBA great/current basketball analyst Charles Barkley comes along and gets caught driving while intoxicated in Arizona early this morning. Apparently, the former Suns/76ers great was civil and polite, and this would rank as a first offense. And he always prided himself on not being a role model anyway. But unfortunately, he's also been an outspoken voice of late about racially motivated hirings and firings in sports.
And while I for one can separate a night of pre-New Year's Eve good times and momentary indiscretion from the legitimacy of his personal politics, one has to wonder if this will affect his credibility as any kind of moral arbiter. Oh, Chuck, you are quite the conundrum.
Welcome to one of NCDSUV's favorite daily features,
where we acknowledge another turn of the calendar for a member of
Hollywood land, even if it's a celebrity who often goes overlooked by
the rest of the blogosphere, and regardless of whether we have a huge
affinity for their body of work.
Yesterday, we solicited the birthday cheer of former Hollywood Madam Heidi Fleiss, and today we come out and play for a Warrior-turned-Sex stud.
I'm not sure what's funnier. That Matt Dillon was really in such a hurry to get anywhere of significance, that it's such a slow news day that this item made the top of most entertainment headlines, or that one website tried to provide their post with extra weight by leading off with the line, "Vermont police arrested Oscar nominee Matt Dillon for speeding overnight."
You'd think they were trying to lend gravitas to the marketing campaign for an indie film. Anyway, looks like the brother of Entourage star Kevin Dillon (ouch!) went... Over The Edge, as he was caught going a tidy 106 mph. Although he wasn't drunk, and his mugshot actually makes him look better than usual.
Hopefully the pace of celebrity misdoings will pick up its pace in the upcoming 24 hours of partying, eh?
Welcome to NCDSUV's splenetic, embittered new weekly feature, Overdressed & Underclassed, which dissects different aspects of celebrity fashion with the enthusiasm and exactitude of a taxidermist suffering from the second clinical phase of rabies (caution: We have reached the contagious stage).
Fashion trends generally reflect the time in which they're created, ergo cash means flash, recession means regression. So what can we expect when a full-blown depression is being forecast? As I turn my jaundiced eye to 2009, I predict that the (hopefully) temporary stumble of Western Civilization will lead to a number of unsightly trendlets among the glitterati. My predictions for who will wear what, below.
8. Rumpled Luxe Most Likely Victims: Angelina Jolie, Madonna, Sean Penn Much like Kathy Fuld's rather feeble attempt to hide her weekly $10,000 shopping sprees at Hermes (you know Kathy, wife of the disgraced Lehman Brothers Goliath, Tricky Dick Fuld) in unmarked bags to protect the great unwashed masses from the awareness of her continuing spendthrift ways, there are going to be gaggles of stars known for their cultural and political "sensitivity" who will attempt to downplay their own profligate spending with the Rumpled Luxe look. Because a Prada dress that's ill-fitting, baggy, wrinkled and strapped together with a series of creased ribbons (and just happens to cost thousands) totally says, "I relate to unkempt homeless people and the struggling working class."
7. Statement Headpieces Most Likely Victims: Nicole Richie, Mischa Barton, Christian Siriano Broke but still want to look a la mode? That's where "statement" headpieces come in. And in keeping with the bipolar mood the wild fluctuations of the market have inspired in the general populace, the message this season's "statements" are sending are decidedly crazypants. Take Blumarine, for example. The unwieldy beige contraptions strapped to models' heads are tied in various fanciful designs. The giant upside down Christmas-bow that threatens to take out a model's eyeball, or at the very least, her line of vision, is my personal favorite. It perfectly evokes the topsy turvy/helter skelter spirit of our times and chooses to join in the chaos and embrace the screwball and the scary, instead of run in the other direction, screaming. Which will most likely be the common reaction if you attempt to replicate this look.
6. Sleepwear As Outerwear Most Likely Victims: Britney Spears, Matthew McConaughey, Courtney Love Luxe lads and ladies too depressed, unemployed, drunk and/or insolvent to change out of their jammies can rest assured that they'll still totally be in style. Dolce & Gabbana has conveniently devoted its 2009 line to various pajama-inspired ensembles that will take you from the deli... to the couch. The dresses resemble Hugh Hefner-style silk smoking jackets and trench coats, shorts, flowy pants and button-downs that scream "naptime!" abound -- casual lolligag belting options included. Perhaps the idea here is to allow the still gainfully employed to stand in solidarity with their jobless brethren by unabashedly approaching their oh-so-urgent PowerPoint presentations and TPS reports with the same vigor their cohorts approach their glazy-eyed afternoon slumps on the couch, clicker in one hand, giant vat of soda in the other, bowl of popcorn precariously balanced on lap strewn with trashy magazines. Let's get this economy started!
5. Bike Shorts Most Likely Victims: Lindsay Lohan, Rihanna, Nicky Hilton Leggings' tacky redneck cousins have arrived. Brace yourselves, because bike shorts are "in." Nothing says "we give up as a society" like oversized cotton T's paired with plain black leather belts that are neither thin, thick, tight or loosely slung and bike shorts... posing as haute couture. Let's keep our fingers crossed and hope that Americans en masse don't pick up this style. We've lived through enough with the redoubtable muffin top/hipster jean/peekaboo thong triangle of terror, and I'm not sure we could withstand the kind of shock and horror that would surely entail if mall rats, Soap Opera Digest subscribers and soccer moms all started sporting short, tight, shiny Lycra pants.
While slogging through VH1's autopiloted, best-of '08 (i.e. best of their coverage of '08) programming during the last week, I made it through a few more of their I Love The... and Top 100... clips shows. During one such marathon, a segment featured the best air-guitar song of that year, with celebrities and professional air guitarists alike superimposed over, say, a Judas Priest clip, wah-wah-ing and soloing away on their imaginary axe.
Oh, I'm sorry, did I just say professional air guitarists? Excuse me while I get my dick out of my hand until someone gives me my paycheck for professionally jerking off. I think what I actually meant to say was unemployed loser who lives in his mom's basement and makes a living through some mundane postmodern form of theater that lands approximately in between a Rock Band jam session and the early audition stages of American Idol.
Firstly, all the value from air guitar histrionics has historically been derived from it being a private endeavor, something that, a la singing in the shower, is vulnerable to shame and embarrassment if caught on tape or by accidental interruption.
Always ones to make their own news by inciting celebrity tempers, or reporting on it when fellow paparazzi prod and needle the beautiful people, TMZ caught Jessica Alba's hubbie, Cash Warren, getting feisty with a cameraman the other night.
You see, the pap's car bumped into Warren's, so the emasculated spouse-of-someone-more-famous-than-him got out of his car to be all, "Hey dick, don't you see by the quality of my man-scarf that I mean serious business when it comes to fender benders?" But then when Warren tried to do the tried-and-true "muss up your equipment" girly-fight move, the photog scuffled back, and Warren wisely retreated to his SUV.
Granted, TMZ and their kin are a bit like a schoolyard bully who starts a fight just so he has something to tattle to the teacher about. But what is it with mega-hot female celebs (Alba, Christina Aguilera, et al) getting hitched to schlebby dudes with crappy beards? Or more to the point, if that's their pattern, than where's my high-profile sugar mamma?
Welcome back to one of NSCDUV's most beloved daily features, which takes aim at the most confounding, misleading or abruptly hysterical info-bar synopses of the day's cable programming.
And while yesterday saw Who Framed Roger Rabbit recast as the titular character's attempt to rap his way back into Jessica's heart, today we follow our devilish remote control to a movie that, in the hands of the Cable Info-Bar, has evolved from poignant human drama to Charlie Kaufman-worthy metaphysical storytelling.
