Taking it personally

I’m a pretty passionate guy. I get fired up over small injustices, I get carried away with points that don’t matter, and anyone who really knows me is right now choking back indignity at the magnitude of such an understatement. I take things to heart and then stitch it all to my sleeve. I rant. I rave.

Someone close once suggested I could take life about one thousand percent less personally and be just fine, not to mention immeasurably less stressed. I protested that you don’t make friends with salad. A bit obtuse to count as a serious rebuttal, I went on to argue that they were mistaking my cynical realism with taking the world too seriously. Just because I think things by and large don’t work out and the universe is overwhelmingly disappointing doesn’t mean I don’t think it is worth trying for a better world. I lost the argument.

The thing I’m interested in is the inconstant but very real threshold of frustration where playing competitive sport changes from healthy catharsis to compounding anxiety. I love – really LOVE – playing hard on the basketball court. There are few things more satisfying, win or lose, than leaving every skerrick of energy out on the court. Having had a difficult week or personal disappointment can be fuel to channel so much negative energy and transform it into focus and drive and release.

But there is a point, an unknowable point, where the negative energy overwhelms the possibility for transformation. No matter how much I want a game or how hard I play or how determined I am to leave all the other shit at the door, I’ll never play well. I’ll never feel the release. Those games are always bluntly personal. And of course there is an exponential relationship between the possibility of playing well and the possibility of letting go of everything else. Like compound interest in the worst tangible way.Those days I just shouldn’t play, but the promise of relief is so seductive. I just don’t know any way of coming down far enough on those days, to a calm enough headspace that the game will just be a game. I mean, it’s all well and good to WANT to take life one thousand percent less personally. Much harder to do when life is so damn personal…

Review: The Wrestler

In the interests of full disclosure, I’m a fool for a quietly rendered story of existential crisis, human failing, and the arbitrary casualties of life. It just…it hits me. In my heart bone.

So there was every chance I was going to fall for Darren Aronofsky’s The Wrestler. For one – as is well documented – Mickey Rourke is a living, breathing, slightly angrier real life manifestation of this kind of tragedy. After being touted in the early 90’s as the saviour of the cinema ‘tough guy’, he spectacularly fell from grace, bang into a wall of drugs, alcoholism, abominable plastic surgery and other acts of disastrous hedonism. He plumbed the depths of personal and cinematic disgrace, until Tarantino and Rodriguez threw him a lifeline by controversially casting him in Sin City. On the back of his bristling, electric performance, Aronofsky fought tooth and nail to have Rourke play Ricky ‘The Ram’ Robinson in The Wrestler. Several financiers spooked and abandoned the project but Aronofsky wouldn’t budge on the casting, meaning the scale of the film was seriously downsized.

Rourke paid back that faith with interest, delivering a muscular, nuanced and utterly compelling performance. Pathos, you ask? In spades. Heaped, fresh spades. He is revelatory and utterly convincing at once, and deserves more than his Oscar nomination. Rourke deserves to hold the statue aloft.

Robert Siegel’s script is deceptively simple – essentially a two hander between lost souls, wonderfully reminiscent of the Marlon Brando classic On the Waterfront. Evan Rachel Wood makes a stunning turn in a handful of scenes as Ricky’s estranged daughter, but the real revelation – even more so than Rourke – is the usually beige Marisa Tomei delivering a performance of gravity and charm as a single mother stripper striving for a better life.

Ambition and desperate loneliness birth each other as the arbitrary turns in life throw these beautifully tragic characters through the alleys of life. The Wrestler is pessimistic and unapologetically bitter at times, but rarely have I spent such satisfying time in the cinema.

Life doesn’t have to be pretty to be spectacular.

When its been over 40 degree for three days in a row

How great is it when people can't resist commenting "Gee, its hot out there" or a rhetorical "How hot is it?"

Seriously. I'm aware of the heat.

Sheesh...

Review: Slumdog Millionaire

Why is everyone so enamoured with the turgid, slight, flawed romance of Slumdog Millionaire? The protagonist is largely inactive, devoid of empathy and seems incapable of anything but a bewildered glare. Satisfying character development is shelved in favour of cheap plays at the heartstrings with scenes of poverty and violence. Of course it is tragic that millions – nearing billions – of people, many of them children, live in abject poverty and squalor. But in a narrative sense, showing flashbacks of a child’s mother beaten to death or his friends deliberately maimed for begging does not actually explain his present day motivations or necessarily create a connection to the character. Bad things have happened but the guy is still a motivation-less dead fish on screen. Likewise we see how he knows these ‘impossible’ answers. But why he is so desperate to prove himself and why this girl is the answer to his happiness – what should be the driving questions of the film – are so hastily pasted into the clever tapestry of sights and sounds that they disappear into insignificance. (And no, “It is written” as a plot justification isn’t remotely strong enough to hold together a feature film. It is the cinematic equivalent of an eighth grade creative writing task hastily concluded with “Then I woke up”.)

The shambles that is the script is a crying shame for many reasons; Danny Boyle is a supremely talented director; the central story structure of showing through flashback how this poor boy circumstantially knows the answers to these questions is novel and interesting; and the child actors are compelling if raw talents. In the end the central character is uninteresting and the central romance is flat out disappointing. No mean feat for a character driven romance.

Other elements of the film were frustrating – the jarring motion-blur of the action sequences and the distractingly frenetic editing masking the plodding pace of the story to name a few. Still, these are personal aesthetic preferences rather than inditements on the movie as a whole.

But returning to the central frustration, why is this film so loved and lauded? Does it tap into Western guilt over the state of a former colony, offering an unthreatening, rise-against-the-odds protagonist to purge our discomfort? Do we so desperately need to believe that the people we indirectly oppress every day can be saved by a bit of determination streak of improbably luck? Are we willing to absolve the sins of the world in romanticism so easily? Slumdog Millionaire is a feelgood film, but given the chasm between its cinematic quality and its reception, I suspect it is feelgood for all the wrong reasons. Proceed with scepticism…

Film: Bustin' Down The Door

The pop culture feature documentary is a strange beast. More so than other big screen documentaries, chronicles of movements, events or trends within living memory are faced with a greater than usual question of subjectivity and a resulting need for editorialisation. Is the purpose to nostalgically relive the good ol’ days or to use the luxury of distance and hindsight to make a point?

Bustin’ Down The Door is an energetic and unashamedly fond account of the turning point of surfing from a pastime to a legitimate professional sport in the mid 1970’s. The film focuses on a handful talented Australian and South African surfers who took up residence on – and took over – Hawaii’s North Shore in the winters of 1974, ‘75 and ’76. While there are codas glimpsing at the private lives of surf royalty Shaun Tomson, ‘Rabbit’ Bartholomew, Mark Richards and Ian Cairns, the film focuses squarely on the pursuit of these guys to make a living out of what they loved, gain respect as the best in the world, and legitimise surfing as a professional sport.

Director Jeremy Gosch is at pains to show the motivation of these mavericks was a kind of fame above fortune. They wanted to make money, sure, but only enough to support their lifestyle of surfing the globe. For these guys it was about respect and acknowledgement and adulation. Rabbit and Cairns and Peter Townend (PT) found themselves prime targets for the angry, pride-wounded Hawaiian locals because they were so zealous in pursuit of this fame rather than fortune.

How this tension played out – the low key Hawaiians being publicly insulted in the surfing media by the upstart Australians – is easily the most compelling part of the film and provides a fitting climax. And yet something rang hollow almost immediately that the credits began to roll.

The whole premise of the film is a celebration of the achievement of these guys to legitimise their sport and make a living for themselves. Then for a few, gaudy moments, we see what their legacy has become. The oversized cheques for ridiculous sums of prize money being doused in champagne at the prestigious Triple Crown presentation. The rock-star lifestyle of tour surfers, sponsored by multi-billion dollar surf lifestyle companies. The film even opens with a shot of Kelly Slater rocking up to the ASP (Association of Professional Surfers) awards night in a black Maserati.

Yet none of the men this film was created to celebrate – not one of the central figures that, according to the doco, were directly responsible for the current state of the sport – is shown to comment on what their legacy has become. And I want to know damnnit. Gosch shows the contrast between what these guys wanted to achieve and the circus it has become, but doesn’t have a single comment on how they feel about that evolution. Don’t bring it up, leave the film as a rose-coloured nostalgia trip, or ask the hard questions.

In a similar vein, while most of these pioneering guys seem to have survived the years relatively unscathed, South African charger Michael Tomson is clearly, painfully worse for wear. Tomson always played second fiddle to his more successful and well-liked cousin Shaun, but Michael was one of the most influential figures in the surf wear and surf lifestyle industry. He founded Gotcha and set the design tone for the whole industry for most of the 80’s and early 90’s. He sold the brand in 1997 after it lost it’s way financially and ideologically. The same, apparently, could be said for Tomson. Michael lived hard, partied hard and bought into the lifestyle he was selling – sex and drugs and waves. His face, and his broken voice, shows it. Although still well respected and relatively well off, Tomson still qualifies as a casualty of the industry these guys gave birth to. But not a single hard question is asked of the man. Just fond, embellished backslapping.

Although not immediately apparent even to the relatively informed viewer, the sense that these incisive and important questions are left unasked is still tangibly frustrating. And no amount of hard-childhood stories from a likeably-greying Rabbit or earnest tones of Edward Norton’s narration can paper the cracks of this jumbled together doco.

2.5/5