This blog will present news items about the motion picture business, with emphasis on lower budget, independent film in most cases. Some reviews or commentaries on specific films, with emphasis on significance (artistic or political) or comparison, are presented. Note: No one pays me for these reviews; they are not "endorsements"! Starting in May 2016, many of the reviews for new feature films have been done on a hosted Wordpress site, and this blog now mostly does shorts and older films.
Since the 1990s I have been very involved with fighting the military "don't ask don't tell" policy for gays in the military, and with First Amendment issues. Best contact is 571-334-6107 (legitimate calls; messages can be left; if not picked up retry; I don't answer when driving) Three other url's: doaskdotell.com, billboushka.com johnwboushka.com Links to my URLs are provided for legitimate content and user navigation purposes only.
My legal name is "John William Boushka" or "John W. Boushka"; my parents gave me the nickname of "Bill" based on my middle name, and this is how I am generally greeted. This is also the name for my book authorship. On the Web, you can find me as both "Bill Boushka" and "John W. Boushka"; this has been the case since the late 1990s. Sometimes I can be located as "John Boushka" without the "W." That's the identity my parents dealt me in 1943!
"Southpaw" panders to screenwriting conventions about "rooting interest", while Jake Gyllenhaal still looks "ruined"
“Southpaw” (directed by Antoine Fuqua, 2015), unfortunately,
does not refer to a left-handed ace pitcher in baseball (Clayton Kershaw, Gio
Gonzales). No, this is Billy Hope,
played by a ghostly Jake Gyllenhaal (more about that later), a boxer who is
coaxed by his daunting wife Maureen (Rachel McAdams) to retire after an eye
injury in a prize match at Madison Square Garden. You wonder how anyone could
be attracted to him in this shape.
At a charity event, a competitor Miguel Escobar (Miguel
Gomez) taunts him, creates a disturbance, and Miguel’s brother (Danny
Henriquez) pulls a gun and fires.
Maureen gets show and her life ebbs away in his arms before the police
arrive.
Billy goes downhill with alcohol and loses everything,
including custody of his daughter after getting arrested on a drugs and weapons
charge. Here is where the screenplay (written by Kurt Sutter) really starts
pandering to all the Hollywood conventions about urgency and rooting interest. You would normally expect a thorough police
investigation and prosecution over the shooting of his wife (manslaughter at
the very least), regardless of any protectionism within the world of the
ring.
Instead, Billy becomes more
pathetic. He turns to Titus Wills
(Forrest Whitaker) for a place to train and have a menial job. He moves out of his foreclosed mansion and
lives in a tenement. His daughter resists
seeing him when he tries to visit the orphanage, under the supervision of Child
Protective Services. The audience is supposed to feel connected to him through his love for his daughter. It's so trite.
The rest if the movie – his road back to the ring (in Las Vegas) – is
predictable and choppy.
Jake Gyllenhaal’s body remains shaved, even plucked, a
leftover from “Nightcrawler”, this time to provide room for ugly tattoos as
well as for the convenience of tape. He’s
come a long way – down – from his roles of the likable teen in “October Sky”, “Moonlight
Mile” and even “Donnie Darko”. But he progressed through "Jarhead" into a self-sacrificial machismo. It's funny how I don't want personally to make "inadequacy" all right, but then -- this.
The official site is here. The Weinstein Company seems to have moved
toward larger releases in a more conventional bloated Hollywood style,
reminiscent of the 80s.
I do remember other boxing movies, like "Cinderella Man", I was never a fan of the multiple "Rocky" franchises, even if they took us to Philadelphia.
I saw the film before a fair Saturday night crowd at
Angelika Mosaic.
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