The Academy loves boxing movies. I recently saw THE FIGHTER, which was one of last year’s Best Picture nominees. The rest of the world has moved on to fast-paced contests like the NFL, competitive skateboard suicide, and LeBron-hating, but the Oscars are stuck on the most popular sport of 1929. You know, for all the World War I vets who always pack the theaters on weekends.
Do the other sports not matter? Boxing has more Best Picture nominations than football, basketball, baseball, hockey, soccer, tennis, and golf combined. Even Ricky Bobby can’t get an Oscar nod. I think the nearest competitor might be horse racing (another sport that peaked about 90 years ago). Is the Academy even aware that other sports have sprung up since the invention of the automobile?
I stand corrected. Nothing says "movie magic" like running.
There is no logical explanation for any of this, other than that I guess the boxing movies are good. I have a sneaking suspicion that it might have something to do with the movie stars appearing shirtless for most of the movie. Think about it. Mark Wahlberg spent two entire movies playing nice guys from the streets who grit their way to ultimate triumph on the big stage. The first time, he did it covered in ugly green football gear. The second time, he went back to his underwear model roots. Which movie got the nomination?
Step 1: Hire famous movie star. Step 2: Obscure movie star's face with bucket and metal grill.
Maybe it’s the supporting cast. Boxing movies like to show how real they are by featuring washed-up, home-wrecked, white-trash low-lifes that surround the hero and make him look good by contrast. THE FIGHTER got Christian Bale an Oscar for his performance as a crack-head former boxer, and Melissa Leo took home the Best Supporting Actress Oscar for playing the craziest movie mother since Psycho. Amy Adams as Marky Mark’s girlfriend, in the same over-sexed, ill-tempered, foul-mouthed performance that won her acclaim in Enchanted.
Low-life degenerate.
I am pretty sure there is just one boxing script in Hollywood, and screenwriters just pass it around playing Madlibs with it:
______ is a down-on-his-luck fighter from the mean streets of _______. Despite the pressures of his crazy _______, who suffers from _______, the boxer manages to score a title fight against ______, whose record is ___ – 0. Inspired by the love of his girlfriend _______, the boxer is hammered for ___ rounds before a miraculous comeback gives him the win.
Anyway, after all this serious boxing drama, I think I am desperately in need of a good, original movie. Something where I can’t see the plot coming from a mile away. Maybe a comic book movie…
One might suspect that there would be a lot of superhero movies on a list of extraordinary adventures. But superheroes are a strange lot, preferring to stay in one place most of the time and fight petty criminals.
Occasionally you’ll get a supervillain who has some dastardly world-domination plot, but even these are usually run out of the basement of some abandoned building in the superhero’s home town, and involve the theft of nuclear warheads which are conveniently being transported via the nearest forest road.
Even if the superhero has great abilities for travel and high resistance to danger, they don’t use it much. Superman can fly into space and back, but only to retrieve lost nuclear warheads or stop time. The Flash can run at near lightspeed, but only finds it useful to beat the rush hour in the local business district.
Gotham City: Surprisingly still crime-ridden in spite of billionaire vigilante justice
There are no historic artifacts in superhero stories (nuclear warheads don’t count), no epic battle scenes (it’s usually just a brawl between a couple of invincible people, and Hulk vs. the entire U.S. Army does not count), and the costumes, while exotic in one sense of the word, lack the worn-in look of classical adventure fare.
Don’t get me wrong. I love good Superhero movies, and there are several that are pretty awesome. But few embody the spirit of adventure like Batman Begins.
I am tortured, oh so tortured, by my uncanny physical skills and immense wealth.
Let’s face it: Batman is a character that is famous for doing all of those things I just mentioned. He stays in Gotham, butts heads with the local criminals, and dresses in black latex. But when Christopher Nolan took over the franchise, he brought Batman to the world.
Here is a hero on a search for meaning. This goes beyond the typical armchair psychology of superhero stories. Bruce Wayne travels to the ends of the earth in order to know and understand suffering. In the remote mountains of Asia, he is trained in the art of survival, in the martial arts, and finally in the mystic practices of the ninja.
This is not a still from Viggo Mortensen's "The Road," but rather a scene from Batman's quest for a rare flower (seriously)
Ra’s Al Ghul is the secret man/organization that takes Bruce under his/its wing and teaches him that periodically civilization must be broken down to its primitive roots or suffer the consequences of indulgent humanity. This is a far cry from a crazy nutjob like Lex Luther or the Joker, because their evil is incomprehensible. But Batman, while troubled by their methods, kind of sees their point. It does not hurt that Ra’s Al Ghul is fronted by Liam Neeson, who has already appeared in at least one of the stories on our list, and may yet appear in more.
"And it was there, right in the middle of my cage match with The Cobra, that I thought up the idea for a kevlar suit that would showcase my pectorals while at the same time protect me from getting punched to death."
In the second half of the movie, Bruce returns home, secretly infiltrates his own corporation, constructs a massive underground lair with the help of his spry, remarkably fit 70-year-old butler, and sets about dismantling a web of corruption in the city.
It is amazing to me that Nolan was allowed to make a Batman movie in which Batman does not appear for nearly an hour. This isn’t like Jaws, where maybe the rubber suit didn’t look real enough. This was a full-on resurrection of a franchise (after the disaster of Batman and Robin) and Nolan’s solution was to keep the rubber suit off the screen.
When we finally see Batman for the first time, he is exiting a laundry, having just dry-cleaned his cape.
The first half of Batman Begins – the hero’s journey into the Abyss, his taking up the mantle of goodness, his befriending of strategic allies – is for my money as good as it gets in superhero movies. Even the Dark Knight, which may be a superior film overall (though not as adventurous) does not have a sequence as good as this.
The end of the movie does veer back into conventional superhero territory with an exciting train chase into the heart of Gotham, but we can forgive them, since it’s a law that every superhero movie must have at least one extended CGI sequence. But it doesn’t dilute the power of the story. When Ra’s Al Ghul shows up at the end, having targeted Gotham as the civilization to bring down next, it proves that sometimes shadowy villains are more menacing than a killer clown or a guy that dresses like a penguin.
Portrayed here by Jon Lovitz
The performances are solid across the board. There is the aforementioned Liam Neeson. Christian Bale is by far the best Batman. Michael Caine simply is Alfred (hey, Michael Caine on our list again!), and it’s hard to go wrong with both Gary Oldman and Morgan Freeman in your movie. But where Batman Begins really excels is the script, which manages to externalize a man’s inner demons and tell a compelling adventure story that spans continents. All that and Batman-shaped throwing stars.
