The Wrestler
I was home by myself Friday night after working eleven hours at the office by myself (office shut down for holiday, but I had a mountain to move). I decided to treat myself with a movie I'd been wanting to see since it came out last year: The Wrestler.
I wasn't disappointed. I'd give it an A-.
It's a really sad movie. I typically don't like sad movies, but this one was sad and not remotely a chick movie. It's about a WWF star winding down his career, his 40-plus-year-old body still steroid-buff but breaking down, living off his huge fame from wrestling's halcyon days in the 1980s, unable to do anything besides wrestle. He can't even have a normal relationship with anyone, and no one cares about him. His closest relationship is with a stripper that he patronizes at a strip club. He's a nice guy and you get the impression he was a nice enough person even in his star days, but he's pathetic and poor (the movie doesn't say what happened to the mountains of money he presumably received back in the 1980s, but you get the impression that he is so stupid, he was just taken advantage of).
It's a movie about a squandered life. It leaves lots of unanswered questions, but clues are dropped throughout. At the end, you think "That dude was pitiful," but you think if him kindly--compassionately. And then you look in the mirror--especially if you're in your forties, like I am--and think, "This dude is kinda pitiful, too." And you realize that, to the extent each of falls short of sainthood, our lives are squandered. In that, we all have a little bit of The Wrestler in us.
Note: It has a well-warranted R rating. With a bit more nudity, it'd probably warrant NC-17.
Received in an email: AT 5 MINUTES AND 6 SECONDS AFTER 4 A.M., ON THE 8TH OF JULY,THIS YEAR, THE TIME AND DATE WILL BE: 04:05:06 07/08/09.
Hate It When That Happens, Episode 1,980,221: The new head of MI6, Sir John Sawers, is at the centre of a security breach after his wife published family holiday photographs and other personal details on the Facebook website.
And Episode 1,980,222: After a wave of complaints from customers, Microsoft has dropped a controversial online ad for its Internet Explorer web browser that featured a vomiting woman.
It's the feast day of the patron saint of people against pornography: St. Maria Goretti. A good-looking twelve-year-old, she was attacked by a man whose imagination had been inflamed by looking at the (compared to today's standards) primitive pornography available at turn-of-the-century Italy. When she resisted, he stabbed her to death.
Disconcerting video featuring Bernanke. Just a hit job? I'm afraid not. Try to find a clip where he's saying something that's correct. Peter Schiff challenged people last Wednesday evening to send him such a clip. To date, I don't believe anybody has:
