The Fighter (2010)

Amy, Jack and I liked this movie, based on the true story of Micky Ward, an up and coming boxer from Lowell, Mass (30 miles from Boston, 5 from New Hampshire), and his half brother Dicky Eklund, whose crack addiction ruined his career in the ring. Good family fare for Christmas day! A strong cast, led by Mark Wahlberg and Christian Bale as Micky and Dicky, respectively, Melissa Leo as their prickly manager-mother, and Amy Adams as Micky's feisty girlfriend, kept us involved. I loved director David O. Russell's outrageous comedy Flirting with Disaster (1996), thought I Heart Huckabees (2004) was pretty funny, and everyone liked Three Kings (1999), myself included. Bale (I wrote about him in Public Enemies) has more nominations and wins for his supporting role as the mercurial addict than Wahlberg (after I wrote about him in The Lovely Bones, he was in Date Night and The Other Guys) as the little brother and they're both great. Melissa Leo (nominated for an Oscar for Frozen River, she was good in Homicide the TV series and its movie (2000), 21 Grams (2003), and The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada (2005), to name my faves of her 92 titles) wears her 1990's bleached hair, spike heels (costume or hair nominations?), and pursed lips well as the matriarch of the family of two brothers and seven sisters, the latter who are pretty much a shrieking mass of hair and hormones (here's a scorecard to differentiate the players), even though one of them is played by Conan O'Brien's sister Kate. This seems to be Adams' grittiest role to date (after her Oscar nominated performances in Junebug (2005) and Doubt, she was fluffy in Enchanted and Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day, and determined in Sunshine Cleaning and Julie and Julia) and I found her character of Charlene fully formed and self-aware. Jack McGee (I miss him on Rescue Me and he's got 162 titles on imdb!) plays Micky's dad George and Mickey O'Keefe, Micky Ward's real trainer, plays himself, as do Art Ramalho (the owner of the West End Gym in Lowell, where those sequences were actually shot), champion Sugar Ray Leonard, and Richard Farrell, who did in fact direct an HBO documentary about Dicky Eklund. After you've seen the movie, read this about the real Dicky Eklund and this about Richard Farrell (the Farrell link has a big spoiler in it, the Eklund link potentially a little one).

There are so many songs, from the movie's 1993 setting, that the Oscars have apparently disqualified it (I wouldn't be myself if I didn't mention that the above link punctuates and spells The Kids Are All Right wrong in its first line but right subsequently) for eligibility for best soundtrack. If the site is correct in predicting the nominees for best score, I will have seen only three of the five, and that's few for me.

Critics and audiences have loved this movie, giving it 89% and 90% respectively on rottentomatoes. If you're okay with the violence to be expected in a movie about boxing, then definitely see this one.