Wrestle with this

Film: Foxcatcher
Format: DVD from personal collection on laptop.

I find sport movies hit or miss. There was a time when I was into sports. I could talk football and basketball with a decent amount of knowledge and knew something about baseball, too. That time has passed and it’s no longer something that I give any time to on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis. A film like Foxcatcher, then, needs to be interesting beyond the sport for me to care much about it. I’ve never had an interest in wrestling, either the showy, entertainment-based professional sort or the Olympic style. The only hope this film has is to be compelling beyond what happens on the mat.

I vaguely remember the news story when it happened. I don’t remember every part of it—it was one of those oddball tragedies that crop up now and again in the news. Terrible events happen all of the time, of course, but sometimes one aspect of the story is so strange that it becomes a thing for a couple of days, like the astronaut who attempted to kill the woman who was having an affair with the man with whom she had been having an affair. The female astronaut driving around in a space diaper was a brief media sensation and then something that disappeared. The events concerning the characters in Foxcatcher was like that. I remember something happening, but not the details.

Capote

Format: DVD from personal collection on rockin’ flatscreen.

When I woke up this morning, I had no plans to watch Capote. The reported death of Philip Seymour Hoffman earlier today forced my hand, though. His death is a damn tragedy and a waste of a tremendous talent. What better way to honor one of the great actors of this generation than to watch the film that earned him his Best Actor Oscar? And so, Capote, a film that I was planning on holding back and saving for a day when I needed a film I knew I really liked.

Like many a biopic, Capote doesn’t cover the full life of Truman Capote but instead focuses on what became the most significant event of his life: the investigation and writing of In Cold Blood, the first non-fiction novel. In Cold Blood is the story of the brutal murder of the Clutter family in rural Kansas on a night in November in 1959. I’ve read In Cold Blood. It’s a hell of a book, the sort of thing that anyone interested in really excellent writing should read. What Capote suggests is that the creation of the book was far more than simple.

Watching Oscar: Moneyball

Film: Moneyball
Format: DVD from Rockford Public Library on laptop.

I had three immediate thoughts on Moneyball when I watched it. First and foremost is that people love underdog stories. Since this is a baseball movie, there are large parts of the world where it will probably not have found much of an audience, but a good underdog story always works. For as much as we love success, we really love success at the expense of someone powerful. There is something ultimately satisfying about seeing someone stick it to the man. Mostly, I think that’s because most of us are underdogs in one sense or another—my guess is that everyone reading along here doesn’t have millions in the bank or a lucrative recording contract or ideas for dozens of patents. So there’s something attractive about seeing someone we can relate to make it in a big way.

The moment after I had that first thought came my second—in the movies, the underdog almost always wins for a reason. If he or she doesn’t win the big game, or succeed in business (with or without really trying), or survive the battle against all odds, or whatever, there wouldn’t be much of a movie. No one wants to see the school with the great football team beat up the guys who haven’t won a game in 10 years. They certainly don’t want to get to know the losers on a more personal level and then see them get annihilated.