Small, quiet, kinda painful (emotionally).

I feel mixed on this one. You are seeing, at the same time, the very beginning of the relationship and the very end. So you have to sorta take it on faith that the middle was…better? worthwhile? not just loving (beginning) or fighting (ending)?

There’s a small secret there, spun out very slowly, that has an almost Memento-like effect of changing how you feel about things that happened earlier…

Shot really small and intimately, the sex scenes were kinda hard to watch: I felt like I was intruding on them! As if I had just walked into the room.

I also felt like this had a lot of (unintended) similarities to Wendy & Lucy. You could almost picture this as being the same character, a few years later (or, in the flashbacks, from around the same time).

I liked it and I’m glad I saw it, but…I didn’t completely fall in love with it.

Great performances. Christian Bale really steals the show (as that character would wish to), he’s practically unrecognizable. Wahlberg is obviously a good fit for the working class boxer boy, Adams is believable, the mom and dad were great, the sisters are just perfect, especially their reactions when they’re all crowded together in a space that would normally seat maybe 2 or 3 people.

And if you just want to see a pretty predictable but very well acted boxing movie, this will fit the bill.

But I thought it felt a little tired, a little “yup I’ve seen this before”. Not worth the hype.

There were some really funny moments in this movie (OMG the scene in the car, with the song. YES) and Seth Rogen and whoever played Kato had some great chemistry (that pseudo we’re in a relationship fighting between friends is often hilarious).

But I was extremely MEH on the 3D — I’m not sure what they thought it would be good for? — and I got very tired of Rogen’s shtick by the end of the movie. I would not have been as forgiving as Kato, after how he acted for about the last 45 minutes of the flick. Annoying.

If you are a huge Rogen fan, however, you will likely enjoy this just fine.

I thought Natalie Portman was really great and man I looooove ballet. I have always loved ballet. (I was a ballerina for much of childhood.)

But as I’ve been telling people all week Black Swan:ballet::The Wrestler: wrestling. [Same director, in case you weren’t aware.] In many, MANY ways, this is the same movie all over again. And while I love ballet, I HATED THE WRESTLER. Hated.

Aronofsky seems stuck on this entirely FALSE proposition that in order to really truly excel at your art (whatever that is, even wrestling) one must commit to the point of suicide via your art. Not only do I think that’s an entirely erroneous point of view, I think it’s a dangerous one to be promoting.

The trope of “being too technically perfect but unable to show emotion” is indeed a true one in ballet, but it’s also a very tired out, been there done that, trope in cinema, particularly when it comes to females. And the whole “she has to get a little crazy sexually in order to show emotion” stereotype also bores me to pieces. Not true, stupid, irritating.

The REAL story in this movie, and the one that should have been explored, is the relationship with the mother. A movie on that situation might have been truly interesting and the performances in those scenes were far more interesting than the rest of the movie.

I should say it is really effective as a psychological thriller. Some great shocks to the system — when you know who comes to the door to say “you were great” and Portman thinks that person is you know what? Yeah, that was great. When you know who does you know what in the hospital? WOAH.

But none of that changes how I felt overall.