The Wrestler

Merriam Webster's definition of Lug

Mickey Rourke may just be the ugliest most loveable but also despicable leading man in all of Hollywood. When appearing in a movie, he mostly looks like a living version of Nick Nolte's DUI mug shot, and when appearing in real life, he pretty much looks the same but occasionally wearing a suit. On top of his battered, craggy looks, he has a pretty long list of eff ups, from teenage arrests to spousal abuse to DUIs--a quintessential ciriculum vitae for any ex-bodybuilder/boxer cum movieman.

He's kinda good in some stuff, but mostly stellar when playing someone close to himself; you know, washed-up, damaged, slightly hung-over and fucking ugly. He did this to a TEE in Bukowski's roman a clef Barfly as Henry Chinaski and is probably going to pull out the performance of his life in this thing that you probably should watch right here.

So this movie, The Wrestler, is directed by Daron Aronofsky, who seems to be taking a big departure from paranoid mathematicians and fractured existential parables with floating trees to settle down with a good ol' fashioned underdog story. I can see why he may have been attracted to the idea of making it, since The Fountain kinda made everyone's brain melt a bit too much and got half-boournsed at Cannes: he needed to win us, and everyone else in the industry, back over again. I also think this is all so he can get everyone on his side one more time before he unveils some even weirder shit, like an entire movie that takes place inside the vocoder-chip of Steven Hawking and is shot using an infrared lens that warps on contact with sound waves.

Here's the trailer