Three Trailers

Mark Wahlberg is playing against a Teddy Bear come to life in Ted. Eugene Levy is an embezzler forced into a safe house run by a Southern Mammy (Tyler Perry) in Madea's Witness Protection and Jean-Claude Van Damme, Arnold  Schwarzenegger, Bruce Willis, Sylvester Stallone and Jet Li do not play celebrity competing chefs on Chopped but chop off some heads in The Expendables 2. It’s hard to tell a book by its cover or a movie by its trailer, but in a world of exceedingly listless trailers, these trailers are all a source of hope. The movies themselves are likely to be another matter all together. A smoking, drinking and  cursing Teddy bear who looks under women’s skirts, rags on his owner and even beats him up is definitely an imaginative invention to be reckoned with. The notion of the toy or puppet come to life is of course goes back to Pinocchio and is a staple of the fantasy and horror genres, but Ted is plainly a ribald comedy that will have to work hard to extend its high concept for ninety minutes. Madea's Witness Protection comes on heels of the death of Henry Hill, the famed Lucchese crime family lieutenant, who was the subject of Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas. The trailer’s success depends on the fact that Eugene Levy’s character could never be played by Ray Liotta who was Hill in the Scorsese film and the humor of the trailer at least depends on the fact that Levy needs protection from his protectrice. The very thing that makes The Expendables 2 a trailer worth seeing is precisely what will mitigate against its success as a feature length film. Thinly drawn stock characters and action sequences which require the use of stunt men usually don't sustain a narrative.

The Fighter

The famed Micky Ward/Arturo Gatti bouts were among the great trilogies of boxing history, equaled only by Hagler/Hearns and the heavyweight engagements of Foreman/Ali and Ali/Frazier. Ward and Gatti were both brawlers, and Gatti only won the last, tie-breaking fight with a dramatic shift in strategy in which, having broken his hand in the third round, he started to box, meaning that he danced around Ward, making him miss and knocking him off his game. After all, that’s what fighting is about: shutting your opponent down, detoxifying his weapons to the point that he becomes helpless, panics and eventually deviates from his strategy and starts to make mistakes. The curiosity of David O. Russell’s The Fighter, the new film about Micky Ward (Mark Wahlberg), is that it only mentions Arturo Gatti once. Gatti’s life was perhaps stranger than either Ward’s or his crack addicted trainer and brother Dick Eklund’s (Christian Bale), ending as it did in a suicide that some feel was a homicide. This is not to say that The Fighter, with its emphasis on the effects of drug addiction on talented people (Eklund  had been the pride of Lowell in his youth and had once knocked down Sugar Ray Leonard), doesn’t succeed in creating its own drama and subtly interweaving and contrasting domestic violence with the violence of the ring. It’s just that the ellipsis is so pronounced. There is another story to be told, perhaps beginning on the streets of Montreal, where Gatti grew up. Someone should make a movie about the Gatti/Ward conflagrations, and how Gatti ended up dying in a Brazilian hotel room at the age of 37 after an argument with his former exotic-dancer wife Amanda Rodrigues.