Along others like Tiempo de revancha ( Time for Revenge. Luis Puenzo, 1985) has been the most problematic for me. Of the films I have taught several times, perhaps Luis Puenzo’s La historia oficial ( The Official Story. Teaching cinema, unsurprisingly, poses its own unique challenges (and rewards) within such a fragmented discipline whose undergraduate majors and minors are typically interested first in language acquisition, second in culture, broadly defined, and third, I hope, in a subfield like Latin American cinema. We may still teach Spanish (as well as several other languages, depending on the department), but our upper-division courses look little like those of the past, even those of my own increasingly less recent undergraduate experience in the late-1990s and early-2000s. Like so many other disciplines, mine-which once was referred to as Spanish but now takes on so many permutations sometimes I find it difficult to think of it as anything more than an afterimage-is no longer as defined as it once was. On any given day, I may teach graffiti and a radio drama, a novel and a video game, or a few poems and a film in my language and content courses. Even when he looks like an unholy mess, he transcends the movie he’s in.Drawing on my own interdisciplinary intellectual formation, I teach a wide range of texts of cultural production in my courses. “Southpaw” may be rote, predictable and mawkish, but none of those faults lie in its star. He even makes the de rigueur makeover montage - shots of him tossing around the ol’ medicine ball and hitting a truck tire with a sledgehammer - less banal and more convincing than it deserves to be. When “Southpaw” switches tracks from revenge narrative to redemption tale, Gyllenhaal doesn’t skip a beat. Here, he’s beefed up, impressively cut and prodigiously tattooed, his face reduced to a barely recognizable pulp of scrapes, lacerations, bulges and bruises. In last year’s “ Nightcrawler,” he was alarmingly emaciated and wild-eyed, giving off a mangy, half-feral vibe. Gyllenhaal proves himself a compelling, even mesmerizing presence amidst the action, even at its most hyperbolic and cliched. A font of shamanic wisdom - delivered by way of Forest Whitaker’s brooding, iconic whisper - he joins a long line of such magical helpmeets, from Morgan Freeman’s Scrap-Iron Dupris to Will Smith’s Bagger Vance.įilmed with a de-saturated palette and painfully graphic close-ups by Antoine Fuqua, “Southpaw” plays like a musical in which the performance numbers are its fights, a pageant of beat-downs, bloodlettings and bodies plummeting to the canvas like so many felled sequoias. It should surprise no one that this endeavor entails trading his flashy manager Jordan Mains, played with understated elan by 50 Cent, for Tick Wills, a quiet corner man from a scruffy neighborhood gym. ![]() That all changes when tragedy ensues and Billy is forced to overcome grief, avenge his personal loss, rescue his career and put his family back together. Now he has to work to get all that he loves back with the help of a new trainer. When the reigning junior middleweight boxing champion (Jake Gyllenhaal) is struck by a horrific tragedy a domino affect causes him to lose his daughter, manager and home. ![]() “Southpaw” is not a rags-to-riches story: Billy is already on top of the world when the movie opens, lavishing his entourage with Cartier swag and contemplating a $30 million contract with HBO. Gyllenhaal plays Billy Hope, once an orphan in Hell’s Kitchen, now the light heavyweight champion of the world, living in nouveau-riche splendor with his wife, Maureen (Rachel McAdams), and their cute, down-to-earth daughter, Leila (Oona Laurence). Put more simply, there’s a lot of punching in “Southpaw,” which combines the training narrative from “ Rocky,” the visceral ringside energy of “ Raging Bull” and the rank melodrama of “ Million Dollar Baby” to make something, if not new, then at least stylish in its derivativeness. He grunts and punches and scratches and glares it in, bleeding copiously in set pieces that thud and splatter with woozy, percussively potent verisimilitude. No one will accuse Gyllenhaal of phoning it in on “Southpaw,” in which he plays a down-on-his-luck fighter struggling to make his big comeback. ![]() Jake Gyllenhaal undergoes yet another startling physical transformation in “ Southpaw,” a by-the-numbers boxing picture that benefits considerably from its star’s tenacious, fiercely obvious commitment. ![]() Billy (Jake Gyllenhaal) doesn’t stand by his manager (50 Cent) after tragedy strikes.
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