I may be on holidays this week, but that doesn’t mean you don’t deserve to be visually stimulated. Or that I’m taking a break. Or that I will stop finding any excuse to talk about Mark Wahlberg. On that note, HERE’S my video review of The Fighter.
After The Fighter’s glorious triumphs at the Golden Globes yesterday and with a general release on Thursday, I figured what better time to hunt down someone who has actually met Micky Ward. Local boxer Paul Briggs fits that category and I chatted him about the Ward legend. It was pretty darn insightful. 
If the big screen adaptation of Jake La Motta's life story in Raging Bull taught us anything, it's that the best boxing stories come from fact, not fiction. That is proving to be the case with The Fighter, the real life story of boxer `Irish' Micky Ward (played by Mark Wahlberg) and his brother Dicky who helped train him. The film picked up two out of the six Golden Globes it was nominated for yesterday, with Christian Bale winning best supporting actor for his portrayal of the drug-addicted Dicky and Melissa Leo for best supporting actress as the brothers mother.
The Fighter has special significance for Gold Coast boxer Paul Briggs (above), who had the opportunity to meet Micky and Dicky at a boxing match several years ago.
"It was at a Kostya Tszyu fight in Las Vegas in 2002,'' he recalls.
"I was fighting in San Francisco the next weekend and he heard my accent and we started chatting from there.
"He was curious to what I was doing in the US as there weren't too many Aussies over there at the time.
"He was interested and curious as to what the scene was like over here.
"He was just a dude.
"It's funny when two boxers get together, the stuff you talk about.
"I sat there and watched a fight and we were just chatting away about the technique.
"It doesn't matter how big a superstar you are, when you get down to the nitty gritty it's just talk between two warriors.''
Briggs met Ward just after the first of three fights with Arturo Gatti, which went on to become one the great boxing trilogies (Ward and Gatti are pictured above). Briggs said chatting with Ward "between fights and rounds'' he was struck by how ``down to Earth'' he was. Sitting next to Ward at the fight was his older brother Dicky who Briggs said was ``a bit of a lunatic''. Christian Bale's erratic portrayal of Dicky in The Fighter is tipped to win him an Oscar and Briggs said it seems authentic.
"He (Dicky) was pretty taken up with the fight and we actually ended up swapping places so Micky was just talking to me,'' he said.
"I've met some lunatics in my time, but he's up there.
"He's bananas.''
Although The Fighter lost out in major categories at the Globes, including best film, best actor for Wahlberg and best director for David O'Russell, it's tipped to go well when the Oscar nominations are announced next Thursday. Many critics who questioned the necessity of yet another underdog boxing film have been won over by The Fighter, which is one of the best reviewed films of the season. Briggs too thought the genre "had been stretched beyond its capabilities''.
"The genre has been flogged beyond belief,'' he said.
"I thought there's a real story there in their life story, I just didn't know if anyone could pull it off.
"Then I heard Mark Wahlberg was doing it and pushing the film and I thought `it's going to be bigger than Ben Hur."
Wahlberg was a driving force behind the film, taking it from early development stages as an executive producer and hand-picking everyone from directors and trainers, to actors and producers. Bale had this to say about Wahlberg in his acceptance speech “Mark, really got to give a shout out to Mark as he really drove this whole movie. You can only give a loud performance like the one I gave when you have a quiet anchor and a stoic character. I’ve played that character many times and it never gets any notice. But the HPFA have nominated Mark for tonight so that’s fantastic, but thank you buddy. Kudos to you for that, otherwise I wouldn’t have got away with it.”
Melissa Leo also gave Wahlberg a shout-out in her acceptance speech “Mark Wahlberg you are a prince, you are amazing. It was so beautiful to play your mother, it was so beautiful to see you and your team work. Thank you so much for working with the Ward-Eckland’s so long and so hard so that Micky Ward’s legacy, and Dicky’s as well, will live on so much longer and so much brighter.” Now I can’t wait for those Oscar nominations next Wednesday, hopefully The Fighter gets the nods it deserves.
The Fighter is out on Thursday, January 20. You can read my full review here.
It took four years, three directors and numerous stop-starts before Mark Wahlberg's biopic on boxer `Irish' Mickey Ward was able to get out of the gym and into the ring. Thankfully, it's worth the weight.
Wahlberg (who also serves as executive producer) plays 31-year-old Micky Ward who works as a road worker in Lowell, Massachusetts and is an amateur boxer hoping to shed his reputation as a `stepping stone' fighter. But the clock is ticking and after four straight losses it's now or never for Micky to live up to his older brother Dicky (Christian Bale) who once knocked down Hall of Famer Sugar Ray Robinson. Dicky is also Micky's trainer, but spends more time chasing the dragon in the local crackhouse than actually honing the skills of his younger brother. Also in Micky's corner is his domineering mother Alice (Melissa Leo), who doubles as his manager, and a total of seven sisters, with 11 heads between them. The younger Ward brother is the family's meal ticket and the pressure on him is great, with Alice summing it up best by saying "all I ever wanted was for you to be world champion.''
It's a depressing cycle, as Micky's talent is evident, but every time he tries to break out of the downward family spiral and make something of himself, he gets sucked back in. It takes sassy barwoman and college dropout Charlene (Amy Adams), who opens her legs and heart to Micky, to make him realise his dysfunctional family might not have his best interests at heart. 
As a boxer, Micky Ward is best known for fighting one of the great trilogies in boxing history with Arturo Gatti. However, The Fighter is set before Ward goes pro and is less of a sporting drama, than it is a family one. It would be easy to write it off as your typical underdog sporting story, but few people who enter the film will leave with that attitude. The most obvious element in its filmic arsenal are the performances - with Bale spine tingling as the erratic and crack cocaine addicted brother. In fact, he's so convincing as a crackhead it makes you wonder just what it is he does during his down time between films. Although Bale's acting talent outside of action blockbusters is no secret to fans of The Machinist, The Prestige, American Psycho and The New World, his portrayal is beyond worthy of the best supporting actor Oscar. Despite Bale's physical transformation to embody the unhealthy physicality of Dicky, his flamboyant and unbridled performance is quite simply a career best.
Wahlberg too is at his finest with a more restrained and understated role which is the heart of the film. He also does the Bale shapeshifter, by packing on weight to his famous abs mid film (sob), before trimming down and adding muscle to seemingly every part of his body. It's easy to see why Leo and Adams (along with Bale and Wahlberg) both received Golden Globe nominations for their supporting roles, with Adams in particular shedding her sweetheart image with more f-words than a 50 Cent tweet.
Perhaps the real star of The Fighter is director David O'Russell, who delivers an absolute haymaker of a film. His third collaboration with Wahlberg, after Three Kings and I Heart Huckabees, O'Russell's product is a collage of greatness mixing documentary elements and confronting close-ups with stills and balls-out creative shots. From the unexpected tracking shots and angles to genius continuous shots, as a director he has mixed his indie filmmaking sensibilities with the conventions of the genre to make a sporting film that extends beyond its reach. Even the fight scenes in the ring, although beautifully constructed and toe-to-toe with anything from the greatest boxing films like Rocky or Raging Bull, act more as a Bolo Punch while the out-of-ring drama delivers the knockout. When other directors could have taken Dicky's addiction and imprisonment to a dark place, O'Russell brings in comedic elements without losing the significance of the situation.
Although the general flawlessness of The Fighter is continuous throughout the film, perhaps it's only at the end credits when real life footage of the brothers is played that you realise just how purely the film captures this remarkable true story. If this reviewer had to go to the scorecards, The Fighter is a 10/10. 
The Fighter is out in Australia on Jan 27 and the rest of the lucky world already have their mitts on it.
You may remember me harping on about Mark Wahlberg’s project The Fighter a while back. He plays Irish boxer Mickey Ward and the film follows his early years when he was trained by his brother before he went pro in the 80s. Directed by David O Russell (who worked with Wahlberg previously on I Heart Huckabees and Three Kings), it also stars Christian Bale as Ward’s brother, Amy Adams as the love interest and Melissa Leo as the mother. I spoke to Mark Wahlberg exclusively about the film earlier this year and he had this to say;
“Mickey Ward is probably my favourite (character I’ve played). It hasn’t come out yet, it’s December 10th. It’s a film I produced, starred in and took four and a half years to get made. I’m very, very excited about it. It turned out really well.”
From the superbly acted and dramatic trailer below, I would have to say I agree with him. Although Bale, whoa, can that guy transform himself or what? He’s gone back to his The Machinist frame and even acquired a bald patch for the role, which looks like a return to his more versatile and brilliant acting days. I cannot wait.
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