The central mixed martial arts event in this film is called Sparta and it is a fitting name to attach to such a Greek-like drama between fathers and sons and brother versus brother. As a sports drama, it skillfully weaves together both a separate comeback and underdog tale, with the tales colliding in the end. Combining melodrama and character complexity, this simple tale has the emotional power of a piledriver.

Tommy Conlon (Tom Hardy, INCEPTION) hasn’t seen his father Paddy (Nick Nolte, AFFLICTION) since he and his mother ran away when he was a teen. Now a broken man, going by his mother’s maiden name, Tommy wants something from his former alcoholic dad – train him to enter a winner take all MMA tournament. He doesn’t want to reconnect with his father, only train. In a sick way, Tommy dangling a reconnection in front of his dad is no worse than if he dangled a bottle of whiskey.

Tommy has no desire to reconnect with his older brother Brendan (Joel Edgerton, ANIMAL KINGDOM) either. Paddy tries to visit Brendan, but he too doesn’t want anything to do with his dad. He stayed behind when his brother and mother left for his then girlfriend, now wife Tess (Jennifer Morrison, TV’s HOUSE). Due to mounting medical bills from his daughter’s heart condition, Brendan has stepped back in the ring, despite promising his wife that since becoming a high school Physics teacher he wouldn’t. They need the money and he refuses to lose their home. He goes back to his old trainer Frank Campana (Frank Grillo, MINORITY REPORT), who is working with a fighter preparing for Sparta.

Brendan and Tommy’s paths couldn’t be more different and yet the same. Tommy made himself an overnight name when a YouTube video of him destroying a top contender in a sparing match went viral. He is like an animal unchained when he enters the cage, mowing down opponents like they weren’t even there. During high school, he was a promising champion wrestler until he and his mother left. Brendan, on the hand, is an underdog, who has always lived in the shadow of his younger brother. He doesn’t have the same brute force, but he has stamina and skill.

On the surface, Brendan seems like the easier of the two to root for. He is fighting to save his family and to prove himself. Tommy is cruel and cold. We know that his resentments fuel his anger and brutality in the cage. We fear what could happen if he does get his hands on his brother. But he has secrets and those secrets are key to his motivations as well. This is a story of broken men finding some resolution. Even Paddy tries to bring his family together knowing that it was he who caused them to be torn apart.

While this has melodramatic tones, the conviction of the three central performers makes it believable. Hardy is intense on a scary level. The fear that he is going to hurt someone, and himself in the process, is palpable. Edgerton, who has the geek cred of playing Luke’s Uncle Owen in the STAR WARS prequels, is emerging as a promising new leading man. Like he did in ANIMAL KINGDOM, he has a masculine quality that is still refined. In a sport where his opponents strike thoughts of unhinged beasts, his Brendan feels like a gentleman boxer from a different era. Then we get to Nolte, whose performance is his best since his last Oscar nominated performance in AFFLICTION. It’s not that he plays a recovering alcoholic so well, but the vulnerability he brings to the role that speaks volumes about his character that dialogue could not convey.

One might argue that men working out their issues by beating each other to a pulp is not very sophisticated. But others might describe it as accurate. The detail that makes director Gavin O’Connor, Anthony Tambakis and Cliff Dorfman’s script so solid is the actions of the brothers in the ring speak of their complex problems. On a larger level, the film is not just about family, but what family means.

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This film is not based on Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robots. Now that we got that out of the way, we can find out what this film is really about. One could claim though that this film is based on a dozen previous boxing movies such as ROCKY and THE CHAMP.

Set in a future where robots have replaced humans in the boxing ring because people like the carnage more. Charlie Kenton (Hugh Jackman, X-MEN ORIGINS: WOLVERINE) is a former boxer who has become involved in the low-rung world of robot boxing. He gets a shock one day when he discovers that the mother of his son Max (Dakota Goyo, THOR) has died and that he needs to work out who will take the child. The 11-year-old’s aunt Debra (Hope Davis, AMERICAN SPLENDOR) wants to take him and Charlie sees her rich husband as a chance to make some money out of the situation.

As part of his deal with Max’s uncle, Charlie will take the kid for the summer. Having used the money to buy an older champion robot named Noisy Boy, Charlie wants to quickly get out on the road again. So he tries to dump the boy off on Bailey (Evangeline Lilly, TV’s LOST), the daughter of his former trainer. But Max maneuvers his way into tagging along. Up to this point the film goes through the paces of so many other films. Charlie is a rash, skuzzy know-it-all, while Max knows all the right moves to make.

However, once the training bot Atom is introduced the film improves. The old generation robot isn’t meant to compete, but Max has faith that he can take on all contenders. It’s not surprising that Charlie and Max bond over the training of the bot. But I’ll tell you it works. The reason it works is because it’s not maudlin and is presented from the point of view of Max, whose enthusiasm toward the robot-boxing world starts to rub off on the viewer. Young Goyo might look a lot like PHANTOM MENACE’s Jake Lloyd, but that’s all the comparisons you can make. Despite the fact that this is a PG-13 movie, it’s appeal will hit boys Max’s age like a swift uppercut.

Adults who know all the movies the film is pieced together from will be less engaged. The script lifts key moments from ROCKY, which do not work in context. The robots being in the ring and the humans controlling them from the outside lessens the jeopardy and the intimacy of the underdog underpinning. Atom is Max’s robot and I never saw him as an underdog. I never really saw Charlie that way either. He’s more of an impulsive type, not a lovable loser. The problem is you can’t just weld random pieces together and think you have a champion on your hands.

Additionally, many characters don’t have the investment in the story as they should. Lilly’s Bailey is a forced love interest. It would have been better if her dead father were in the film; he would have meant more. And I never bought the subplot about her trying to keep the gym open. It seems Charlie is the only member, so I think she has bigger problems than him not pay his rent. There isn’t a powerful bad guy either. The fair grounds boxing promoter Ricky (Kevin Durand, TV’s LOST) is wicked and is the catalyst for an important plot turn, but he isn’t involved in the climax at all. The owners of the undefeated bot Zeus — Tak Mashido (Karl Yune, MEMOIRS OF A GEISHA) and Farra Lemkova (Olga Fonda, LITTLE FOCKERS) — are walking clichés and have no real antagonism with Charlie or Max, even though the little kid tries to start something.

Like I said once Atom gets in the ring, the film started to grab my attention. Director Shawn Levy (NIGHT AT THE MUSEUM) and writer John Gatins (HARDBALL) do a nice job of setting up the fights to maximize tension. The fights for the most part deliver strongly on the promise of epic robot on robot violence. But then the film lets you go with some stupid moves. When the film needs to soar, it just limps to a finish. On the way home, kids might be jazzed up to play the REAL STEEL videogame. Their parents will be wondering if that Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em set is still at grandma’s house. At least with that you never know when the head is going to pop off the robot. In the film it’s completely telegraphed.

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How can you not be romantic about baseball? That’s what Brad Pitt’s Billy Beane says in this great baseball movie, which is more about the business of baseball than the game. And that said the film still does stir the desire to grab some peanuts, popcorn and Cracker Jack and head out to the ole ball game.

The story follows Billy Beane, the general manager of the Oakland A’s, as he is forced to rebuild his team after losing three key players to other clubs. The dirty little secret in baseball, that anyone who knows baseball knows, is that the playing field is not level. As Beane says, there are rich teams and there are poor teams and there is 50 feet of crap and then there is the A’s. When a trip to visit the Indians’ GM about player trades goes badly, he seeks out the quiet guy by the door who seems to make the others listen to him. That guy is Peter Brand (Jonah Hill, CYRUS), an Ivy League economics grad who believes that professional baseball has it all wrong when it comes to staffing teams.

Brand follows the sabermetric method, devised by Bill James, which uses statistics based on averages to field a team that will win enough games to make the playoffs. Beane hires the young man and devotes his new team to the unorthodox practice. But it’s not that easy. For nearly a century professional baseball has done their scouting in the same way. Scouts seek out talent on feel. Beane’s new approach puts all the scouts’ jobs in jeopardy. Beane’s coach Art Howe (Philip Seymour Hoffman, CAPOTE) thinks he’s crazy and refuses to play the players Beane gets the way Beane had intended. One of his new hires is Scott Hatteberg (Chris Pratt, WANTED), a catcher Beane has gotten to play first base. With every loss everyone from commentators to fans believe the whole experiment is a bust.

Beane himself is a metaphor for how the old scouting game is hit or miss. He was signed right out of high school, turning down a scholarship at Stanford to play pro ball. He never panned out to be the star that everyone thought he’d be. He bounced around teams with stints in the minors until he decided to stop playing and become scout. For Beane, Brand’s method puts science to the guessing game and helps hedge their bets on fielding a complete team that can win. It also allows him to get players that are a bang for his buck.

Pitt plays Beane as a great smartass kidder. Ironically, for a man who brought more science to the game, he has a superstitious streak where he refuses to watch the games. He is a man who doesn’t just want to win, but wants to change the game that he blames for taking away his chance at a great education. Another part of his superstitious nature is not to get too close to his players, because you never know when you might have to trade or cut them. As his passion for the new way of doing things grows, the more personable he becomes. Success is good to him. Pitt plays him as a strong-willed optimistic man, who knocks out his self-doubt with sheer determination to follow something through.

Hill’s Brand (a fictionalized version of Beane’s real assistant Paul DePodesta) is the perfect foil. He’s smart and enthusiastic, but very green. There is no way he would be heard if he didn’t have a champion in his boss. Together they are like a perfect comedy duo. Beane’s confidence and Brand’s shy smarts and awkwardness bounce off each other with great humor. For instance, Beane asks Brand to analyze three players. Brand, afraid he’ll look like a nerd, sheepishly says he’s done 47 and then corrects himself and says it’s 51. He doesn’t know why he decided to lie about it.

Part of the joy of the film is getting a behind the scenes look at Major League Baseball and how teams are managed. Watching Beane make trades is like watching feverish traders on the stock market floor. Beane has to navigate the politics of the game to implement is plans. At one point he makes moves that even Brand has difficulty going along with for fear of what people will say. Money helps the process, but Beane is out to prove that it isn’t necessary. He isn’t doing any of this for the money, only to prove that he is right. But he is afraid that if he doesn’t win the World Series, they will forget everything they have done.

Because this is a sports movie, the film does come down to a big game, but it’s not like any other. It’s a unique underdog tale. We’re not just rooting for the players on the field, but the management. Having been schooled from so many other baseball films, I thought those guys were the enemy? This is a story of a man who challenges conventional wisdom. That’s a brave thing to do when millions of dollars and livelihoods are on the line. This might be just a story of baseball, but it’s still inspiring to all of us to have the courage to say something unpopular because we know it’s right. You know… it’s a metaphor.

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ROLLER BOOGIE is from the long Hollywood tradition of trying to cash in on youth trends. This little confection tried to capture the roller skating culture of Venice Beach. It casts a 20-year-old Linda Blair in the lead and a roller skating champion with no acting experience as her love interest. They’re just kids having fun, but it’s the stuffy adults that always have to come and ruin their vibe.

Blair (THE EXORCIST) plays Terry Barkley, a rich girl from Bel-Air whose parents want her to be a concert flutist. She wants to be a roller skating champion. As an adult myself, it’s hard to 100% root for her life decisions there. Bobby James (Jim Bray) is an amateur roller skating champ, who works at a skate rental stand on the boardwalk. They met up at the local roller rink where his friends bet him that he can’t get her to skate with him, because there is no way a girl driving a million dollar car would ever skate with a beach bum. As you can guess, she not only skates with him, but also asks him to teach her to skate like him.

This rich girl-poor guy material is all typical melodramatic hogwash so that the actors have something to do opposite skate numbers. Unlike good trend films like SATURDAY NIGHT FEVER or even URBAN COWBOY, this film doesn’t have compelling characters to hold our attention through the skating sequences. Oh if only John Travolta were a skater. Blair plays Terry as a little snooty because that comes with the zip code of course. Frustratingly, she doesn’t seem to ever know what she really wants from life or from boys. Bray is not an actor, but he can skate. So the film is much better when he’s doing what he knows.

Like it ran out of material and needed to pump up the drama at the end, the film tacks on conflict between rink owner Jammer Delany (Sean McClory, THE QUIET MAN) and gangster land developer Thatcher (Mark Goddard, TV’s ONE LIFE TO LIVE), who threatens violence if he doesn’t sell. The logic of the entire development can’t stand up even on bare feet. And it all gets wrapped up in one scene where all the characters, even Terry’s parents, end up together listening to a tape of the bad guy incriminating himself.

The film is like skating with a three-wheel skate. Here is one example of what I mean. There is a musical number to start the film where a bunch of skaters cruise around the street. At one point they skate by a couple making out on top of a dumpster. A dumpster? Oh how romantic. It’s just thrown in there like director Mark L. Lester said on the morning of the shoot, “Hey you extras go make out on that dumpster. That will be funny. And we have a dumpster available.” There are so many moments like this where bad choices seem to be being made on the fly. Bad jokes. Bad shots. Bad plotting. Bad acting. It’s clunky, broke and makes everything fall down.

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Sometimes when life is out of control desperate people do things to try and gain back control that just make things worse. Director/writer Tom McCarthy, who made the fabulous THE STATION AGENT and THE VISITOR, presents us with two characters whose lives are spinning out of control. One makes the wrong decision and the other the right decision. It’s surprising that a tattooed 16-year-old is in the right.

Mike Flaherty (Paul Giamatti, AMERICAN SPLENDOR) is a lawyer who represents the estates of the elderly. His practice is struggling. He’s keeping the financial problems from his wife Jackie (Amy Ryan, GONE BABY GONE). One of his clients, Leo Poplar (Burt Young, ROCKY), is suffering from dementia and has been ruled incapacitated by the court. Mike knows Leo wants to stay in his house so he petitions the judge to allow him to become the old man’s guardian and make sure he can stay there. Mike isn’t just a nice guy. He gets $1,500 per month for being the guardian and he moves Leo into a home because it’s easier on him to watch over him.

Arriving on Leo’s doorstep is his grandson Kyle (Alex Shaffer). His mother Cindy (Melanie Lynskey, HEAVENLY CREATURES) is in rehab again, so he has come to live with Leo, who has never met him before. So now Mike feels obligated to take the teen in. Mike is the coach of the lousy local high school wrestling team and takes Kyle to practice. Turns out, Kyle was a champion back in Ohio and Mike wants the ringer for his team.

Wrestling gives Kyle a sense of control over at least one aspect of his life. Coaching Kyle allows Mike to vicariously feel the same. Mike’s best friend Terry (Bobby Cannavale, THE STATION AGENT) is going through an ugly divorce and volunteers to be an assistant coach on the team just to feel the glow of success from Kyle. The problem is Kyle is only a band-aid.

Giamatti is always good as the average Joe down on his luck. He brings the right notes to the character making him sympathetic while doing something morally questionable. Giamatti makes us believe that his character is intending to do the right thing while doing the wrong thing. Ryan gives the wife role a bit of an edge. This is a Jersey girl and you don’t mess with a Jersey girl. Cannavale is here for humor purposes and works very well against Jeffrey Tambor (TV’s THE LARRY SANDERS SHOW), who plays Stephen Vigman, Mike’s first assistant coach before Terry pushed his way in. Now Stephen feels like he’s being pushed aside. He’s a master of the passive-aggressive mutterings under his breath.

Sports play a driving force in the film, but it is not the center. We root for Kyle’s success because he’s a kid trying to gain control over a life that is partly out of control not due to anything he did. When his mother surfaces again, we know that control for both Mike and Kyle will be hard to keep. When things get to a tipping point, one of them will make the right choice and one of them the wrong one. But sometimes learning from mistakes makes for a win win situation.

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The script for this film comes from acclaimed writer Don DeLillo, the author of WHITE NOISE, UNDERWORLD and COSMOPOLIS. This is his first screenplay produced, having had several plays produced before. His experience shines through here in literate dialogue, but there is a level of artifice here that works better on the stage than on the screen.

Nicky Rogan (Michael Keaton, MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING) describes himself as a craftsman rather than a playwright. Rogan’s latest play is about to open, but it’s also game six of the 1986 World Series and he is a long-suffering Red Sox fan. He has a pessimistic outlook on both the game and the reaction to his play by the notoriously harsh critic Steven Schwimmer (Robert Downey Jr., IRON MAN). Rogen’s friend and fellow playwright Elliot Litvak (Griffin Dunne, AFTER HOURS) says that he once opened a one-night one-act play about fishmongers in a fish market and Schwimmer found it and trashed it. He believes die-hardly the critic ruined his life. By his disheveled appearance you believe him.

If Rogan doesn’t have more to worry about, his daughter Laurel (Ari Graynor, DATE NIGHT) tells him that her mother is seeking out a prominent divorce lawyer. He can’t believe that Lillian (Catherine O’Hara, BEST IN SHOW) would leave him. But he is sleeping with Joanne Bourne (Bebe Neuwirth, TV’s CHEERS), who happens to be the producer of his play.

Brought to the screen by director Michael Hoffman (A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM), DeLillo’s dialogue is the chief pleasure. Sometimes though it comes off very stagey, drawing too much attention to itself. Then the film takes tonal leaps that seem very out of place. For example, the lead actor in Rogan’s play got a parasite in his brain on a trip to Borneo that is making him forget all his lines. Then later a cab driver mistakes Rogan for a famous gangster and they go out for a beer and she talks to him like she’s a self-help guru crossed with a guardian angel. Finally the conclusion, which faces off Rogan against Schwimmer, is so contrived and resolved too easily that we start wondering what the point of the entire film was from the start.

The film is at its best when it is listening to the interaction of its characters. Keaton gives Rogan an ADD personality. He is moving from one person in his life to the next so fast he doesn’t really connect to any of them. But when he looks at Elliott, he knows where that behavior leads. Rogan talks with great passion about how the Red Sox have virtual killed his childhood over and over again, but we don’t feel it, because while it provides the title of the film it is not really connected to the rest of the story other than it highlights Rogan’s pessimism.

If you look back over the whole film, you can pick a bunch of great scenes and great lines, but when you look at the whole film it seems as fragmented as its main character. For a film that at times is heavy handed about its message in a particular scene, the larger journey isn’t satisfying. If baseball is life, as characters say here, than this film’s life ends in a tie.

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It’s hard to not think of the Oscar-nominated SEABISCUIT when thinking about this film. The comparison doesn’t help this film about the 1970s Triple Crown winner. It has less ambition than the film about the Depression era underdog. But it does fit nicely into the canon of Disney’s inspirational sports films.

Penny Chenery (Diane Lane, THE PERFECT STORM) was a housewife before inheriting the  horse farm of her father Chris (Scott Glenn, THE RIGHT STUFF). She was determined to honor her dad’s legacy by racing their latest filly to the Triple Crown. Going against the wishes of her husband Jack Tweedy (Dylan Walsh, TV’s NIP/TUCK) and brother Hollis (Dylan Baker, HAPPINESS), she risked everything on Secretariat, a horse that critics didn’t think had the stamina to win the longer races.

To train her horse she convinced retired trainer Lucien Laurin (John Malkovich, BEING JOHN MALKOVICH) to stop golfing (which he was terrible at) and mold a champion. Lucien brought in jockey Ronnie Turcotte (Otto Thorwarth), a rider who rode his last horse so hard that the animal’s heart exploded. As his caretaker, Eddie Sweat (Nelsan Ellis, TV’s TRUE BLOOD) spent more time with the horse than anyone and knew him the best. Miss Ham (Margo Martindale, MILLION DOLLAR BABY) was Penny’s father’s longtime secretary and did the same for Penny. She came up for the official name for the horse that everyone else called Big Red.

Nine times out of ten a sports film is also an underdog tale. So it’s hard to tell an underdog story about a horse that won the Belmont Stakes by 31 lengths. So the film makes his owner Penny the underdog. She was an unlikely owner in a time when horse racing was a man’s world. Taking on Secretariat was a huge financial risk, because after her father died she owed millions in estate taxes. The first half of the film focuses on these issues, but once Secretariat wins the Kentucky Derby, the film becomes a story about destiny.

There isn’t much subtlety in the story with it’s big speeches and outbursts. But the inherent likability of Lane carries the film far. She is supported well by Malkovich as a man who loves horses at the same time is driven crazy by them. Along with African-American Sweat and the reckless Turcotte, the foursome works well as a crew of outsiders. While her husband and brother are given no more dimension than being the ones who keep reminding her she’s neglecting her housewife role, they do provide the doubt that makes us want her to succeed even more. Add in a tough challenger in Sham and his arrogant owner Pancho Martin (Nestor Serrano, THE INSIDER) and you find yourself caught up in the story by its end.

Director Randall Wallace finds ways to make each of Secretariat’s races unique. He uses the horse’s tendency to surge from the back of the pack for nice dramatic effect. He puts his cameras on horses and within the races. The soundtrack booms with every foot fall. The beautiful cinematography and great sound design capture the power and grace of horses.

The film’s pacing performs much like Secretariat. It hangs back, takes its time and then surges to the finish. It’s easy to like a character with a dream and Lane makes that easier as I said. Her obstacles are tangible and the film skirts through without making her adversaries too cartoonish. This minimizes the schmaltz, which the film also skirts with, making the film more about the emotional victory of Penny instead of showing up the boys club. It’s a story about people, and a horse, living up to their great potential.

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Of all the sports to grace the screen, boxing has easily inspired the greatest films. Now director David O. Russell has added another to the ranks of RAGING BULL, ROCKY and MILLION DOLLAR BABY. But like all of those films, the reason this film is great is not because it’s a boxing movie. This is a story of family and how for some they can either help them raise their arms in victory or punch them below the belt.

Micky Ward (Mark Wahlberg, THE DEPARTED) has been a promising boxer for years, but always staying at the promising level. Some have started to believe he’s simply a stepping stone for other boxers to fight in order to move up the ranks. He learned everything he knows about boxing from his older brother Dicky Eklund (Christian Bale, THE MACHINIST), who at one time knocked down Sugar Ray Leonard. Now he’s an unpredictable crack addict. Micky’s career has always been a family affair. His mother Alice (Melissa Leo, FROZEN RIVER) is his manager, but Micky begins to wonder if they have his best interests in mind after they put him up against a boxer 20 pounds heavier.

Micky struggles with what to do about his disappointing career. He starts dating a bartender named Charlene (Amy Adams, JUNEBUG), who wonders if his loyalty to his family is not blinded him. Dicky has only good intentions, but he’s always high, late and getting into trouble, all of which affect Micky negatively. Cop/trainer Mickey O’Keefe (playing himself) wants to train him, but only if Micky bars Alice and Dicky from the gym. Micky’s father George (Jack McGee, CRASH) knows what is best for Micky, but how can he go against the fighter Alice and her posse of daughters, which number something like seven… I lost count after a while.

While the film offers some unexpected humor at the expense of the white trash family, Russell never has his characters apologize for their behavior. For Micky, it’s his life and he knows nothing different. When he starts seeing Charlene, he sees a future that is different than the one he always imagined for himself. But his family is the weight bag tied to his back. Dicky is a force of nature and Micky is a meteorologist who gets sucked up into the pull of the storm.

Wahlberg has never been more retrained. All he wants to do is step out from his brother’s shadow whether it’s in the public eye of his hometown or within his family. He wants to become his own boxer and his own man. Wahlberg conveys this with real tenderness. He is supported by a collection of the best supporting performances of the year.

Bale makes Dicky a personality who draws attention the second he walks into the room. Sometimes that attention is from his sense of humor and sometimes from his wacked out behavior. Bale is effortlessly convincing as the addicted man who once was a champion caliber fighter. He uses to forget what he missed with his career. It’s hard to know exactly whether drugs ended his career or if the end of his career led him to drugs. It’s one of the best performances of the year.

As for the female supporting cast, great performances come from Oscar nominees Leo and Adams. Leo plays Alice as a hard as nails working-class woman with a touch of P.T. Barnum. The only problem is that she’s running a third-rate circus. She loves her kids, but she also loves what they can bring her. She coddles Dicky, knowing he has problems, but never fully admitting that they are bringing him down. Her son’s comeback is just around the corner even though she has to retrieve him from a crack house on a regular basis.

Adams makes Charlene hard as nails in another way. She has a past, partying away a college scholarship and ending up tending bar as a result. She believes in Micky and hates his family. And she certainly isn’t scared of them. She goes into their house and tells them how it is. As they say, she’s got a brass set.

This is one of the very best films of 2010, because it tells a great story with patience, allowing us to know the characters. It lets its entire cast take center stage and develops deeper meaning from them. It’s about family. It’s about one brother succeeding where another brother failed. It’s about redemption. It’s about the pressure of success. It’s about life.

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For years to come this film will be known as the film that won Sandra Bullock an Academy Award. Whether she deserved it over her competition is up for debate, but it does mark her best screen performance to date. While the story is billed as the amazing true-life tale of professional football player Michael Oher, the film quickly becomes a showcase for Bullock’s Leigh Anne Tuohy, a real-life Southern spitfire who did an extraordinary thing for Oher, which transformed his life forever.

Oher (Quinton Aaron, BE KIND REWIND) had bounced around foster homes and friends’ houses for his entire life. His mother Denise (Adriane Lenox, BLACK SNAKE MOAN) was a drug addict and had multiple kids with multiple men. He starts attending a mainly white private Christian high school when he is brought to the attention of Coach Burt Cotton (Ray McKinnon, TV’s DEADWOOD). He lives at a Laundromat and eats leftover popcorn from school sporting events to survive. Then one night walking home in the cold with shorts and a t-shirt on, he has a fateful run-in with the Tuohys. Leigh Ann decides to invite him to stay at their home.

John Lee Hancock’s film portrays the integration of Oher into the Tuohys family with patience and care. Leigh Anne’s rich white friends worry about a big black man saying in the house with her teenage daughter Collins (Lily Collins, TV’s 90210). Oher is very reluctant to trust the Tuohys, having come from a place where kindness always has strings attached. Through the sheer force of her persistent, take-no-for-an-answer personality, Leigh Anne wears down Oher’s defenses and eventually he becomes just one of her kids.

For Oher to play sports he has to get his grades up. His teacher Mrs. Boswell (Kim Dickens, THANK YOU FOR SMOKING) discovers that he’s retaining her lessons, but has to improve his writing skills before he can take written exams. So she starts giving him oral exams instead. Leigh and her husband Sean (Tim McGraw, FOUR CHRISTMASES) hire tutor named Miss Sue (Kathy Bates, MISERY) to help him out as well. Eventually Oher gets a chance to play and he’s a bit timid. This is where the film gained its most criticism. Oher didn’t need the Tuohys to teach him football. He had been playing for years. Unfortunately, the film wants to draw the theme of Oher’s trust issues and his new family over to his football playing as well. As a result we get a very condescending montage sequence where the precocious Tuohy son, S.J. (Jae Head, HANCOCK) trains Big Mike, which is a name Oher hated. It undermines the good intentions of the film and the Tuohys by unintentionally painting them as the white saviors of this big dumb black man.

Oher’s character is simply portrayed as a young man who is completely introverted. His defense mechanism to life’s problems is to look away. Bullock’s Leigh Anne is the opposite. She sees a wrong and goes head first into fixing it. The Tuohys are shown as a busy modern family who get reminded of the simple pleasures of life when Oher joins them. For a young man who has never had a bed in his life, it makes Leigh Anne reflect on her blessings. Bullock makes Leigh Anne a strong, conservative and caring woman without ever making it seem comical. It’s quite refreshing actually.

The film does the right thing by using the contrasting worlds Oher and the Tuohys worlds as the focal point of its narrative. The film only goes for heightened drama at the end when the NCAA confronts Oher and his family over his college choice. The sequence seemed too drawn out for dramatic affect.

When I first heard the story of Leigh Anne Tuohy and Michael Oher, the first thing I thought was of its goodness. The film captures that feeling and runs with it. While this film could fall into the inspiration sports film category, the inspirational part has hardly anything to do with sports. Leigh Anne Tuohy’s heart is inspirational. Michael Oher’s kind spirit despite his ugly background is inspiring. The film reminds us that there are so many young people who are in the same situation as Oher, but who never get out. While it’s not a perfect film, its heart is in the right place and we always need more of that.

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Andy Kaufman never liked to be called a comedian. He described himself as a song and dance man. One could say a vaudevillian. With that in mind, it’s not-so-bizarre his decision to transform himself into a pro-wrestler for a time. And Kaufman never did anything half hearted.

This documentary uses rare archival footage to highlight Kaufman’s career as a wrestler. The production was edited by Kaufman’s girlfriend Lynne Margulies using home video and vintage interviews. In one interview, Kaufman says that if he’s going to take on a character he’s going to go commit himself his entire life to it. That explains why so many people didn’t know if it was a joke or for real. As a wrestler, he crafted himself as a chauvinistic Hollywood elite who challenged any woman in America to wrestle him. As the film shows (over and over again), Kaufman’s shtick was that women don’t have the mental capacity for wrestling, only housework. His favorite dig was that women are better than men at scrubbing potatoes.

In all honesty, calling this a documentary is a bit far-fetched. It’s really a highlight reel of footage from Kaufman’s career. Kaufman would wrestle women anywhere — bars, comedy clubs and even an airplane. Even for a fan of Kaufman, as I am, the endless wrestling match after match does get tedious after awhile. The film doesn’t even have a credited director with Margulies serving as producer and editor. The repetitive punk soundtrack doesn’t help the tedium either.

However, the film has its moments, which usually come during the interviews. Kaufman’s comedic accomplice, Bob Zmuda, who went on to create Comedy Relief, tells a great story about Kaufman holed up in his house watching old female wrestling films. This exercise in sideshow entertainment was a turn on for Kaufman. What does it say about his psychology that he lured women in with insults so they would roll around on the floor with him. Then again that kind of irony is part of Kaufman’s genius. He made a career fulfilling every whim.

I really wish the film delved more into Kaufman’s reasons and inspirations for becoming a wrestler. Additionally, I liked seeing some of his classic wrestling taunt segments too. There is a great one where he “knocks out” a woman by his pool in Hollywood. Zmuda runs in scared that Kaufman has really hurt the woman. Kaufman’s response, “Doesn’t matter. She’s poor. She can’t sue me.” More of those elements would have made the film a lot more fun.

In the end, this film is a passing curiosity for Andy Kaufman and die-hard wrestling fans only. Uninterested viewers will probably find it boring. For me, Kaufman’s bizarre genius still shines through and for those moments, while fleeting, made the experience enjoyable.

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