BEFORE: I think I lucked out in the "back to school" theme for this month - of course, not every film can be about high school or college. Still, I got more than I planned for, because I was really only expecting "At Middleton" and "Metal Lords" to carry the theme, but then some of the animated films like "Hoppers" and "Lyle, Lyle, Crocodile" had kids going to college and I think junior high, respectively. Then nothing was really on topic until I got to Margaret, but now look, here's a film about college wrestling, and therefore college. I can still squeeze in one more film about school before I have to start the Horror Chain ("Shock Block")
Jennifer Lopez carries over again from "Home".
THE PLOT: Centers around the life of Anthony Robles, who was born with one leg and won a national championship in 2011 while competing at Arizona State University.
AFTER: Yes, this is based on a true story, there was a one-legged wrestler who became an NCAA Division I champion. Yes, there apparently were a lot of twists and turns in his backstory, including a lot of hemming and hawing about what college to enroll in. Since he grew up in Mesa, Arizona, it makes some sense that he played for the ASU Sun Devils, but he had really been hoping to be recruited by Iowa, which is a top school for wrestling, apparently a lot of champions have played there. Then he was offered a full-ride scholarship from Drexel, which he ended up not taking, and I wish the film could have gone a bit more into the reasoning behind that, I mean, it's a fine school and if any college offers you a scholarship, it would seem to make sense to take that, I mean, I wanted to go to NYU film school but I also applied to Fordham and Ithaca, though their programs are less well-known. However, if Fordham had offered me a full scholarship, I think I would have been a fool not to take that, it would have saved a ton of money.
Obviously there's also a lot here about family drama, especially Anthony being at-odds with his father, or step-father or mother's baby-daddy, or whatever he was. At some point many people reach a point in their maturation where they just don't want to do what their parents say, and his "father" pushing him to take the Drexel offer might have been the main reason for him NOT to take it, however the film doesn't really explain this well, perhaps because nobody knows. Maybe Robles just had a feeling that he would fit in better at Arizona, and he could stay closer to home. Late in the film he mentions that he wanted to stay close to his mother after his father took off without warning, perhaps he didn't want to leave her alone, or he stayed to help support his family, it's a bit unclear. That being said, I suppose if the film explained the reason for him doing every little thing would have been a lot of telegraphing, which is kind of another cinematic cardinal sin.
What's even worse than his father leaving his mother was his father coming back to the family later, and being abusive to his wife and their other children. According to this, he came back because he was fired from his job, probably couldn't maintain a separate apartment, so moving back in with the family might have just made financial sense for him at the time. But again, Jennifer Lopez is playing a woman in an abusive relationship, as I mentioned the other day, it feels like she's played a number of those roles over the years. If she's not in a rom-com, then she's likely to be playing the victim of domestic abuse. Just saying.
Anyway, I don't really know much about the sport of college wrestling, I'm not sure if missing a leg is a terrible disadvantage or perhaps a subtle advantage, speaking purely physically. I know that the wrestlers play in different weight classes, which leads to the question over how much does a leg weigh, and if Robles was missing a leg, did he therefore have more weight in other parts of his body than a wrestler with two legs would have, so did he have more muscle in his arms to compensate? I think this is a valid question. Also there's the issue of balance, while he might have trouble walking with just one leg, he would nevertheless have a higher center of gravity, and that could come in handy during certain wrestling moves. And while apparently some people made jokes about a wrestler with one leg, I'm taking this totally seriously, I want to know whether or not this gave him any kind of edge. We hear so much now from the anti-trans haters about people born male now being allowed to compete in women's sports, I'm not saying they have a valid argument, but there is an argument against it being made.
Anthony trains as a "walk-on" for ASU, meaning that he's not officially on the team, technically he's just hanging out, hoping that a slot will open up or he'll get so much better in the college heats that they just HAVE to give him a place on the team. But then disaster strikes as the university decides to cut spending on sports and basically does away with the entire wrestling program. Anthony stays at ASU, however, and a year or two later the alumni manage to raise enough money to fund the program again. As I said, a lot of twists and turns on the way to that championship. The IMDB trivia section on this film, however, points out that after ASU dropped their wrestling program, it was reinstated two weeks later, not an entire year later, as depicted in this film.
The film has a decent pedigree, since it premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in September 2024, and won several festival awards after that. Toronto is a big deal, I went there with the first feature I produced back in 1997 and we did manage to get a lot of buzz from that. I remember back then if you finished your film at a certain time of year you definitely needed to enter Toronto and also Sundance, and both festival required premiere screenings, however Sundance back then would settle for a U.S. premiere, so technically you could screen a film in both, because a September Toronto screening was NOT in the U.S., so you could have the world premiere at TIFF and then the U.S. premiere at Sundance. If you were smart enough to enter both and lucky enough to get into both, which we did that time. For most films that process is a little more like applying for college, you submit applications to three or four colleges, but you can only attend one at a time. And some films do the same, they enter a dozen festivals but only screen in one or two before they go to theatrical release or streaming - but once I got a film rolling on the festival circuit, my goal was to get it into as many festivals as possible, in order to maybe win more awards and build up the film's pedigree.
Directed by William Goldenberg (editor of "Air" and "News of the World")
Also starring Jharrel Jerome (last heard in "Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse"), Michael Pena (last seen in "A Working Man"), Don Cheadle (last seen in "The United States of Leland"), Bobby Cannavale (last seen in "Paul Anka: His Way"), Mykelti Williamson (last seen in "Waiting to Exhale"), Shawn Hatosy (last seen in "A Guy Thing"), Noen Perez (last seen in "Freakier Friday"), Carlos Solorzano (last seen in "Goodrich"), Julianna Gamiz (last seen in "Instant Family"), Elijah James, Johnni DiJulius, Parker Sack, Chimechi Oparanozie, Jordan Wallace, Benjamin Barrett (last seen in "Licorice Pizza"), Corey Jantzen (last seen in "The Normal Heart"), Shane Sparks, Quint Kessenich, Juan Magana, Timothy Hornor, Andrew Santiago, Gabe Kessler (last seen in "Eddington"), Mason Eaglin, Haiden Pino, Jason Medwin, Michael Weaver (last seen in "Easter Sunday"), Landon Robinson, Alex Barone (last seen in "Luckiest Girl Alive"), Angel Rivera, Tiffany Cornwell, Adam Amin, Andrew Borba (last seen in "Straight Outta Compton"), Melissa Diaz, Anselmo Giovanni, Jesse Jantzen (last seen in "Foxcatcher"), Stewart Jewett, Kaleb Shorey, and Anthony Robles.
RATING: 6 out of 10 private jets that need to be cleaned (well, I guess somebody's got to do that...)
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