¶ … Cinderella Man The 2005 film "Cinderella Man" reunites the team of director Ron Howard, screenwriter Akiva Goldsman, and leading man Russell Crowe, who had worked together four years earlier on the Oscar-winning "A Beautiful Mind." On the surface the two projects could not seem more different: in "A Beautiful Mind" Crowe plays John Nash, a bespectacled Princeton professor with paranoid schiozphrenia and a Nobel Prize in economics; in "Cinderella Man" he plays Depression-era heavyweight boxing champion James J. Braddock (who had been dubbed "Cinderella Man" in the newspaper columns of raffish "Guys and Dolls" scribe Damon Runyon, who also supplies the film's epigraph). Although the film was widely praised by critics and was nominated for three Oscars (for editing, makeup, and for Paul Giamatti as Best Actor in a Supporting Role playing Braddock's trainer Joe Gould) "Cinderella Man" would underperform at the box office on its original 2005 release -- the film's domestic box office take was some twenty million dollars less than its budget. Yet six years later, the Depression-era setting of the film has become all too relevant to the world at large: one gets the sense that if it had been released in 2011, it would find an audience much more receptive to a depiction of domestic difficulties in an economic downturn. Yet this also leads to the realization that, if "Cinderella Man" would pre-date the present economic crisis by three years, then it wasn't the setting that prompted Crowe, Goldsman, and Howard to approach this particular story after the success of "A Beautiful Mind." So if they weren't making a movie about life during a depression, what sort of movie did they think they were making? There are a number of different answers that could be offered to that question -- "Cinderella Man" manages to straddle genres in a number of ways, and is not only a solid entry into the established genre of "boxing movie" alongside Scorsese's "Raging Bull" (1980) or Clint Eastwood's "Million Dollar Baby" (2004), but...
The fact that "Million Dollar Baby" won the Best Picture Oscar the year before "Cinderella Man" was released may very well have contributed to the decision of Crowe, Howard and Goldsman to make the film. Clint Eastwood's new twist on the boxing genre was to make the boxer a woman, and to place gender difference in the foreground., and it seems to have inspired the gender-related aspects of "Cinderella Man."
As one writer says, not reading this novel "…deprives individuals and communities of the opportunity to respond to an ethical imperative insisting on virtuous treatment of our fellow human beings" (George, 83). This is a tremendous summation of fundamentally what Steinbeck is trying to achieve with a novel like of Mice and Men, and a notion which sums up most likely Steinbeck's strongest motivation for writing the novel. However, as one
In this sense, his parent's influence was obvious. Since his early childhood he would listen to stories from the war period without any practical consideration of the actual facts those stories conveyed. However, his parents would later choose for him by guiding him towards the military education. In this sense, "in the early years of his life, Johnny's parents made one decision about which they would be unwavering: When
In "Piaf," Pam Gems provides a view into the life of the great French singer and arguably the greatest singer of her generation -- Edith Piaf. (Fildier and Primack, 1981), the slices that the playwright provides, more than adequately trace her life. Edith was born a waif on the streets of Paris (literally under a lamp-post). Abandoned by her parents -- a drunken street singer for a mother and a
Price Beauty? 'For though beauty is seen and confessed by all, yet, from the many fruitless attempts to account for the cause of its being so, enquiries on this head have almost been given up" William Hogarth, The Analysis of Beauty, (1753) Not very encouraging words, but if the great artist William Hogarth felt himself up to the task, we can attempt at least to follow his lead. That beauty is enigmatic
Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane details the life and experiences of Henry Fleming, who encounters great conflict between overcoming his fear of war and death and becoming a glorious fighter for his country in the battlefield. Published in the 19th century, Crane's novel evokes an idealist picture of nationalism, patriotism, and loyalty in America, especially in its war efforts. Fleming's character can be considered as the epitome
" (Pettersson, 2006) Oral and written verbal art languages are both used for the purpose of information communication as well as information presentation with the reader and listener receiving an invitation to consider the information. The Narrative & the Symbolic The work of Abiola Irele (2001) entitled: "The African Imagination: Literature in Africa & the Black Diaspora" states that Hampate Ba "...incorporates the essential feature of the oral narrative at significant points
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