The Fighter-Film Review

Micky Ward and Arturo Gatti had three memorable fights, fights that will go down in history. Gatti; from Montreal, and Ward from Lowell Massachusetts. Two warriors that never gave up, that had tremendous heart, that punished each other with their fists, that sent each other to hospital.

The Fighter is the story of one of those warriors; Irish Micky Ward. It is also about his brother, his trainer Dicky Eklund, who once went ten rounds with Sugar Ray Leonard and knocked the hall of famer down, on route to a loss.

The Fighter is a realistic, no punches pulled, round by round account of Ward's family life, his brother's struggle with drugs and subsequent imprisonment and his soul mate Charlene.

Every one battles in this film but there is a great love there.

A viewer might wonder how everyone can be fighting and still love each other. Watch the youtube fights of Gatti and Ward. After two of their three fights both fighters were in the trauma ward, yet they when the bell sounds to end each and every fight, they hug each other like long lost brothers. Brothers in arms. Watching the film I was hoping to see Ward and Gatti fight, but alas, it was not to be.

Mark Whalberg plays the taciturn Micky and Christian Bale plays his flaky brother, tortured by lost potential and crack abuse. His performance is brilliant. Melissa Leo is the tough-talking matriarch of the family, and Amy Adams plays Charlene, a match for Leo's character; Alice and a match for Ward. She later became Micky Ward's wife.

The Fighter is a gritty look at life in bars, crack houses, boxing gyms and low income lives.

Arturo Gatti casts a shadow on this film because Ward is remembered for those fights more than anything else. Gatti had a tumultuous personal life which ended with his murder.

As the fights in the film demonstrate, when your skills desert you in the later rounds, due to the beating you have taken, do you have the heart and the will to win. Micky Ward would not back down. The heart of a lion. A will of iron.

This is no black and white film, no right and wrong, it is black and blue in its look at family, at love, and of course at life in the ring.



**** stars

Acting Classes starting March 26th

Bottle Tree Productions starts its ten week long Spring Acting Classes March 26th at The Kingston Christian School on Woodbine Road in Kingston's West End. A great way to pump up your child's self confidence and to develop the talent that lies within your child. Scheduled times are 9:30-10:30 am for kids 6-10 years old. 10:30 am-12 noon for kids aged 11-12, 1-3 pm for teens. Each child will get a part written specifically for them in the end of class show. We allow each child to grow at their own rate. Kids get enough pressure put on them in the school system. Pressure to conform, pressure to succeed, pressure to do homework and fear of failure. We have a system where failure is a part of growing and learning. We provide a safe environment for these kids where they learn that failing is an integral part of succeeding. Award-winning playwright; Charles Robertson provides the scripts for the kids. To register and pay for classes online go to Bottle Tree Productions Acting Classes.

March Acting Classes in Kingston Ontario

At The Wellington Street Theatre in downtown Kingston, professional Toronto actor Tony Babcock brings his Acting Out Loud workshop to Kingston on the last weekend of the March Break. On Saturday March 19th from 9 am to 6 pm, Tony will teach kids aged 7 to 12 a fun high-energy workshop designed for kids who want to learn about acting on stage, acting in film and hilarious improv and theatre games.
Cost is $100 plus hst.

Secure your spot in The Acting Out Loud Workshop

Acting Out Loud

Saturday ages 7-12 $100.00 Sunday for teens $100.00

On Sunday March 20th, from 9 am until 6 pm, Tony teaches teens the ins and outs of showbiz. As an ACTRA performer in Toronto, Tony can give aspiring teens plenty of good advice about the actor's union, about agents and about the work. His high-powered workshop will energize any teen. Cost is $100 plus hst.

Email us at info[at] bottletreeinc[dot]com for more info or check out our website at Bottle Tree Productions

Why Elocution is Important

Every day, in every class that we teach, in every rehearsal that we direct, Charles and I take time to correct actors' speaking habits.

We live in Kingston, so in our daily lives, we say 'ahl' as the contraction for 'I will'. ("Ahl go'd'the store.") We say 'gunna' instead of 'going to'. And don't let's forget that classic American interpretation of Canadian accents' 'aboot'. I could go on 'aboot' how I never hear us say it like that, but we do say it differently - and it's hard to write a phonetic approximation of 'about' - so I won't. You will just have to find a Canadian and ask them to say 'Out and about'. In addition to that classic mispronunciation,  lots of terminal consonants are dropped entirely, and words blend together without the distinction of where one ends, and the other begins.

This is all fine, when you are speaking to others with the same accent, but on film and especially on stage, actors need to be clear. Writers don't create work so that it can be tossed off  by an actor with a mouthful of mashed potatos. Audiences and moviegoers can forgive missing a little bit of visual action, because they can make up for it fairly quickly and comprehend the story unfolding, however, if they don't hear or understand what has been said, they will spend time immediately trying to decipher those words. In that process, they lose the next lines, because they were not paying attention, and the thread of the story gets dropped.

I heard an unfortunate radio announcer talk about the overpopulation of elk in a neighbouring township. The solution was to open the hunting season up to include a number of the unfortunate animals. Imagine our shock, when the announcer forgot her best practises and mangled her announcement that there will be an 'elk hunt' in the fall! (use your imagination)

So, please consider the poor unfortunate elk, and speak clearly. We can teach you how.

Bell is Strangling the Internet in Canada

The recent CRTC decision to allow Bell Canada to charge exorbitant rates on individual consumption of more than 75 gigabytes is an economic disaster in the making on so many levels. The opposition Liberal and NDP parties were against this attack on net neutrality. Net neutrality is essentially a consumer and competition based view that cable companies and telecom companies or gate keepers should not destroy the relatively free access to the web by charging fees which would hold consumers and the web hostage.

The inflationary pressures that Bell Canada is putting on the Internet will drive up costs for everybody at a time when the world is still reeling from the fallout of other disastrous economic policies. According to CBC news, consumers in Canada are being cut off to 90 per cent of the Internet traffic starting March 1st. Now if Canada was a dictatorship where the goal is to suppress the news that might be understandable.

As any barely literate web trafficker knows, even basic content from the web is demanding more and more bandwidth with a deflationary pressure on computer hardware and storage systems as proof.  Bell Canada is trying to drag us back into an artificially inflated economic trap, driving up prices where they are falling in every other country.

And I would argue that this innovation killing strategy runs afoul of our free trade agreement with our neighbours to the south since NAFTA is supposed to guarantee unfettered trade between our two countries without a legislative barrier or tariff prohibiting this trade. Bell Canada is using the CRTC to block American companies like Netflix, Apple, Google and Amazon from offering cheaper goods to Canadian consumers. This government initiated tax on free speech and free use of the Internet is government-legislated protectionism designed to prop up a weak business model.

Open source applications will conceivably suffer from the squeeze being put on the travel of goods and services over the web. This policy should effectively knock Canada back into the dark ages.

These Canadian gatekeepers are also strangling Canadian innovation on the web in both software and hardware by making it more expensive to compete. There is no reason Canadian companies can't compete with American companies but by sabotaging the Internet, Bell Canada is making sure that new Canadian companies will wither on the vine. By putting the squeeze on consumers this is also an insidious form of censorship, by charging what will be an ever-increasing tax on internet usage. It will be an ever-increasing tax because more and more bandwidth will be needed for basic communications, web visits, downloads and other internet applications. Even if you didn't use your computer for anything but email and visiting sites without downloads, you will be taxing your bandwidth limits in a few short years.

But when a company deprives the people of the goods and services that they want with heavy taxation, it is a doomed business model and when a government agency assists in the fleecing of the public it dooms its political masters.