Something Cult, Foreign-Language or Indie #161: Win Win (2011).

In New Providence, New Jersey, Mike Flaherty (Paul Giamatti) is a lawyer who moonlights after dark as a wrestling coach struggling to keep his practice in the black, and is hiding that problem from his wife Jackie (Amy Ryan) and their two daughters. When his dementia-afflicted elderly client Leo Poplar (Burt Young) proves to have no nearby relatives, Mike persuades a judge to appoint him as Leo's guardian just for the cash. He has no true intention of looking after Leo and clandestinely moves him into a nursing home while the money keeps rolling in, but not without Leo's teenage grandson Kyle (Alex Shaffer) following suit. He's a sullen, smoking punk whom Mike and Jackie reluctantly take in and then they learn about his troubled background: his mother Cindy (Melanie Lynskey), Leo's daughter, is in rehab after living with her boyfriend and Kyle doesn't want to return there. But then it's revealed Kyle has also been a champion wrestler, and so Mike manages to recruit him onto his team. Everything is then turned upside down when Cindy resurfaces to claim custody of Leo and Kyle.

Before writer-director Tom McCarthy won two Oscars for dramatising the coverage of sexual abuse in a Catholic archdiocese with Spotlight, he made this beautifully charming, layered and and slyly subversive 2011 fusion of sport and family dramedies. Win Win is never artistically daring or distinctive, but it never tries or even needs to be; it's unashamedly a character study, with characters who pleasantly all have to work for our affection and could have otherwise felt rehashed. McCarthy's cast all shine thanks to his lucid and amusing screenplay and patient direction: Giamatti again helps us engage with a quite stuffy loser, Lynskey makes the rather broken Cindy a strong woman, Young shows a subtly comic edge and Shaffer (a real-life former wrestler who's since become a full-time actor) brings adequate angst and nicely-hidden vulnerability to Kyle. Overall, Win Win fully earns its title.

Having a brain of my own.

I think there's one in every social circle: the friend or acquaintance who consistently, if maybe unintentionally, challenges you a great deal mentally. I have several, but one truly stands out. I won't name him even though he won't read this, but his identity is irrelevant. Now, I want to be clear that while I frequently disagree with him, I really look up to him and I like to think I've taught him things in return.

But he reads voraciously, and therein lies the conflict. Very frequently during and after interactions with him, particularly of course when we've been discussing political or academic topics, he has so many logical and persuasive counter-arguments to my statements that I can subsequently dumb, even though I have an Honours degree and am currently studying again. I'm sure he doesn't mean to make me feel as such, but I just can't help it. And that feeling usually passes but I still naturally recall the discussion.

He's several years my senior, and therefore something of a mentor to me alongside being a friend. But while he has a genuinely good heart, it's under a pretty hard exterior which compels him to press his views and opinions very assertively and confrontationally; by contrast, I'm pretty quiet and (often) diplomatic. Plus, he values facts, and those certainly do matter, but I am more emotional where he's more cerebral. But nonetheless, we've always understood and valued each other deep down.

Anyway, on to the internal challenge he has inspired in me: to, as the philosopher Harrison once sang "think for yourself, 'cause I won't be there with you." Debates with him have, several times, resulted in me experiencing cognitive dissonance, the first time subconsciously so, and that may help to be diplomatic but not, to my mind, quite free-thinking. I'm pretty sure he would want me to have at least some semblance of cognitive independence anyway, and he seems to respect my opinions and my right to express them. I just value being my own person, and for me that's often hard when dealing with types whose brains work like his does. But nonetheless, I am confident he wants me to march to my own beat, and if he does see this I sincerely hope he takes no issue with it.

Something Cult, Foreign-Language or Indie #160: Howard Lovecraft and the Frozen Kingdom (2016).

In this Canadian animated nod to the works of cult horror author H. P. Lovecraft, young Howard Lovecraft, on his institutionalised father's orders, tries to destroy the Necronomicon (a fictional spell book the real Lovecraft created). Upon merely discovering it, however, it whisks him off to the frozen parallel world of R'yleh, which he discovers is home to numerous dangerous magical creatures and imprisoned children. Beyond that, of course, Howard also uncovers numerous secrets about his ancestry as he tries to find his way back home.

Howard Lovecraft and the Frozen Kingdom begins promisingly, with a premise befitting the real Lovecraft's work, which I haven't read but is famously bizarre and Gothic, and the animation design matches this to the letter. However, it soon becomes very thematically thin and hackneyed, with writer-director Sean O'Reilly insistently invoking a barrage of family film cliches (believing in oneself, parent-child conflict et cetera) which have all been explored more potently and subtly just in Pixar movies alone, and of course, it also has a happy ending. These aren't just unoriginal but, I suspect, incongruous with Lovecraft's style, and it's also worth nothing that several of the voice actors, including that of Howard himself, must be related to him because they share his surname. The film also, I think, lacks humour and a few musical numbers that could have added more energy and charm; if those elements worked in The Nightmare Before Christmas they could've also worked here.

Instead, the result is a loving but increasingly safe and unimaginative cartoon concoction. I managed no love for or chills from Howard Lovecraft and the Frozen Kingdom.

Healing.

Last December I got personal and confessional on here as you may recall, to no avail, and so then last month I revisited that post and delivered a sort-of second part to it. I closed that one with a suggestion that perhaps that article would do the trick for me finally. Well, I'm very pleased to announce it did. I cannot tell you just how cathartic and liberating the mere process of writing that entry was for me, let alone posting it. Once I put it out there, I shed cleansing tears and felt immensely relieved, if not necessarily redeemed.

Almost a month later, I don't know if I've forgiven myself yet for the misdemeanours I'd committed which inspired those entries, but I do know they've occupied my thinking considerably less since. I don't think I should forget about them entirely anyway. Regardless, considering all of that I am sincerely more at peace mentally than I was before posting about them.

In that sense, I am gradually healing. I'd forgotten how nice that process feels, but I don't want to do anything to have to try to achieve that feeling again. Come to think of it, as I lay here on my bed composing this entry, the catharsis is returning.

It occurs to me now, to say to any of you who may be stewing over something you regret doing or saying, to speak up. You really do have to release that stuff from your head; otherwise it will become an increasingly heavy weight around your neck. I would even suggest expressing it all online, not necessarily on social media but somewhere like here, where you have a smaller but more intimate audience. It legitimately worked for me.

In closing, once more, I still haven't yet exonerated myself of those sins (whether I should or not), but know this: I feel a damn sight better now that I've shared them, and how I've punished myself for them over the years, with all of you. Thank you, and now let's all try to heal together.

Something Cult, Foreign-Language or Indie #159: Borg vs. McEnroe (2017).

In 1980, Swede Bjorn Borg (Sverrir Gudnason) was the world's hottest tennis star, having won five French Open and four consecutive Wimbledon singles titles. But standing in the way of his fifth then came rising American star John McEnroe (Shia LaBeouf), who was everything the reserved and stoic Borg wasn't: brash and confrontational. Seemingly born rivals, these two players had never faced each other... until the 1980 Wimbledon championships.

Borg vs. McEnroe recreates this most definitive and timely of sporting rivalries in such a way that it is thoroughly suspenseful and entertaining even for a non-tennis fan like me. Danish director Janus Metz Pedersen, working from Ronnie Sandahl's sharp screenplay, marries the sporting action (which is flawlessly edited and shot) with a firm grip on the interpersonal stories unfolding here, which cover both men's upbringings and training, their love lives and their gradual off-court friendship. He also coaxes solid performances from his two leads: Gudnason, in the less showy role, is well-balanced and layered and LaBeouf evokes not only the same fury in all of McEnroe's infamous on-court tantrums but the congenital drive and persistence that sparked them.

But best of all, when the film turns its focus to how these two managed to forge a lifelong friendship, its sweetness is sincere but never cloying. That's because the filmmakers, I think, recognised the common obsessions and goals Borg and McEnroe had: sporting glory, and fame. Plus, the director being Danish, rather than Swedish or American, surely helped him to be objective in telling this story. But regardless, everybody involved told it very well.

Something Cult, Foreign-Language or Indie #158 : The Program (2015).

In 1999, after surviving a bout of testicular cancer, Lance Armstrong won his first of seven Tour de France titles. But his meteoric rise to sports superstardom was undone with a spectacular and permanent fall from grace, when in 2013 after overwhelming evidence of his guilt surfaced, Armstrong admitted to doping throughout his career and was stripped of all his major titles and banned from cycling for life.

2015's The Program recreates the behind-the-scenes story of how Armstrong (Ben Foster) was finally brought down. Based on the book Seven Deadly Sins, journalist David Walsh's account of the key role he played in exposing Armstrong's and his cycling team's doping program, director Stephen Frears and writer John Hodge offer a mostly riveting and judicious treatment of a scandal we all heard so much about; only in a few scenes in the middle section does the approach seem stagnant. The race scenes are beautifully filmed and Frears bravely makes us see intravenous doping at its bloodiest. This isn't done for gratuity either; only to forcefully emphasise just how driven and ruthless Armstrong and his colleagues were in their pursuit of glory at all costs.

Foster is solid as this very corrupt but complex and mortal individual, equally convincing as Lance at his most competitive and egomaniacal and as Lance during moments of paranoia. Jesse Plemons is well-balanced as Armstrong's whistle-blowing competitor Floyd Landis, too, but I think the best and most surprising performance comes from Chris O'Dowd, who here proves he's way more than just a comedian, superbly and sincerely filling Walsh's shoes and entirely channeling the suspicion and determination with which the real Walsh helped to see justice served. 

The Program is a slightly flawed, but excellent account of perhaps the defining sports scandal of this century so far.