A Classic, like De Niro's RAGING BULL

Rating: 10/10 (1 February 2009)

Saw THE WRESTLER tonight ... you absolutely have to see it. I can't remember a movie I have seen in recent year that I have enjoyed more.
It's tragic, funny, poignant and, yes, crazily action-packed ( staple-gun to the back anyone? )!! Plus, Mickey Rourke deserves all the accolades he's been getting for this role, which is comparable only to De Niro in RAGING BULL...
The movie is like a BUKOWSKI novel, filled with bittersweet losers trying to make sense of the mess of their lives ... the scenes when "Robin" is working at the supermarket deli are unforgettable, as is every one of the other scenes in this masterwork of a "dude's flick", where, yes, " I laughed, I cried"....
Plus, it has an eighties hard rock soundtrack ( Ratt, hilariously used in a tender bar-room scene with stripper Cassady ) and strikes the right chord in anyone who lived during that decade and now finds themselves curiously over forty, a long way from their own eighties "golden youth" ( but maybe I'm getting too personal here? ).
My only complaint, though, is the very very end. I'm no sadist, but I would have liked to "see" The Ram's jump from the ropes. If I would have witnessed his death in the ring,and experienced that final catharsis, I no doubt would have been leaving the theater a bawling mess. As it was, i had to explain to my wife that "yes, of course he died -- that was the whole point."
That said, go plop down your ten bucks hard earned cash and spend two hours with Randy "The Ram" Robinson. It's an experience that you won't soon forget any time soon.