Dwayne Johnson Is Coming for Your Children

Phil Nugent — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 17:00:00 GMT

The New York Times has honored Dwayne Johnson with a profile. Despite reporter Brooks Barnes's rote tribute to the Artist Formerly Known as the Rock's "Paul Bunyan physique and Central Casting good looks", the piece raises suspicions that what really struck the editors as newsworthy is that, in these confused and festering times, at least somebody has got a long-term career plan. Having had mixed success with hit action films such The Scorpion King and non-hit action films such as The Rundown, and having had his acting praised for his work in such unlikely repositories for his talent as Southland Tales and Be Cool, the 36-year-old, six-foot-five-inch star is consciously making his pitch to the youth market. And not the tweens and the twentysomethings, either; it sounds as if his business cards should be printed with the motto, "You Know: For Kids!" A top executive at Walt Disney Studios says of Johnson, “He’s larger than life and has endless charisma but comes across as a regular guy on screen. That makes him a very unique talent.” But the judgement seems to be that, in a casting universe dominated, in Barnes's words, by those "who are either intense and brooding (Christian Bale) or pudgy and dorky (Seth Rogen)", the Rock lacks an "edge." That might help to explain why one is drawn to him, as to solid flotsam floating past in a hurricane, when he's passing for the most normal thing in the context of the storm of weirdness that was Southland Tales. "“Audiences, particularly kids," says director Andy Fickman, "seem to love discovering that a guy this big and this good looking is actually very sweet and very funny." As did the autograph-seeking stranger who, Barnes writes, interrupted Johnson's dinnertime interview to ask, "“Um, I’m sorry to interrupt you while you have a knife in your hand..."

The movie that set Johnson on his new path was Fickman's The Game Plan, a 2007 family-friendly Disney movie involving football and an adorable eight-year-old moppet that turns out to be one of those things that did monster business while remaining off the radar off anyone without kids. Fickman directed Johnson's new vehicle, Race to Witch Mountain, a "re-imagining"--"remake" is such an ugly word--of the 1975 Escape to Witch Mountain, forever known to people of my generation as "the one with the flying Winnebago." (I am not entirely certain that I have actually seen Escape to Witch Mountain, but I saw the TV commercial for it so many times that Eddie Albert's read of the line "You kids have powers that are beyond belief!" is embedded in my memory as if it were my first kiss, which given the circumstances and quality of my first kiss, it might as well have been.) Although the new movie has a better-than-respectable cast that includes Carla Gugino, Ciarán Hinds. Tom Everett Scott, and AnnaSophia Robb (of Bridge to Terabithia), Johnson's big head is undeniably the focal point of the ad campaign, flying Winnebagos be damned. After that, Johnson will take on the title role in Fix's $45 million Tooth Fairy; it will require that he don a tutu and wield a magic wand, which means that, if nothing else, Vince McMahon will standing in line at the box office at 12:01 A.M. on opening day. (Since you asked, Johnson has seen The Wrestler. “That film rang really true,” is his verdict. “It’s sad, but that’s exactly what happens to a lot of those guys.” It now seems far enough from being what's likely to happen to him that Barnes might have been pushing it by finding reason to drop Mickey Rourke's name twice in the course of the article.) In the meantime, Johnson has appeared at the Grammys, the Oscars, "the Nickelodeon Kids’ Choice Awards, guest starred on Hannah Montana and served as the grand marshal of Hong Kong Disneyland’s Main Street Parade," all as part of his effort to have himself declared, as Barnes puts it, "Mom-Approved." It is hard not to wish him the best. He really is talented, he really does seem like a nice guy, and he even does his own stunts--of necessity, "because it is so difficult to find stuntmen of his size." Burt Reynolds would trade everything he ever had to have read that, just once.

Take Five: The Squared Circle

Leonard Pierce — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 21:15:00 GMT

Darren Aronofsky's The Wrestler opens across the country this weekend, and in addition to being hailed as a return to form for the Pi director and a triumphant comeback for shooting star Mickey Rourke, it's also one of an increasingly large number of acclaimed films -- both narrative and documentary -- to deal with professional wrestling. High culture has always had a problematic relationship with rasslin'; it's popularity is undeniable but has always upset the intellectuals of the sporting press, who delight in reminding people that it isn't real, as if its fans don't already know that. It can be lowest-common-denominator entertainment for sub-morons, but it also carries an undeniable emotional heft and a sort of physicalized symbolism that was remarked on at great length by no less august a personage than Roland Barthes, who wrote a famous essay about it for his book Mythologies. And now, years after it was considered an activity significantly less respectable than bowling or roller derby -- the great 'untouchable' sports of the 1950s -- a number of directors have found its combination of artifice and wounded reality irresistible. Here's some of our favorite movies that make reference to life inside the squared circle.

BARTON FINK (1991)

In the Coen Brothers' masterpiece about the art of writing and the way crafting fiction gets in the way of seeing reality, wrestling is used as a metaphor by the highfalutin playwright Barton Fink to symbolize class struggle -- but his inability to complete a simple screenplay in the wrestling genre also serves as a metaphor for his creative blockage. While he seems almost physically incapable of putting words on paper, his flustered producer Ben Geisler (Tony Shalhoub) delivers a classically bewildered line: "Wallace Beery! Wrestling picture! Whattya want, a road map?" Watching the moral and physical struggles of wrestling in stark black and white on cheap B-picture dailies, Fink still can't think of anything -- and is typically dismissive and oblivious when his neighbor Charlie tries to show him a few moves. John Goodman's Charlie will eventually teach him a lesson he'll never forget.

HITMAN HART: WRESTLING WITH SHADOWS (1998)

Bret "Hitman" Hart comes from what can only be described as one of professional wrestling's royal families. His father, a tough-as-nails Canadian legend and a strict disciplinarian who planned his childrens' careers from the crib, runs one of the most respected schools in the sport, and almost everyone around him -- his brothers, his in-laws, his friends -- are involved in pro wrestling. In this A&E documentary, we follow the everyday life of someone immersed in the game: his strained family life, his true feelings about the sport, and his growing discomfort with the storylines being written for him -- which results in one of the most memorable betrayals, both real and staged, in the modern-day history of wrestling. A little-seen film, Wrestling With Shadows is a sharp, perceptive piece of work that deserves a wider audience.

NIGHT AND THE CITY (1950)

Jules Dassin's legendary British film noir would probably have worked just as well if it had featured boxing -- that violent and often rigged sport so beloved by the makers of moody crime dramas -- instead of professional wrestling. But by having Richard Widmark's needy, creepy, desperate little hustler Harry Fabian wrapped up in the sport of wrestling, we get a number of elements that prove highly rewarding: Herbert Lom's compelling performance as Kristo gives some sense of the strange dynastic quality of some of the great wrestling families, and best of all, we get the unforgettable fight scene between Mike Mazurki as the Strangler and Stanislaus Zybyszko as Gregorius. Both men were actual wrestlers -- but Zybyszko, then an astonishing 70 years old, was from the transitional era when it was actually a legitimate sport. His performance in the scene -- almost silent, incredibly brutal, and absolutely mesmerizing -- has both incredible dignity and repulsive, visceral emotion.

BEYOND THE MAT (1999)

Inspired by Wrestling with Shadows and covering a lot of the same thematic territory, Barry Blaustein's Beyond the Mat had a theatrical run and thus attracted a good deal more attention than its predecessor. Both films shared qualities in common, though, from the alternatingly absurd and tragic lives of those who try to make a living as professional wrestlers to the personal dramas of the ring workers that mirror their gamed-out struggles. (They also share the quality of making WWE head honcho Vince McMahon look like an utter fucking creep, but that's not so hard, since he does the same thing himself every time he opens his mouth.) This time out, the most compelling figures are the ruined, crack-addicted wreck Jake "The Snake" Roberts and his opposite number, the witty, gregarious family man Mick Foley.

SPIDER-MAN (2002)

One of the most successful and enjoyable big-screen super-hero adaptations, Sam Raimi's Spider-Man gets a lot of its juice from the way it envisions Peter Parker's origin story without being boring or disrespectful. Since Spider-Man's is one of the most familiar origin stories in comics, Raimi had to do it just right, and one of the just-rightest scenes is the one where Parker, his powers newly acquired but not fully mastered, decides to cash in on them by taking part in a televised wrestling match. Raimi updates the scene by making it a big, flashy, ECW-style 'extreme' competition, but keeps the sense of fun and absurdity, most especially by casting lovable legend Randy Savage as Spidey's squared-circle nemesis, Bonesaw. To this day, the scene is one of my all-time favorites in any superhero movie to date.

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