we all look alike to me

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Two white dudesI used to wonder if the casting in the Rocky movies was nothing more than cynical race-baiting, but now I actually see virtue in it. Oh, the racial overtones still bother me, but now, having seen Cinderella Man, I appreciate the enormous narrative service Stallone did his audience by having a white guy fight a black guy: we can tell the fighters apart. And when Rocky's opponents weren't black—Hulk Hogan, Dolph Lundgren—they were distinctively freakish. This is not the case in Cinderella Man. Between the quick, incomprehensible editorial cuts and the parade of indistinguishable pasty white lugs wearing indistinguishable black shorts, I stopped even trying to follow the fights. Fortunately, they had a ringside announcer narrate who just hit whom and how much it hurt.

The film was a pleasant enough confection, but I'm at a loss to explain the critical love heaped upon it. A saintly, persecuted boxer/father/husband with a supportive wife photographed through gauze gets his One Big Chance to battle out of the Great Depression: a fight for the heavyweight championship against a man so evil, he threatens the wife with widowhood. Will our hero win? Will he and his wife climb out of abject destitution? Will the film conclude with the grudging respect of the vanquished opponent and end titles that explain what happens to our heroes next? Have you never seen a Ron Howard movie?