Re-watching this after I guess decades?
I enjoyed it but not overwhelmingly so. I think less than when i originally watched.
However I am reading, with amusement, the other reviews on here. They go on and on about how the movie skewers Hollywood and New York elites. No it doesn't. Instead this movie is dead simple: a playwright who says he is for the common man (and I mean man) is not really so. He is more interested in being seen as the great artist.
How do we see this?
He comes out to Hollywood and goes on and on in front of John Goodman about how he is for he common man while ignoring what Goodman had to say. Goodman repeated three times how he had stories to tell and Fink just ignored him.
Fink is more interested in himself as the great writer than actually focusing on the ask: write a wrestling movie, don't overthink it, write something similar to what others have done.
How do we see this? He insists on staying in a fleabag hotel as a sort of hairshirt to goose his artistic suffering and therefore creativity. But he doesn't need that creativity as he has been asked to write a straightforward wrestling movie in the style of past movies.
He could have stayed in a fancy hotel, enjoyed the lifestyle and written the wrestling movie.
Oh and those Hollywood elites? What the same ones who want to put out a wrestling movie that the public loves. Some elites huh!
