charlytully Review of Off the Black

Off the Black (2006)

Nick Nolte here versus Mickey Rourke in THE WRESTLER

[8/10 · 9 April 2009]

This comment is intended as a guide to help people who have time to see only one movie about a dying grizzled athlete way past his prime to decide if they want to spend 94 minutes with Nick Nolte or 111 minutes with Mickey Rourke. (This is sort of like the late comedian George Carlin's famous routine comparing baseball to football; be warned, I still pick baseball.) On the basis of sports action, OFF THE BLACK is limited to ONE pitched ball--the TITLE pitch--while THE WRESTLER has many scenes of body-slamming, chair-bashing excitement. In terms of sex, Nick Nolte's character (Ray Cook) has prostate cancer and presumably the cuddling and kissing he does with his old high school sweetheart Marianne (a thankfully fully-clothed Sally Kirkland) is about all he's up to, while Mickey Rourke's Randy "The Ram" Robinson gets to spend a lot of screen time with topless Marisa Tomei (playing his exotic dancer lover Cassidy). In regard to substance abuse, Ray pretty much limits himself to a refrigerator full of beer, plus dinner wine and the occasional bottle of whiskey (contributing to the delinquency of a minor through promoting under-aged drinking with his 11th-grader surrogate son Dave Tibbel, played by Trevor Morgan), while The Ram seems to keep his life in shambles through over-medicating himself with every drug known to mankind. "Poignant" and "bittersweet" aptly describe both films, but the producers of OFF THE BLACK very obviously threw in a few crudities to obtain their desired "R" rating for a movie which could have just as easily been PG13, while THE WRESTLER is definitely a very "hard" R. For what it's worth, I rated the latter story one notch higher than BANG THE UMPIRE SLOWLY, at "9."