kelofthesea

redleaderfic:

mith-gifs-wrestling:

I’m not quite sure what I expected when I sat down in the movie theater to watch “My Dad is a Heel Wrestler,” the new movie starring Hiroshi Tanahashi and a host of other NJPW wrestlers. Considering it had NJPW’s official stamp of approval, I was fairly certain it wouldn’t be pulling the curtain aside to show wrestlers calling their matches and bookers deciding who was going over whom. And it was a children’s movie, so I think I expected it to embrace the simpler, fictional side of wrestling, to be set entirely within the world of wrestling: that the results of the matches would be unknown to the wrestlers and the events in the ring would be spontaneous and un-booked. What I got was, instead, something much more complicated: a movie that embraces the strange twilight limbo of modern wrestling fandom, in which reality and fiction are mingled in ways impossible to untangle. It’s a movie that captures with uncanny, affectionate accuracy not the reality of wrestling, but the reality of being a wrestling fan, with all of its joys and pains.

If you’re an English-speaking wrestling fan, the odds are fairly good you won’t get a chance to see this movie with subtitles, at least not for a while. So until then, if you choose to continue, this review is a spoiler-filled look at “My Dad is a Heel Wrestler”–leaving out a lot of various subplots, but looking especially at how it captures the experience of being a wrestling fan in this modern age.

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“Well Done, Cockroach,” a review of “My Dad is a Heel Wrestler,” is up now at Spectacle of Excess!

At its heart, the movie is about the pains and joys of loving the bad guys, the losers, the comedy acts who always seem to take the pin, the aging superstars whose prime is behind them. Underdogs, in all their beautiful variety.

Oh no.

Oh no, I’m going to own this movie and watch it so many times, aren’t I.