Thus, I required a DVD I hadn’t seen before, and one which I suspected I wouldn’t like, at that. I chose “The Contender“.
And damn it if I didn’t like that one, too, quite a lot.
Sure, it had a lot of obvious weaknesses, the most prominent of which may have been that it didn’t quite cater to my subjective taste, but overall, it was more than merely “good”. The cast was surprisingly strong, considering that I hadn’t heard of most anyone of them before (not to mention that I failed to recognise Oldman, Slater and Bridges until the end credits), and the characters they played were believable, all of them with reasonable and understandable motives, even though I’d be hard pressed to agree with many of them 
The music grew a little pompous during some speeches and scenes, especially President Evans’ final one, creating a relatively melodramatic atmosphere. I seemed to me to be an exaggerated attempt at making the audience feel more patriotic or some such nonsense, and to me this felt unecessary; silence would have been just as powerful as blaring trumpets and deep strings.
Thematically, the film was much better. I have no real idea of how realistic it was — even though I suspect it was realistic enough — but the way it highlighted the pettiness and the cameraderie of many politicians was awesome, especially for someone like me, who has little enough fith in the American political system. (Although I recognise that I probably give it to little credit; it has, after all, survived pretty well for some 230 years, more or less.) Now, don’t misinterpret me, I’m usually of the opinion that politicians too often are unfavourably presented in the media, and that this is potentially damaging for democracy, but legitimate criticism should always be promoted. And I felt that this was fairly legitimate; the use of the Republicans as “bad guys” and Democrats as “good guys” I see as a result of the movie’s agenda and these parties’ respective views on the role of women, and when it came to playing dirty, I don’t feel the Democrats were much better than the Republicans, to put it lightly.
As for the agenda, I must say that I liked it very much. As I become more and more liberal for each passing day (soon I bet I’ll be reading Ayn Rand. I mean, I already bought “Wealth of Nations”, right? :P), the movie’s liberal view of traditional gender roles and privacy issues was much to my liking. The presentation of these matters, and Hanson’s refusal to speak of it, even to clear her name of the allegations made against her, were also admirable.
So, even though I was looking forward to giving this one a 6.5/10 or something like that, I’m actually forced to giving it a 7.5/10. The slaughter will have to wait for another opportunity to present itself.
(Wow, I almost forgot to add the “Movie” tag… 
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