Wisconsin Film Festival sneak peek #1: Wrestling for life
Wrestling For Jesus: The Tale Of T-Money
Despite what various ESPN personalities will tell you about baseball, football, curling, or women’s basketball, there is no better sports-related metaphor for the human condition than wrestling. Sometimes in life, you play the heel, punching life in the crotch when the ref isn’t looking. And sometimes you play the face, getting your ass stomped by life with multiple clutches and suplexes. To remind you of wrestling’s place in your subconscious, here’s a Wisconsin Film Festival sneak peek—which should be paired with Paul Giamatti’s Win Win, playing at the Orpheum on April 3 at 9 p.m.—featuring films about wrestling that aren’t necessarily just about wrestling.
Oil Wrestling: March 31, 5 p.m., Play Circle Theater
Synopsis: An un-narrated and un-subtitled short completely in Turkish, Oil Wrestling is an unadorned documentary that watches, up close, an oil wrestling competition between men in a Turkish village. We watch as boys grapple with boys, men grapple men, and the crowd grumbles its approval. It’s probably about manhood in Turkey, but it’s mostly just about oil wrestling.
How it fits: Of any movie we’ve ever seen about wrestling, this one has the highest percentage of actual wrestling. There are about three minutes of kids mugging for the camera before they’re due in the ring, followed by 20 minutes of oil-soaked Turks slamming each other into a grassy field. The close-up shots of glutes are very nearly pornographic, but watching dudes break their toes for a shot at bragging rights will fill your heart with the spirit of competition.
If you like wrestling movies, you’ll like this because: It’s like watching a Lucha libre match, except the competitors are lubed-up dudes who repeatedly try to rub oil in their competitors’ faces, and are wrestling because it seems like a cool way to waste a sunny afternoon. It proves wrestling crosses all boundaries: cultural, language, and comical misuse of oil.
Wrestling for Jesus: The Tale of T-Money: April 2, 5:45 p.m., Bartell Theatre
Synopsis: Wrestling for Jesus: The Tale of T-Money follows the titular star of the Wrestling For Jesus (WFJ) wrestling promotion, as he tries to reach people through the word of Christ and a technically sound Hurricanrana. He is modestly successful in the latter, but slightly less so in the former, as he takes his production on tours of the quarter-full gymnasiums of South Carolina, and competes with a rival company that encourages the vulgarity that isn’t to be found in WFJ. Then things take a turn for the heartbreaking when T-Money’s family life unravels.
How it fits: Wrestling for Jesus is like two movies in one: Filmmaker Nathan Clarke takes a look at the unconventional methods of evangelical Christians to reach the unconverted, and a look at a struggling wrestling company trying to become bigger and more successful without the things that make WWE-style wrestling popular (the wanton violence, the sex, the blood). It also shows the cost of chasing dreams for too long; your family life struggles, and you end up delivering flowers to pay the bills. Think of it as The Wrestler about the guys Mickey Rourke wrestled against in those gyms, but with more Jesus.
If you like wrestling movies, you’ll like this because: It plays out like the WCW vs. WWE wars of the late ’90s in miniature, as two small potato companies battle for the hearts and minds of small town South Carolina. Though it’s probably more about the soul-crushing reality of being a semi-pro wrestler—you can get paralyzed when someone screws up, like one wrestler does here—than about actual wrestling, the tale of T-Money is like the tale of any wrestler, from Rulon Gardner to Hulk Hogan to Randy “The Ram” Robinson.
