![]() ![]() Neither do she and Dan manage so much as a kiss. Who she is or what she does, apart from jogging around campus and serving a service-station attendant his nightly meals, is never explained. The image of the breast vessels is repeated when Dan's love interest, Joy (Amy Smart), first appears carrying twin Japanese bowls at chest level to serve Socrates his dinner. The Girl Can't Help It) before attempting to seduce him. Women exist in the film simply to serve: A college girl eager to jump Dan's bones carries beer steins at breast level (shades of Jayne Mansfield's milk bottles in Not once but twice Dan is clenched from behind by an older man, once by his coach and later by Socrates, sending jolts of new awareness (zooming cameras, the roar of a ladybug eating grass) through his body. Thus we have many scenes of muscular young hairless men working out in the gym late at night, with lots of close-ups of their taut Spandex-clad bodies or their wide eyes as they watch each other's spinning bodies. The Peaceful Warrior is as riddled with homo-eroticism as Robert Smigel's For a story that is supposed to be about gymnastics and Eastern philosophy, The Peaceful Warrior, which makes the movie unintentionally funny. Perhaps because the narrative holds little credibility, you can't help become aware that something else is going on in Dan has scary dream sequences in which his leg shatters, or another where he fights his alter-ego atop a school tower. The Peaceful Warrior also manages to work in improbable horror-movie motifs (director Salva is behind the Naturally, Dan keeps coming back for more.īased on the best-selling semi-fictional autobiography of gymnast and college coach Dan Millman, He also slaps Dan around, calls him a jackass and tells him to give up alcohol, meat and sex on his route to greatness. Kill Bill): "You think more than you know," he tells Dan, as if this were somehow uncommon. Later, he suddenly appears at the end of Dan's bed, just as Dan is about to have sex with a groupie, leaving the hero with God knows what kind of sexual trauma.Īs well, Soc seems to be channelling Hong Kong movie veteran Gordon Liu (the white-bearded guru in Because of the man's philosophical bent, Dan dubs him "Soc" for Socrates, though unlike the original Socrates, Nolte's version can do magic tricks: He levitates to the roof of his garage. Nick Nolte plays a gruff Texaco service-station attendant with mysterious powers whom Dan meets one night when he can't sleep. The Peaceful Warrior initially seems like familiar enough, overripe sports hokum, with Scott Mechlowicz playing a young jock who shields his wounded vulnerability with a façade of cockiness.
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