The competition – both the sports and the dance – uniting all these forces and bringing about a more loving and (dare I say) functional family dynamic – isn’t that our fantasy at its finest?  Tooth-rotting sweetness, perhaps, but we know that he didn’t get to the end of that without hours and hours of tiring work and discipline.  I don’t think that the competition itself melted all the problems, but it’s the focal point and really drove all the other interactions needed to bring healing.  The family didn’t unite because of a dance; they united because a member of their clan had devoted himself to something he was passionate about and at their core they loved him for that.  

@Ted_Howard: yes, the characters didn’t deserve a happy ending.  But nobody does.  We’ve all done some pretty nasty stuff to other people, intentional or not.  What we see in both main characters is that they admitted that they were broken people seeking healing.  What if Pat hadn’t been fighting to get better in the vain hope of reconcilliation with his wife? Would he have stayed in the hospital an obese and psychotic mess?  

Something that the the book expressly states – the movie hints at it but can’t be so clear – is the understanding by our protaganist that the ex-wife is now, to use a phrase that I detest, out of his league.  He’s lost out on his true love and now he’s going to pursue a relationship with a woman who has some pretty intense scars.  He knows it’s going to be harder, but that’s the price he’s paid for his mistakes.  He does have a happy ending, though it’s not as happy as he first wanted.  

As for point 2, there’s a lot to say here about what kind of US audiences watches foreign-language movies, and how that influences which foreign movies are purchased for release.  (But it must be said that I’ve been surprised by some foreign shit that gets released abroad, while far worthier films never get to see the light of day.) 
 
However you are right that, in general, audiences (not just American ones) are protected from a lot of crap from other countries. Even crap from countries that have huge film industries, like India and China, and for European shores, France. Mainstream American films – terrible and wonderful alike – definitely own the international distribution market.

There’s a sort of intellectual reflex on the American left to cast a critical eye upon American culture, especially vis-a-vis the cultures considered inferior or irrelevant by the right.  That’s all well and good, and if you had to choose, it’s probably preferable to be unduly self-critical than insufficiently so.  But I’ve often noticed this tendency parodying itself in the assumption that all non-western people are ascetic sages who prefer subtle, emotionally complex art and have no taste for the mindless violence and facile conclusions of so many American films.  It’s just not true.  You can find plenty of broad, vulgar, simplistic or banal elements in the media of any culture. Sabado Gigante, Japanese game shows, the Hong Kong martial arts film industry, &c. are not Western inventions: they are homegrown initiatives. 

Even the Illiad, that sublime poem of antiquity, is notable specifically for its near-complete lack of “abstract /internal conflicts”.  Achilles doesn’t brood or reflect–he acts, and acts angrily.  And while there’s “something to it” besides all the gut-spilling and bone-breaking that gets narrated in graphic detail, there really is a lot of skull-splitting in the poem that recurs again and again (even unto repetitiveness to modern ears) for no other apparent reason than that it was titillating to original audiences.   The unavoidable conclusion to be drawn from a comparison of contemporary American and Homeric Greek culture is that we are way less into rape and gore.

Americans are not exceptional angels, but we are also not uniquely depraved.  The presumption that other cultures are free of base dramatic instincts is false, and kind of patronizing besides.

PS: I also wonder if there’s a sampling effect at play: foreign films tend to be better than the average domestic film, but how much of that effect can be explained by the fact that (1) There are many more film-makers in the world than in the US alone, and (2) in order to get translated and redistributed in another country a film must be significantly better than average in the first place?  There’s a lot of dreck in other languages’ media that we’re largely insulated from because no one bothers to import it, and the resulting effect is that the average foreign film looks pretty good when compared to the average domestic offering.

Bam on jackass (and his family) have typical philly accents. it’s totally part of the northeast spectrum of accents (northern new england/boston/ny/nj/philly/baltimore) that all kind of sound the same. i mean, not to me, i’m from ny, but that’s what people tell me.

i mean, i’m not a linguist or anything. but there is definitely a distinct philadelphian accent that is never in movies/tv. i noticed it when i saw a movie where the woman was supposed to be from philly (it was danny bonaduci’s mom in a biopic) and they gave her a pretty distinct ny accent.

Strongly disagree. Mattandelissa’s example is excellent.  And even if you just focus sports or athlete-themed films – a genre where competition will invariably be a theme – there are a lot of counterexamples.  These are just the ones I can come up with at the top of my head:

On the Waterfront
Raging Bull
Breaking Away
Friday Night Lights (both the movie and the television series)

I assure  you that “comfort food” movies are rampantly produced worldwide, they just usually fail to benefit from the heavy marketing and distribution that Hollywood studios can afford. 

 And IMO a better term to describe the kinds of interactions found in classic literature would be “conflicts” since that would cover contexts that can’t be depicted visually very well (or at all), such as emotionally complex internal struggles or a descent into madness, etc..

While classic literature has its share of chariot chases and sword fights, it also generally contains many abstract/internal conflicts which help give more meaning and significance to the external duels and epic battles that are often included in modern movies merely as gratuitous fluff that distracts from the lack of any meaningful plot.

Movies and TV shows have a hard time conveying intangible/abstract conflicts so the easy way out is to transform them into tangible contests, and the uniquely American character of this habit is to whittle just about any conceivable type of conflict into a gunfight, courtroom drama, or dance competition. Often preceded by a car chase, of course.

Because in America, nobody puts Baby in a corner! If you do, we’ll chase you down and shoot you, and after our heartfelt testimony the jury will acquit us to live happily ever after.