Tetro (2009)
Francis Ford Coppola. Now there’s a name we haven’t heard in the film world for a long time. Wine, yes. But as far as creating a notable cinematic work (at least compared to his once legendary status), his name has been almost nonexistent. In fact, the only film he’s made since Apocalypse Now (1979) that has any staying power is arguably his adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992), an over-the-top avalanche of high drama and visual delight, and that was a solid seventeen years ago. In 2007, we were reminded of him when Youth Without Youth came out (a film I did not see), but even that was poorly received. Now, there is Tetro. And the question on everyone’s mind is, “Has he finally returned?”
The answer is yes and no. Tetro is a mostly solid but not great effort that will do little to hurt Coppola’s damaged reputation, but it won't go very far in reminding people about his Godfather and Conversation days either. The story concerns the highly dysfunctional Tetrocini family, headed by a wealthy composer patriarch, played by Klaus Maria Brandauer, whose heartless rise to success can only be classified as “shady”. Brandauer, however, is only present in the film’s numerous color flashbacks (the majority of the narrative is in Black & White), as the focal points of are the younger Tetrocini men, played by Vincent Gallo and Alden Ehrenreich. Through a series of deliberately revealed family secrets, tragedies, and double-crosses, Coppola creates an absorbing portrait of a truly fucked-up group of people. Though overlong and not particularly original in any way (this is little more than another Greek tragedy update), Tetro is rarely boring.
Coppola takes a little while getting started, but he eventually wins us over with his compellingly damaged characters, Gallo’s mysterious and self-destructive writer in particular. The dialogue is a tad awkward at times, and the characters (with the exception of the always marvelous Maribel Verdu) are kept oddly at a distance, but there remains something irresistibly watchable about these ancient themes. Perhaps it is the comfort of repetition, something that both helps and harms the film. It works for about the first two-thirds, but by the end, you will be rolling your eyes with increasing annoyance at each ridiculous and unsurprising new “twist” Coppola tries to cram into the last half-hour.
One thing Coppola has never had trouble with is creating memorable imagery, and his atmospheric portrayal of modern Buenos Aires is no exception. The intimate interiors and richly detailed outdoor scenes are united by his beautiful use of light and shadow. Visually, the film never falters, and is matched by a lovely and evocative soundtrack. The creation of an atmosphere is one of the film’s main triumphs.
The acting is solid, and the themes – endlessly recycled though they are – remain absorbing, but Tetro is ultimately done in by overlength and a concluding half hour that seems forced, tacked on, and improbable. Far from Coppola’s greatest failure, it is also certainly not one of his best. Fans of the director and cinematography enthusiasts will find much to enjoy here. Others beware.
AND...
Rocco and His Brothers (1961)
What can I say about Rocco and His Brothers that hasn’t already been said a thousand times? Widely considered one of the greatest films ever made, Luchino Visconti’s epic Italian family drama is the primary reason we have such movies as the Godfather trilogy (you may have heard of it) and many of the films of Martin Scorcese and Bernardo Bertolucci, to name a few. A brief overview will have to do for now, then you’ll just have to see it for yourself. This is legendary cinema; you almost have no choice.
The central characters are the five Parondi boys, members of a poor farming clan from southern Italy that makes its way to Milan after its patriarch dies. Divided loosely into five chapters, one for each son (Vincenzo, Simone, Rocco, Ciro, and Luca), this three-hour behemoth traces over a year of their struggle to find fortune and happiness in the big city. Their path is alternately guided or obstructed by love, hate, betrayal, and one another, resulting in an operatic yet realist-influenced portrait of social mobility and family bonds.
Despite its imposing length, this film is nearly impossible to look away from. The more you get to know these characters, the more riveting their struggles become, and by the end you will find yourself laughing, crying, and shouting right along with them. The themes presented, like Tetro’s, are as ancient as Greece, but unlike the other film, Rocco is both genuinely startling and unpredictable, and about twenty times more absorbing. The casting is spot-on, the acting is flawless (Alain Delon and the rest of the brothers are rock solid, but Katina Paxinou as their hyper-dramatic mother steals the show), and the direction is masterful. My only qualm is Nino Rota’s score, which sounds suspiciously like another he would write eleven years later (Godfather fans will know what I’m talking about).
Many filmgoers are often turned off by very long movies, especially ones where the reading of subtitles is a necessary part of understanding the plot. While Rocco and His Brothers employs both of these, it is one of the cases in which I don't think either will impede even casual audiences’ enjoyment of the film. It’s that beautifully simple. This movie is a unanimously acknowledged classic. Go see what the fuss is about, and judge for yourself.
Tuesday, June 30, 2009
Monday, June 29, 2009
Popcorn and Death by Fire
Drag Me to Hell (2009)
For more than half of the past decade, director Sam Raimi has had a very, very big problem. Its name was the Spider-Man franchise, and ever since its box office shattering release in 2003, it has played the dual role of making Raimi wealthy beyond imagination and devouring his soul.
For a while we didn’t recognize this new Sam, a man we thought we knew and loved, a man who brought us such immortal images as cinema’s only human-on-tree sex scene (The Evil Dead), and Bruce Campbell being chased around a cabin by his own severed hand (Evil Dead 2). Could this possibly be the same man who cast That 70s Show’s Topher Grace as Spidey’s menacing arch-nemesis, Venom? Who gave Peter Parker a song and dance number? Really? It hurts to say it, but yes, this is the same man, warped and twisted though he may have become. But I have good news: the Sam Raimi we once knew is back.
Drag Me to Hell is proof that Raimi can still have fun making movies. It is a scary, funny, exuberantly made slice of supernatural mayhem, never dull, always fun to watch. After a questionable prologue involving a possessed boy wearing a poncho, Raimi kicks things into fifth gear with a seemingly endless barrage of screams and laughs, a balance he pulls of with a skill-level unseen since his Army of Darkness days. The highly likable Alison Lohman plays an ambitious loans specialist at a Los Angeles bank who incurs the wrath of an old, one-eyed Gypsy woman when she refuses to grant her a loan extension. Like any of us would have done, the woman physically attacks Lohman, steals a button from her coat, and places a demon hex on her that results in daily physical and psychological torment. Seized by a sudden urge to not die a horrible violent death, Lohman sets out to break the curse, much to the chagrin of her disbelieving college professor boyfriend (a very funny Justing Long), and employs the aid of a fortune teller and a skilled medium to do so. Will she be successful in breaking the curse, or will she meet her maker and get dragged to hell? Both questions are answered in this film.
Despite its high entertainment value and skillful pacing and execution, the film is not without its flaws. Some of the CG-effects are far from convincing, and the final plot twist is a bit predictable if you’ve been paying close attention (you will be sitting there for a solid fifteen minutes just waiting for it to happen). However, it is unlikely that this will dampen your enjoyment of the film overall. The jump-out scares are as effective as any I’ve encountered (I’ve never been so frightened of a handkerchief in my life), the pace never drags, the casting is solid beyond expectation (Justin Long is actually perfect for his role), and the script by Raimi and his brother Ivan is kept afloat by some good laughs (the dinner scene with Long’s parents is a lot of fun, and the Gypsy woman is hilariously gross as she plops her slobbery dentures on Lohman’s desk while hacking up enough phlegm to fill a soda can). Though much less insanely inventive than the Evil Dead films, Drag Me to Hell still contains flashes of the spark that made us love Sam Raimi when he was a rookie. For that alone, it is definitely worth seeing.
But perhaps what stands out most about the film is its deviation from the terror-torture-sadism horror trend that we have become used to in recent years. Not that we don’t all love a little terror, torture, and sadism in our movies once in a while, just not all the time. Drag Me to Hell is a reminder that horror films can be scary, funny, and utterly ridiculous at the same time, all without being completely stupid. Fans of rare scary-funny gems like Shaun of the Dead or people just looking for a fun night at the movies, check this one out. It won’t disappoint.
AND...
The Wicker Man (1973)
Have you ever seen a grassy field full of people having public sex outside of a pub? Or a young Scottish woman trying to seduce a virgin police inspector through a combination of singing and nude dance? What about a mother curing her daughter’s sore throat by sticking a live toad in the girl’s mouth? Unless you have seen 1973’s occult mystery The Wicker Man, the answer to all of the above is probably no. And if this is the case, you are missing out on quite a unique and memorable film experience.
Starring Christopher Lee and the unfortunately named Edward Woodward as the policeman, Wicker Man is quite unlike any film you will ever see. I review it in conjunction with Raimi’s Drag Me to Hell because both are concerned, to varying degrees, with the occult, paganism, and the bad things that supposedly happen when pagans meet people from mainstream society. In all of the above cases, entertaining results are inevitable, and Wicker Man is no exception.
Though barely seen upon its initial release, and having survived near destruction not long after, the original negative of the film was retrieved by a group of young distributors and given a proper release in the U.S. Audiences loved it, and since then the film has achieved cult status and been recently remade, with Nicholas Cage in the lead role. I have not seen the remake, and am unlikely to do so any time soon. For me, it’s “give me Edward Woodward or give me death.” Semi-fun fact: word has it that many of the actors and crew members loved the story so much that they worked on it for almost nothing, including Christopher Lee, a big star of the Hammer horror genre at the time, and writer Anthony Schaffer, responsible for Alfred Hitchcock’s Frenzy (1972).
The film begins with Woodward making his way from the mainland to the secluded Scottish island of Summerisle, where he begins probing the disappearance of a young girl whom many of the townspeople insist never existed in the first place. Of course, not everything is as it seems, and before you can say “maypole dance,” Woodward is up to his neck in intrigue, deceit, pagan rituals, and more nudity. To give away any more of the plot would be criminal, but suffice it to say the pacing is brisk, the themes are compelling, and the actual Wicker Man himself is one of the more menacing images in cinema history.
But what makes the film particularly special is its interesting approach to the age-old Christianity versus paganism debate. Woodward, the uptight Protestant who has chosen to save “himself” for marriage, is a far cry from the typical civilizing missionary meant to rescue the souls of idol-worshipping savages. His beliefs, though certainly more mainstream than those of Summerisle’s residents, are never taken for granted as being correct, or even normal. They are given the same level of validity, and are thus equally open to criticism and ridicule. At one point, Woodward shouts at Lee in disbelief that the people of the isle are ridiculous for performing fertility dances, meant to achieve conception without intercourse. “Haven’t these people ever heard of Jesus Christ?” he cries, to which Lee responds that Christ himself was the product of the union between a human woman and what technically amounts to a ghost. Woodward, of course, is speechless. And until the film’s climax, when the natives get particularly nasty, the message seems to be that religious validity is completely relative.
The fact that a movie often classified as “horror” can open up this kind of conversation is a testament to writer Anthony Schaffer’s uniqueness of vision. Rarely has the occult been treated so thoughtfully and even-handedly in a film, especially without causing it to lose its brisk pace or entertainment value. Overall, despite some oddly placed Broadway-style song numbers (don't ask), The Wicker Man is close to par with such acknowledged genre classics as Rosemary’s Baby (1968). If you're up for a not-so-standard mystery full of twists, bizarre imagery, and a healthy sense of the absurd, Wicker is your man.
For more than half of the past decade, director Sam Raimi has had a very, very big problem. Its name was the Spider-Man franchise, and ever since its box office shattering release in 2003, it has played the dual role of making Raimi wealthy beyond imagination and devouring his soul.
For a while we didn’t recognize this new Sam, a man we thought we knew and loved, a man who brought us such immortal images as cinema’s only human-on-tree sex scene (The Evil Dead), and Bruce Campbell being chased around a cabin by his own severed hand (Evil Dead 2). Could this possibly be the same man who cast That 70s Show’s Topher Grace as Spidey’s menacing arch-nemesis, Venom? Who gave Peter Parker a song and dance number? Really? It hurts to say it, but yes, this is the same man, warped and twisted though he may have become. But I have good news: the Sam Raimi we once knew is back.
Drag Me to Hell is proof that Raimi can still have fun making movies. It is a scary, funny, exuberantly made slice of supernatural mayhem, never dull, always fun to watch. After a questionable prologue involving a possessed boy wearing a poncho, Raimi kicks things into fifth gear with a seemingly endless barrage of screams and laughs, a balance he pulls of with a skill-level unseen since his Army of Darkness days. The highly likable Alison Lohman plays an ambitious loans specialist at a Los Angeles bank who incurs the wrath of an old, one-eyed Gypsy woman when she refuses to grant her a loan extension. Like any of us would have done, the woman physically attacks Lohman, steals a button from her coat, and places a demon hex on her that results in daily physical and psychological torment. Seized by a sudden urge to not die a horrible violent death, Lohman sets out to break the curse, much to the chagrin of her disbelieving college professor boyfriend (a very funny Justing Long), and employs the aid of a fortune teller and a skilled medium to do so. Will she be successful in breaking the curse, or will she meet her maker and get dragged to hell? Both questions are answered in this film.
Despite its high entertainment value and skillful pacing and execution, the film is not without its flaws. Some of the CG-effects are far from convincing, and the final plot twist is a bit predictable if you’ve been paying close attention (you will be sitting there for a solid fifteen minutes just waiting for it to happen). However, it is unlikely that this will dampen your enjoyment of the film overall. The jump-out scares are as effective as any I’ve encountered (I’ve never been so frightened of a handkerchief in my life), the pace never drags, the casting is solid beyond expectation (Justin Long is actually perfect for his role), and the script by Raimi and his brother Ivan is kept afloat by some good laughs (the dinner scene with Long’s parents is a lot of fun, and the Gypsy woman is hilariously gross as she plops her slobbery dentures on Lohman’s desk while hacking up enough phlegm to fill a soda can). Though much less insanely inventive than the Evil Dead films, Drag Me to Hell still contains flashes of the spark that made us love Sam Raimi when he was a rookie. For that alone, it is definitely worth seeing.
But perhaps what stands out most about the film is its deviation from the terror-torture-sadism horror trend that we have become used to in recent years. Not that we don’t all love a little terror, torture, and sadism in our movies once in a while, just not all the time. Drag Me to Hell is a reminder that horror films can be scary, funny, and utterly ridiculous at the same time, all without being completely stupid. Fans of rare scary-funny gems like Shaun of the Dead or people just looking for a fun night at the movies, check this one out. It won’t disappoint.
AND...
The Wicker Man (1973)
Have you ever seen a grassy field full of people having public sex outside of a pub? Or a young Scottish woman trying to seduce a virgin police inspector through a combination of singing and nude dance? What about a mother curing her daughter’s sore throat by sticking a live toad in the girl’s mouth? Unless you have seen 1973’s occult mystery The Wicker Man, the answer to all of the above is probably no. And if this is the case, you are missing out on quite a unique and memorable film experience.
Starring Christopher Lee and the unfortunately named Edward Woodward as the policeman, Wicker Man is quite unlike any film you will ever see. I review it in conjunction with Raimi’s Drag Me to Hell because both are concerned, to varying degrees, with the occult, paganism, and the bad things that supposedly happen when pagans meet people from mainstream society. In all of the above cases, entertaining results are inevitable, and Wicker Man is no exception.
Though barely seen upon its initial release, and having survived near destruction not long after, the original negative of the film was retrieved by a group of young distributors and given a proper release in the U.S. Audiences loved it, and since then the film has achieved cult status and been recently remade, with Nicholas Cage in the lead role. I have not seen the remake, and am unlikely to do so any time soon. For me, it’s “give me Edward Woodward or give me death.” Semi-fun fact: word has it that many of the actors and crew members loved the story so much that they worked on it for almost nothing, including Christopher Lee, a big star of the Hammer horror genre at the time, and writer Anthony Schaffer, responsible for Alfred Hitchcock’s Frenzy (1972).
The film begins with Woodward making his way from the mainland to the secluded Scottish island of Summerisle, where he begins probing the disappearance of a young girl whom many of the townspeople insist never existed in the first place. Of course, not everything is as it seems, and before you can say “maypole dance,” Woodward is up to his neck in intrigue, deceit, pagan rituals, and more nudity. To give away any more of the plot would be criminal, but suffice it to say the pacing is brisk, the themes are compelling, and the actual Wicker Man himself is one of the more menacing images in cinema history.
But what makes the film particularly special is its interesting approach to the age-old Christianity versus paganism debate. Woodward, the uptight Protestant who has chosen to save “himself” for marriage, is a far cry from the typical civilizing missionary meant to rescue the souls of idol-worshipping savages. His beliefs, though certainly more mainstream than those of Summerisle’s residents, are never taken for granted as being correct, or even normal. They are given the same level of validity, and are thus equally open to criticism and ridicule. At one point, Woodward shouts at Lee in disbelief that the people of the isle are ridiculous for performing fertility dances, meant to achieve conception without intercourse. “Haven’t these people ever heard of Jesus Christ?” he cries, to which Lee responds that Christ himself was the product of the union between a human woman and what technically amounts to a ghost. Woodward, of course, is speechless. And until the film’s climax, when the natives get particularly nasty, the message seems to be that religious validity is completely relative.
The fact that a movie often classified as “horror” can open up this kind of conversation is a testament to writer Anthony Schaffer’s uniqueness of vision. Rarely has the occult been treated so thoughtfully and even-handedly in a film, especially without causing it to lose its brisk pace or entertainment value. Overall, despite some oddly placed Broadway-style song numbers (don't ask), The Wicker Man is close to par with such acknowledged genre classics as Rosemary’s Baby (1968). If you're up for a not-so-standard mystery full of twists, bizarre imagery, and a healthy sense of the absurd, Wicker is your man.
Sunday, June 28, 2009
Welcome to Palookaville
Tyson (2009)
Directed by James Toback
If you are around my age, your first memorable experience of Mike Tyson as a notorious public figure was the “bite heard ‘round the world” against Evander Holyfield in 1997. I remember vividly the L.A. Times’ front page photo close-up of the ear, sweaty and glistening, a bloody hook-shaped chunk torn from its center. I remember watching both bites replayed in slow motion over and over again on television. I have seen people look at photos or televised images of the man, shake their heads, and mutter about what an animal he is, what a violent, unstable maniac. James Toback’s documentary provides something of a response to these simplifying statements; you will not think of Mike Tyson the same way after seeing this movie.
The film is literally all Mike. No one else is interviewed, nobody else gives their opinion, no one is there to explain, analyze, censor, or buffer him. He sits in front of the camera, a hulking giant of a man, calm, honest, and introspective, and does the best he can to explain himself and why he does the things he does.
Through archival footage, we watch Tyson’s rise from the streets of Brooklyn to the home of his mentor and father figure Gus D’Amato, from the heavyweight championship to prison and back again. We see him then and we see him now, a grown man talking about his pigeon-keeping days as a boy, how another boy grabbed one of his beloved birds and twisted its head off before his eyes. He talks about being chubby and being bullied, about how he will to this day do anything to avoid being physically humiliated. He talks about his attraction to beautiful, strong, intelligent, independent women, and his subsequent need to “dominate them sexually” (well said, Mike, well said). He denies the rape conviction that landed him in prison, and calls a man on the street a “little white bitch” before shouting menacingly “I’ll fuck you ‘til you love me.” He discusses the horror of watching prison inmates throw their own feces at one another, and watches with a confused half smile as his ex-wife Robin Givens tells Barbara Walters how frightened she is of him. A complicated man, to say the least, one who seems impossible to explain in any simple terms.
Tyson is absolutely riveting, alternately frightening, funny, shocking, exhilarating, and thought provoking. Director James Toback does a brilliant job of letting Mike speak for himself, which makes it both easier to identify with and easier to criticize him, depending on your personal viewpoint. Toback’s familiarity and close personal relationship with Mike in real life is evident in the sensitivity, respect, and sometimes confusion that come through in the film. And in the midst of the controversy surrounding his personal life, people tend to forget that this guy was an absolutely phenomenal fighter. The boxing footage is jaw-dropping, particularly for those of us who never got to see him in action during his prime. The man was an absolute juggernaut.
This is the best film I have seen this year so far (its is currently June 27), and is certainly one of the most compelling documentaries I have seen in a long time (only Street Fight and Errol Morris’ The Fog of War, a very similar film in terms of style, even come close). Do yourself a favor and see it. You won't forget it.
AND...
Muhammad Ali The Greatest, 1964-1974 (1974)
Directed by William Klein
We can’t talk about boxing without acknowledging the Greatest himself. The man from Louisville, Kentucky, born Cassius Clay, was not only one of the most dominant fighters of his era, but remains one of the most legendary sports figures of all time (perhaps topped only by His Royal Airness, basketball legend Michael Jordan). Ali’s brash, outspoken manner channeled his religious and political beliefs into the public eye with the force of a right hook, making him one of the most notorious and divisive celebrities of his day. Between 1964 and 1974, he was persecuted for his beliefs, refused to fight in the Vietnam War, had his championship belt and title stripped, and was banned from boxing for a number of years. His triumphant return to the top in 1974, chronicled in detail in When We Were Kings (1996), is perhaps the most well-known fight in boxing history. This ten-year period, focusing on Ali’s fights against Sonny Liston in 1964 and 1965, and the “Rumble in the Jungle” against George Foreman in 1974, is compellingly captured by William Klein in his fly-on-the-wall documentary The Greatest.
Klein’s camera is everywhere, in Ali’s gym, at press conferences, hotels, ringside, in the streets. He captures interviews with Don King, Mobutu Sese Seko, and perhaps most incredibly, Malcolm X. He films the Beatles visiting Ali’s gym for a photo shoot in 1964. He follows an all-Black acting class in New York City as they improvise scenes using Ali as a character. And he roams the streets of New York, Boston, Kinshasa, and the fields of Maine, filming the people, young and old, who bear witness to Ali’s athletic prowess and the zeitgeist he was so instrumental in creating. The result is one of the most fascinating documents of Ali in his prime I have seen.
Less a linear narrative than a series of sketches, moods, and drawn out riffs, Klein’s film is not nearly as accessible to an audience conditioned on bare-bones narrative cinema, like we Americans, as When We Were Kings. An American expatriate living in France, Klein seems to have adopted the more European characteristics of a psychological, mood-based filmmaking style, and as a result, the movie drags at times. He tries to give it all a structure by dividing it into chapters, but let’s face it: this film is basically an amorphous mass.
However, if you are willing to stick with it, the rewards are significant. The footage is raw and alive with movement and energy. The film’s strength lies in its complete thoroughness in capturing the time period, focusing just as much on your average citizen as it does on well-known public figures. Though lacking the highly personal depth and intimacy of a film like Tyson (2009), The Greatest is nearly as interesting through a very different approach: instead of focusing on a person, it focuses on people. Yes, it rambles at times, and yes, it may seem a bit shapeless, but this should in no way deter you from watching it. It is definitely worth your while.
Directed by James Toback
If you are around my age, your first memorable experience of Mike Tyson as a notorious public figure was the “bite heard ‘round the world” against Evander Holyfield in 1997. I remember vividly the L.A. Times’ front page photo close-up of the ear, sweaty and glistening, a bloody hook-shaped chunk torn from its center. I remember watching both bites replayed in slow motion over and over again on television. I have seen people look at photos or televised images of the man, shake their heads, and mutter about what an animal he is, what a violent, unstable maniac. James Toback’s documentary provides something of a response to these simplifying statements; you will not think of Mike Tyson the same way after seeing this movie.
The film is literally all Mike. No one else is interviewed, nobody else gives their opinion, no one is there to explain, analyze, censor, or buffer him. He sits in front of the camera, a hulking giant of a man, calm, honest, and introspective, and does the best he can to explain himself and why he does the things he does.
Through archival footage, we watch Tyson’s rise from the streets of Brooklyn to the home of his mentor and father figure Gus D’Amato, from the heavyweight championship to prison and back again. We see him then and we see him now, a grown man talking about his pigeon-keeping days as a boy, how another boy grabbed one of his beloved birds and twisted its head off before his eyes. He talks about being chubby and being bullied, about how he will to this day do anything to avoid being physically humiliated. He talks about his attraction to beautiful, strong, intelligent, independent women, and his subsequent need to “dominate them sexually” (well said, Mike, well said). He denies the rape conviction that landed him in prison, and calls a man on the street a “little white bitch” before shouting menacingly “I’ll fuck you ‘til you love me.” He discusses the horror of watching prison inmates throw their own feces at one another, and watches with a confused half smile as his ex-wife Robin Givens tells Barbara Walters how frightened she is of him. A complicated man, to say the least, one who seems impossible to explain in any simple terms.
Tyson is absolutely riveting, alternately frightening, funny, shocking, exhilarating, and thought provoking. Director James Toback does a brilliant job of letting Mike speak for himself, which makes it both easier to identify with and easier to criticize him, depending on your personal viewpoint. Toback’s familiarity and close personal relationship with Mike in real life is evident in the sensitivity, respect, and sometimes confusion that come through in the film. And in the midst of the controversy surrounding his personal life, people tend to forget that this guy was an absolutely phenomenal fighter. The boxing footage is jaw-dropping, particularly for those of us who never got to see him in action during his prime. The man was an absolute juggernaut.
This is the best film I have seen this year so far (its is currently June 27), and is certainly one of the most compelling documentaries I have seen in a long time (only Street Fight and Errol Morris’ The Fog of War, a very similar film in terms of style, even come close). Do yourself a favor and see it. You won't forget it.
AND...
Muhammad Ali The Greatest, 1964-1974 (1974)
Directed by William Klein
We can’t talk about boxing without acknowledging the Greatest himself. The man from Louisville, Kentucky, born Cassius Clay, was not only one of the most dominant fighters of his era, but remains one of the most legendary sports figures of all time (perhaps topped only by His Royal Airness, basketball legend Michael Jordan). Ali’s brash, outspoken manner channeled his religious and political beliefs into the public eye with the force of a right hook, making him one of the most notorious and divisive celebrities of his day. Between 1964 and 1974, he was persecuted for his beliefs, refused to fight in the Vietnam War, had his championship belt and title stripped, and was banned from boxing for a number of years. His triumphant return to the top in 1974, chronicled in detail in When We Were Kings (1996), is perhaps the most well-known fight in boxing history. This ten-year period, focusing on Ali’s fights against Sonny Liston in 1964 and 1965, and the “Rumble in the Jungle” against George Foreman in 1974, is compellingly captured by William Klein in his fly-on-the-wall documentary The Greatest.
Klein’s camera is everywhere, in Ali’s gym, at press conferences, hotels, ringside, in the streets. He captures interviews with Don King, Mobutu Sese Seko, and perhaps most incredibly, Malcolm X. He films the Beatles visiting Ali’s gym for a photo shoot in 1964. He follows an all-Black acting class in New York City as they improvise scenes using Ali as a character. And he roams the streets of New York, Boston, Kinshasa, and the fields of Maine, filming the people, young and old, who bear witness to Ali’s athletic prowess and the zeitgeist he was so instrumental in creating. The result is one of the most fascinating documents of Ali in his prime I have seen.
Less a linear narrative than a series of sketches, moods, and drawn out riffs, Klein’s film is not nearly as accessible to an audience conditioned on bare-bones narrative cinema, like we Americans, as When We Were Kings. An American expatriate living in France, Klein seems to have adopted the more European characteristics of a psychological, mood-based filmmaking style, and as a result, the movie drags at times. He tries to give it all a structure by dividing it into chapters, but let’s face it: this film is basically an amorphous mass.
However, if you are willing to stick with it, the rewards are significant. The footage is raw and alive with movement and energy. The film’s strength lies in its complete thoroughness in capturing the time period, focusing just as much on your average citizen as it does on well-known public figures. Though lacking the highly personal depth and intimacy of a film like Tyson (2009), The Greatest is nearly as interesting through a very different approach: instead of focusing on a person, it focuses on people. Yes, it rambles at times, and yes, it may seem a bit shapeless, but this should in no way deter you from watching it. It is definitely worth your while.
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