Dickie is a former contender and now Micky’s trainer, but to be honest it doesn’t seem like his heart is that in it anymore. He spends most of his time pursuing his other passion, smoking crack.

Micky’s got a big fight coming up, but Dickie’s always the center of attention because he’s got a film crew following him around. “HBO’s making a movie about my comeback!” he says, but the documentarians are pretty clear that it’s about crack addiction. (The actual documentary is called HIGH ON CRACK STREET, I’ll have to try to see that one.) Despite his troubles Dickie’s still called “The Pride of Lowell” and never gets tired of bringing up the time he knocked down Sugar Ray Leonard. Knocked him down. Not knocked him out.

Micky’s hotheaded mother (no shit, that was Melissa Leo? I didn’t even recognize her) is his manager. His dad (Jack McGee) seems more level-headed, but is outnumbered by the seven big-haired daughters who take after their mom and work together like a pack of wolves. Dad is kind of like the guy who knows everybody should listen to him but is resigned to the fact that they won’t.

Family is important to all of them so they don’t fire Dickie even though they’re pissed that his outside interests and hobbies (again, crack) interfere so much with Micky’s training, traveling, etc. They try to be all Pride of Lowell, get dressed up and take a limo to the airport before a fight, end up having to make an extra stop to chase Dickie out the back of the crackhouse.

In a way the movie is all about embarrassment. Micky is embarrassed to show his face in Lowell after losing again. Dickie is embarrassed for his mom to find him at the crackhouse. The whole family and town are embarrassed by the documentary. They want the pride back.

It’s also about running away or hiding from problems. Dickie’s always literally jumping out the back window and making a run for it. When Dickie’s in the joint Micky takes the chance to run from his family. He finally shuts out his crazy mom, stays away from the drama, and his career starts to go well. His family hates his new girlfriend (but I don’t, it’s Amy Adams) because she went to college and they think she’s a “skank.” She knows how to hide from her problems too (and hides from the viewers that she’s supposed to have a drinking problem) but she teaches Micky how to face up to shit. For example when the mom and all the sisters track her down and show up on her porch she not only goes out there to face them, she throws the first punch.

In fact it goes back to the very first thing we learn in the movie, when Dickie explains his fighting style as “squirrelly as fuck,” dancing around and dodging, as opposed to Micky getting in close and taking the punches. By the end of the movie I think they learn to stop being squirrelly as fuck about their relationships.

Wahlberg and Bale are both good handsomer Hollywood versions of the real people. Wahlberg is especially impressive in the ring. He and his partners took alot of hits to do the boxing scenes, which is especially noticeable in the last fight where they really seem to be beating the shit out of each other. Bale’s approach is pretty mega, appropriate I think based on the footage of the real Dickie, who obviously has to be the center of attention at all times. Bale also went down to MACHINIST/crackhead weight and shaved a bald spot on the back of his head, although it’s not very noticeable until a ways into the movie.

For personal reasons I choose to believe that the real girlfriend looks exactly like Amy Adams and her hotness is not an exaggeration. Because you gotta be able to believe in something, you know? It’s nice to see Adams getting to play a role that’s not sweet and naive. Good to get back to her CRUEL INTENTIONS 2 roots. Must be tough, though, always getting typecast as good looking.

The other characters are less Hollywood and really well cast. My favorite character is Mickey O’Keefe, the police sergeant who becomes Micky’s trainer. I’ve been telling people for the week or two since I saw this that it seemed like they just got the real guy to play himself, but until just now when I looked it up on wikipedia I didn’t realize that’s because they did just get the real guy. He’s very quiet and emotionally reserved, but throughout the movie you can read on his face the frustration that Micky’s family are getting in the way of his chances, and his genuine, humble loyalty to Micky and wanting to help him. Then when (SPOILER) everything works out and everybody’s jumping up and down happy he barely even smiles, but you can see he’s right there with them.

Leo as the mother reminds me a little bit of the grandma in ANIMAL KINGDOM. She’s much more openly hostile, but seems to have the same motivation of just wanting to be there with her kids no matter what. Maybe she kinda likes being the boss, and maybe she makes the wrong decisions sometimes, but I don’t think she’s a bad person. (I guess I wouldn’t say that about the gal in ANIMAL KINGDOM. I didn’t say they were the same. They just reminded me of each other a little bit).

I also gotta say they got an amazing performance out of a toddler. This tiny kid is supposed to be Dickie’s son, and he has two amazing reactions. One is in a scene where he wants to watch his dad on TV but they won’t let him, one is when his dad just got out of prison and he’s excited to see him, but things don’t go well. It’s weird that the kid doesn’t seem to have aged while Dickie was away, but oh well. The expressions this kid has and the things he does are so perfect it seems like pretty much exactly what they would’ve done if they decided to CGI the whole performance. Shit, maybe they did? It didn’t look like they did. I think they just found the Christian Bale of baby actors.

Or maybe it was Christian Bale. He not only took off weight for this movie, he took off age. He’s gonna have a hell of a time getting back into the right shape and age to play Batman again.

I’ve heard some complaints that this movie is classist or something, that it portrays not-rich people in a cartoonish and stereotypical light. It’s nice for viewers to be offended on behalf of the actual people who worked for years to get their story made into a movie and then worked closely with the production, but I don’t think it’s necessary. If you believe that it’s unfair to depict the women of early ’90s Lowell, Massachusetts as having big hair and being catty I think you’re being a little too sensitive. And whatever the crackhead lobby may say, it is actually true that the individuals of that persuasion are sometimes missing a few teeth. The movie is just reporting the truth when it comes to hair of the early ’90s and dental health of the crackheads.

Also, please take note of the real guys shown at the end of the movie, and tell me with a straight face that the good looking Hollywood versions of them are an unfairly stereotypical portrayal. If all movies portrayed all white people like this that might be a problem, but that’s not the case in my opinion. In INCEPTION the white people wear ties, for example.

By far the most cartoonish character in the movie is a movie buff with a sweater around his neck who says he hears good things about the cinematography in BELLE EPOQUE. And that’s the only guy I felt like I was supposed to hate. I think you gotta acknowledge that the movie ultimately likes all these people. Not in a condescending “isn’t it adorable?” My Name Is Earl type of way, but in a they’re-flawed-but-they’re-my-family type of way. Micky is the protagonist and he’s stuck between the different factions, but he believes they’re all his people. They’re his blood and his neighbors. He wants to be the Pride of Lowell, not the guy who got out. And he wants his brother on his side. He wants to be the Pride of the Pride of Lowell.

THE FIGHTER really got me by having the equivalent of that rare achievement I love in action movies, the simultaneously occurring action and emotional climaxes. I guess you could say that about most sports movies, but I think this one is a little different because (SPOILER?) winning the fight really feels like a supblot, a side issue, an extra bonus. It’s the way all the family drama is resolved that I found myself rooting for and excited about. I’m sure it didn’t wrap up that neatly in real life, but watching the movie I bought it. Consider my heart warmed.

Each of them tell a little about their backgrounds, so they have their own interesting stories. Then they tell about the lead up to the fight, what happened, how they felt about it. Some have nothing but respect for Ali, they admire him, even idolize him. Some are still bitter about the way he insulted them, thought he was too mean. But more than one cries when talking about Ali’s Parkinson’s.

It’s not just a great portrait of Ali, but of professional boxers in general. You got different races, a couple guys from different countries, but all of them grew up hard, working class, scrapping for money, many of them criminals. Some of them are very articulate, some aren’t, but they all have really good stories to tell. Through the stories of Ali and his opponents this movie crosses paths with mobsters, hitmen, the Vietnam War, the Fruit of Islam, the assassination of Malcolm X, an allegedly thrown fight, a musical performance on the Jack Benny Show, a prison bid and a near death experience. So there’s more than just punching, although yes, there is also alot of punching involved.

Although they talk alot about the importance of Ali to black America it’s a white dude, the Canadian champion George Chuvalo, who seems most invested in Ali’s career from afar. He has opinions about everything, including saying that Sonny Liston took a dive because he was threatened by the Nation of Islam. In archive footage they show Chuvalo at the fight, being held back, trying to get in Ali’s face to confront him about it. It’s like REDBELT. But even though he believes that, Chuvalos also seems fiercely protective of Ali’s dignity and respect as The Greatest, for example seeming offended by Larry Holmes “taking advantage of an old man” by defeating him in 1980, two years after he’d famously decided to retire as champion and “get away clean.”

This is a really fascinating new way to look at this story. With a guy like Ali it’s easy to slip into hero worship, so it’s kind of cool that this shows him from the perspective of the guys he punched the shit out of, so you see different sides of him. I always laugh at his boasts and taunts but a couple times this movie made me feel sorry for the people he was insulting, who just weren’t quick-witted enough to get into that type of duel with him, or weren’t about to retaliate when he had the nerve to call them uncle toms. He’s a showman and a funny guy but you realize sometimes he’s a bully. At the same time that you’re accepting that, though, your respect for him is raising as you see what a hero he is even to these people he left in the dust.

The filmatism is good too – great jazz and soul soundtrack, artfully lit interviews with shadows filling out the crags on the boxers’ aging faces, gorgeously restored archive footage, energetic editing, smartly structured. It’s a great movie especially for somebody like me who loves Ali but doesn’t know shit about boxing.

“Hey Vern, do you watch boxing?”
“Nah, just documentaries.”

There’s alot of information about Ali out there. Obviously WHEN WE WERE KINGS is one of the all time great sports documentaries, and his life has been dramatized both by Will Smith and by himself in a TV movie, and many of his fights are available on DVD. So it’s impressive to see somebody come up with such a smart idea for a new angle on the champ, and to execute it well. Also impressive is that this was produced by Spike TV. I guess some of that money they get for running Ax Bodyspray ads all fuckin day goes to some good every once in a while.

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The most notable part of the movie is that Michael Jai White plays Tyson, in the role that brought him to somewhat-prominence. Before that he had a small part in TOXIC AVENGER 2-3 and was in a couple low-rent martial arts movies that I ought to track down one of these days, but this is what got him the bigger roles like, uh, Spawn.

You know, in the first UNDISPUTED the Ving Rhames character was clearly inspired by Mike Tyson. I think he was the current-champ, not the former-champ, but he was in prison on a rape charge that he denied. I’m not sure if I thought about it before that when Michael Jai White took over the character for part II it was the same guy who played Mike Tyson! This movie ends with him about to go to prison, so for a real weird experience I challenge somebody to watch TYSON, then UNDISPUTED, then UNDISPUTED II all in a row.

It’s a tough job but I think White does good, somehow changing his gravelly, deep voice into the high pitched Mike Tyson lisp without it seeming laughable. He masters an open-mouthed, dead-eyed look that at times seems kind of blank for the star of a movie but at the same time is very Mike Tyson. The movie starts with him as a little kid shooting at people on a basketball court and ends with him about to go to prison for rape, and he never seems to really mature or learn anything during that time. He’s kind of like a big child who’s just really good at boxing.

George C. Scott plays Mike’s mentor Cus D’Amato, who yells at him for stealing his ice cream but also sides with him when the other people at the gym get pissed at him for dispappearing, getting into trouble and hitting on underage girls. It’s arguable whether this version of D’Amato is a good role model (he does get him off the streets, but also says he should leave school because it’s a bad influence). But this is the best part of the movie, the relationship between the growly old white man and the boyish, muscular punching machine.

Paul Winfield plays Don King as an over-the-top cartoonish supervillain – in other words, he underplays it. But it’s pretty good casting. Robin Givens (Kristen Wilson) is instantly hatable even before she’s supposed to be – talking to Mike on the phone the first time she keeps asking, “To whom am I speaking?” in a fake aristocratic accent. Again, almost too subtle for the real person.

Like any TV biopic it mostly plays as a runthrough of the famous events in the guy’s press bio. There’s even a montage with the newspaper headline “Respect For Tyson Grows and Grows” in order to communicate that in this point of the story respect for Tyson grows and grows. Whenever he’s on TV for a press conference or interview it seems to cut to his family or friends sitting around in a big group watching. That way when he just sits there while Robin tears him up in that Barbara Walters interview we get to see Malcolm Jamal Warner (who plays his best friend by the way) saying they must’ve drugged him. I learned from Wikipedia that there was an episode of THE COSBY SHOW called “Theo and the Older Woman” where the real Robin Givens was the older woman. I wonder how he felt about doing that scene?

Tyson mostly seems like a victim or at least passive witness to the events of his life. He has this talent but he doesn’t really know anything else and therefore people take advantage of him and push his true friends out of the way. The most dramatic scenes are a couple that show him as not just angry but downright crazy. In one he starts berating his sparring partners and beating them to a pulp, in another he’s following some girls and somehow ends up running into the back of a convenience store and getting into a racial conflict with the owners. Malcolm Jamal Warner doesn’t even know what got into him. That was a pretty good scene.

But more often it suffers from the old based-on-a-true-story curse: they don’t really know for sure what happened, and they don’t want to get sued, or look stupid by being wrong, or piss people off by portraying it in a way that they think is wrong. So in most of the controversial areas they imply one way and then don’t set it in stone. Don King comes across as a sleazy con artist, but it never says he’s ripping him off. Robin Givens and her mom seem to be golddiggers (and faking a pregnancy and miscarriage for his benefit), but if so Mike never admits it. We see him just before picking up girls, just before going into the hotel room with Desiree Washington (looking up to no good)… not that I necessarily want to see these things play out, but in every case where the movie has a tough decision to make it chooses the path where it runs away like a sissy.

Another problem is not the fault of the movie, but it’s obsolete now because Mike Tyson got much more interesting after this was made. In prison he converted to Islam, got some crazy communist tattoos, he got the title again and then got far more washed-up before. Plus he got his face tattoo and, most important of all by far, bit off Evander Holyfield’s ear. And a Mike Tyson biography without ear-biting is like NORTH BY NORTHWEST without the cropduster. Maybe they should add some text at the end: “In 1997, Tyson bit off a chunk of Evander Holyfield’s ear.”

Even the earlier events are kind of obsolete now because they’re more interesting told in Tyson’s point-of-view in the TYSON documentary. In fact, this movie is easier on him than that one is, glossing over his extramarital affairs, his crimes when he was younger and his eventual laziness. That one shows more of his flamboyant side too, with all the clips of him saying crazy shit at the ringside. In this one he’s kind of bland.

But don’t worry, if you are disappointed in the movie and it is not yet 1996 there is an offer at the end of the video where you can send in to be reimbursed up to $2.50 for your rental. When I watched it it was 2009 so the offer was no good, but I probaly wouldn’t have sent in anyway. It was about as good as I figured it would be.

[ratings]

TYSON is a documentary about Mike Tyson. Actually, it’s an interview with Mike Tyson, illustrated by old clips and photos, so it’s his life story and career from his point of view. In the beginning there’s some split screen with overlapping clips of him talking. For a second I thought “Oh shit, that’s right, James Toback did that shitty movie TIMECODE with the 4-way split-screen. I forgot about that movie.” (I bet you forgot about it too until I mentioned it. Sorry.)  But don’t worry, most of it is a simple, straightforward documentary about an unusual person.

[UPDATE: and as Handsome Dan pointed out in the comments I was confusing Toback with Mike Figgis. Toback is guilty of BLACK AND WHITE, but innocent of TIMECODE.]

I don’t really follow boxing so I didn’t know much about him, and it turns out it’s an interesting story. He talks about being picked on as a kid, then getting in his first fight (a guy killed his pigeon) and winning. That changed his whole attitude about himself. Then he started boxing and he met this grizzled old white guy Cus D’Amato, he’s like Burgess Meredith in ROCKY, he takes Mike under his wing and molds him mentally and physically into a warrior. At first Mike wasn’t taking it that seriously, he was still on the streets robbing people and shit, until this D’Amato convinced him he could be great. They had a father-son type relationship, you see through vintage interviews how much they meant to each other, then the guy died when Mike was 19. Real sad story.

Well, there was no turning back, he was an incredible boxer and he quickly pounded his way to world champ. In the movie he talks through a bunch of the important fights, then what it was like to be world famous at that age. Vintage Tom Brokaw and Barbara Walters clips pop up talking about his marriage to Robin Givens from HEAD OF THE CLASS. Man, I forgot about that interview, anybody remember that? They’re sitting together and Robin is just tearing him apart for the cameras, acting like an angry mother, calling him “Michael” and saying he’s manic depressive and listing everything he does wrong. And here’s this guy famous for punching the shit out of people, he just sits there with a helpless look on his face and doesn’t say shit. Don’t get me wrong, he was obviously a terrible husband (he says he cheated on her all the time) so you can’t feel too sorry for him, but it’s just weird to see.

Of course the movie has to deal with his rape charge and prison time. He claims he’s innocent and it’s obvious that he’s really bitter about it, but he seems to imply that he didn’t do it that time. It’s kind of like earlier in the movie he talks about being accused of stealing some money when he was a kid, and he didn’t do it but he did have $1500 in his pocket from other crimes so nobody believed him. There’s a scene where he talks about how he likes his sex and it’s kind of disturbing, it’s easy to imagine him not knowing where to draw a line.

He also tells the whole story about biting a chunk out of Evander Holyfield’s ear, and from his point-of-view it makes alot more sense. He blames “accidental headbutts” for losing the title to Holyfield – he kept blacking out and he knew he hadn’t been hit, he didn’t understand what was going on. When the same thing started happening in the rematch it enraged him, he couldn’t believe this guy was doing that to him again, so he went crazy and started biting. He doesn’t really try to justify it, just explain it. I mean, how are you gonna convince somebody to agree with you biting a guy’s ear off? All you can do is explain why it seemed like a good idea at the time. I hope that will be instructive for other ear-biters.

They don’t dwell too much on those moments of insanity, and they don’t even play the whole clip when he threatened to eat his opponent’s children. They do have the clip of when he was with Don King, an entourage and a bunch of cameras the night he got out of prison. Some passerby yells something about how he should be in a straight jacket, and Tyson snaps. It’s like he’s still in the yard, he starts yelling about this “punk ass white boy” and “faggot” and what he’s gonna do to him, including but not limited to “I’ll eat your asshole alive you bitch!” and  “I’ll fuck you ’til you love me!” The funny thing is his entourage doesn’t even really grab him and hold him back or calm him down or anything.

The guy he’s yelling at is never on camera. Too bad, because I bet you could actually see his whole head of hair turn white. It would look like a cheesy special effect, but everybody who was there would swear it really happened. That’s gotta be the most pit of the stomach, shit in the pants scared this dude has ever or will ever be, by far. He must’ve felt like a bear was lunging at his throat but got distracted by honey at the last second. This is the risk you take in this whole Best Week Ever, gossip blog world of everybody making their snarky comments about celebrities, like it’s any of their business. If that’s your thing and you like to say it to the celebrities in person then I recommend choosing a celebrity who is not known for knocking people unconscious with his hands. Just as a rule of thumb. Choose some weeny from American Idol or something, just for safety purposes.

This is an interesting movie because Tyson is such a larger than life character. I mean look at the guy, he’s got a white long-sleeved button up shirt on, like he’s trying to look nice, but he’s got a fuckin Maori war tattoo on his face. You do alot of staring at his face during the movie, noticing how much his nose has gotten pounded in. He looks in shape. It becomes clear that he can’t box like he used to, but he sure looks scarier now than he ever did. And strangely dignified, at least when he wears a nice shirt.

But what really hit me most about the movie is the way it shows this kind of universal tragedy of the guy who works really hard, becomes amazing at something — and then fizzles out. Maybe it’s the fame and the money, maybe it’s just the inevitable cycle of things. When he brags “I’m the best there ever was!” it’s not a completely ridiculous claim. But by the end of his boxing career he’s losing fights, he’s not trying very hard. I never knew about his last fight – he loses to a white dude, and then in the ringside interview he says that his heart’s not really in it anymore, he knows he can’t really fight and he just did it for the money. Honest but sad as hell.

Before the movie they had a trailer for another documentary that’s coming out that’s about Lebron James, focusing on his high school team and how amazing he’s been since a very young age. And that guy’s at his peak right now but TYSON makes you dread the (hopefully not really) inevitable burn out.

And it makes me think of people in all other areas who are great at something. Like, this seems to be the way with rappers. Most of the legendary rappers make about 1-3 great albums early in their career. Then they stay around for years but never recapture that. I was thinking about that because there were a couple albums that came out recently that I was looking forward to, from guys that haven’t had new albums in a while and who used to be the best. And they got some good songs on there but, you know, not greatness. Personally I really hate the southern style of rap that’s so popular now, where it’s based on simple outdated keyboard riffs and robots singing and chants of “oh! oh! ooooooHHH!” and shit like that. I just don’t get it at all, to me it sounds exactly like what the great hip hop sounds like to those dudes who say “it’s not even MUSIC!”

So I don’t understand why a guy from New York or L.A. who created legendary, even groundbreaking, much-imitated music is now coming out with albums imitating the crude shit that is popular now, putting 25 different guest stars on his album, hiring a different producer for every track. It doesn’t make any sense to me. These guys are always comparing themselves in their lyrics to Clint Eastwood, Steven Seagal, Bruce Willis. You stupid motherfuckers – Clint Eastwood didn’t ask the cast of HIGH SCHOOL MUSICAL to join him in GRAN TORINO. And he didn’t put any matrixy bullet time in there, or Jason Bourne camera wiggles. He went in alone and made a fucking Clint Eastwood movie, because that’s what he’s good at. Worry about being great again, not about hitting the charts again. If you live to be 80 you’ll be more proud of the albums you made than of all the money you put into your shark tank.

But, you know, that’s the cycle that TYSON makes you fear, the inevitability that if you’re great at something it won’t last forever. So the new Wu-Tang album might be pretty good but it’s never gonna be 36 Chambers. Or even 18 chambers. That’s the tragedy of TYSON. You can only be the best there ever was for a couple years, and then you’re just that dude that doesn’t have it in him anymore.

(unless you’re Clint Eastwood)

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