In the debate over who is the greatest boxer who ever lived, filmmaker James Toback has cast his vote. His new documentary "Tyson" is about the controversial -- some say dangerous -- Mike Tyson.
Toback, a cantankerous sort who is not a household name, is better-known for films he wrote but didn't direct -- "The Gambler" (1974), starring James Caan and directed by Karel Reisz, and Warren Beatty's "Bugsy" (1991), directed by Barry Levinson.
Toback's quirky output includes "Fingers," "The Pick-up Artist," "Two Girls and a Guy" and "Harvard Man." He has a cult following. "Tyson" is his second documentary, his first being "The Big Bang" (1989), about the meaning of life.
While visiting Los Angeles in 2000, I attended a special screening of his "Black and White." Afterwards, Toback spoke about his work, and I can write that he was engaging, albeit genuinely off-beat.
"Tyson" opens with Tyson addressing the camera. He's in a well-appointed room and he's wearing a crisp, white shirt. As he talks about himself, the camera does not move for quite some time.
Eventually, Toback brings in boxing footage -- much of it grainy, overexposed or blown up. It's raw and rough-hewn, exactly what most people think of Tyson. Gradually, the movie brings in other elements, but through it all, Tyson will talk directly to you.
Toback lets Tyson reveal himself slowly and surely. We find out about the punks in his neighborhood who mocked him and beat him up. Some of them made fun of his teenage hobby -- his love of homing pigeons. One fool killed one of Mike's pigeons, and a furious, raging Tyson made mincemeat of him.
As the film progresses, we learn a lot about the fighter. A few others get their say. Tyson's beloved trainer Cus D'Amato saw his potential and brought him into his home. There is a father-and-son bond between them.
With Tyson sitting right next to her, we see his first wife, actress Robin Givens, tell Barbara Walters in a nationally televised broadcast that she's afraid of him.
And there's the media circus over the sexual assault of beauty queen Desiree Washington, for which he went to jail for three years. On camera, Tyson denies he raped Washington. Was he convicted because of his brutish reputation?
Few men lasted more than one round in many of his early bouts. Ring opponent Evander Holyfield lost part of an ear after Tyson bit it off, a moment shown and discussed.
As he talks and reveals more and more of himself, Tyson becomes less and less complex. Every word he speaks increases our knowledge about his beliefs, his psyche and his emotional makeup. It's like "The Elephant Man," in which everything builds until the main character says, "I am not an animal."
If D'Amato was Tyson's angel, was boxing promoter Don King his devil? One of the better parts of this very good documentary is when Tyson talks about his relationship with King. He calls him a "wretched, slimy, reptilian motherfucker," and says that King "would sell his own mother for a dollar." It's an eye-opening moment.
Tyson comes across as utterly sincere. You get a real sense of his development into one of the greatest boxers who ever fought. You appreciate his place in sports history.
He never explains away the negative things that swirled around him. He offers facts and tells what he thinks. His honest conversation with the audience is a gut-check for him.
There's not a note of objectivity in how Toback frames the story of Mike Tyson. That's not a bad thing. I came away from the movie with a greater understanding of the man, the myth and the mayhem.
With the three "Spider-Man" films under his belt, director Sam Raimi has returned to his horror-movie roots with "Drag Me to Hell." Raimi is especially famous for his "Evil Dead" trilogy. Interesting bit of trivia here: One of the stars of "Evil Dead II," Rick Domeier, is that tall, blond Nordic-looking pitchman you see hawking housewares and other things on the QVC shopping channel.
Raimi's idea of horror is not gross-out, slasher material. Philosophically, he's closer to director Wes Craven than he is to director James Wan and his "Saw" team. For lack of a better word, Raimi's approach to making people scream in a movie theater is old-fashioned.
"Drag Me to Hell" is simple and straightforward. An up-and-coming bank loan officer, sweet-looking and pleasant Christine Brown (perfectly played by Alison Lohman), rejects the pleas of a gnarled old lady not to be evicted from her home because she hasn't kept up her mortgage payments.
Christine wants a promotion to the vacant position of assistant manager and to live happily ever after with her amiable boyfriend Clay Dalton (nicely acted by Justin Long). She rejects any extension. The creepy woman delivers a supernatural curse. Satan will definitely come knocking.
In Raimi's vision, co-written with his older brother Ivan Raimi, Christine quickly grasps what's happening to her because of a series of incidents that made my skin crawl. She turns to a mystic to keep her from eternal damnation.
You're not getting another word out of me about what follows, but director Raimi is a master at building tension and making members of the audience very tense. He is also a master at blending imagery and sound, and there are aural moments that are stunning.
In addition to the many parts of the film guaranteed to frighten, some are wonderfully comic, laughter being a terrific release from the building tension.
"Drag Me to Hell" delivers exactly what it's supposed to. It's about an ordinary young woman facing an extraordinary challenge. As for me, I'll never look at a kitty cat or a fly the same way again.
"What Goes Up" is a thoroughly worthless movie. Jonathan Glatzer's directorial debut is off-kilter from start to finish, as if he plucked out bits of film from the middle of scenes.
He also wrote this mess. It's about an unhappy, emotionally adrift New York City newspaper reporter named Campbell Babbitt. He is sent by his editor to get a local color story in New Hampshire centering around the 1986 launch of the space shuttle Challenger, the one that carried the state's schoolteacher Christa McAuliffe for a few brief shining moments.
A male friend of his, a tormented soul, is a teacher in a small-town school up there.
When Babbitt arrives, he finds that his friend has killed himself (maybe), that the teacher's special education students are a group of uncool misfits (actually, they are all boring), and that the school's music teacher is a nasty, suspicious crone, who's played by the overrated Molly Shannon.
Steve Coogan, a gifted comic actor, plays Babbitt, but he can't go for laughs, because the movie is supposed to be a tragedy. Besides, laughter would indicate that some of the characters have personalities worth enjoying.
What follows after his arrival is utterly disjointed and uninteresting. And that's saying something, because the film includes statutory rape, masturbation, sexual abuse and the kidnapping of the dead, not to mention the aforementioned possible suicide and Challenger disaster.
Somehow, the miserable Babbitt has managed to get a leg up on winning a Pulitzer Prize for a story he wrote about a sad sack of a woman with whom he had a relationship. That's just one more ludicrous note in a thoroughly ridiculous movie.
| Niagara Falls Reporter | www.niagarafallsreporter.com | June 2 2009 |