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Boxing is our most controversial American sport, always, it seems, on the brink of being abolished. Its detractors speak of it in contempt as a "so-called 'sport,'" and surely their logic is correct: if "sport" means harmless play, boxing is not a sport; it is certainly not a game. But "sport" can signify a paradigm of life, a reduction of its complexities in terms of a single symbolic action--in this case its competitiveness, the cruelty of its Darwinian enterprise--defined and restrained by any number of rules, regulations, and customs: in which case boxing is probably, as the ex-heavyweight champion George Foreman has said, the sport to which all other sports aspire. It is the quintessential image of human struggle, masculine or otherwise, against not only other people but one's own divided self. 
-- Joyce Carol Oates

Someday, they're gonna write a blues song just for fighters. It'll be for slow guitar, soft trumpet and a bell.
-- Sonny Liston

As a child somewhere on the journey towards adolescence in the mid-to-late 1980s, there were certain names that brought with them entire worlds. "Maradona" was one this little Canadian Scot spent a lot of time rolling around his tongue, while balls rolled around football pitches marked out by jumpers and trees, at the feet of players far more capable than he. "Schwarzenegger" and "Stallone" made for air machine guns, bandannas, throwing each other in the mud and learning to love the art of gratuitious bloodshed.

Then there was Tyson. Tyson was what the older kids who worked at the slaughterhouse would name their dogs (and, eventually, their children). Tyson was huddled conversations under the bridge about sixty second knockouts, older cousins with cigarettes in their mouths, replaying the fist swings with a slow and sincere reverence. Tyson was in the playground, our heads smashed against walls by the bulkier and more slowly moving amongst us, games of British Bulldogs suddenly turning to the heavyweight championship for inspiration. Seconds out, they'd shout, and the bricks were only ever those seconds away.

At the time, Joyce Carol Oates was writing very smart and eventually legendary work on Tyson, contextualising him amongst the greats. But the rumble in the jungle, to us, was probably an episode of GI Joe. We were becoming vaguely aware that Cassius Clay and Muhammad Ali were the same person but could not tell you the reasons why. Frank Bruno was on the Saturday telly, that lovely Irish McGuigan lad too. But those weren't the word that made the world shake.

That word was Tyson.

I knew nothing of boxing, but I knew what I saw. That vicious, raw, pure distillation of the fight. Kid Dynamite transformed into Iron Mike. The purists hated him. He wasn't the art. The world did not dance on his fists. It was pummelled. He was unbeatable because you can't beat rage like that. You can't beat the streets, and the prisons, and the anger.

You know what happened. Others have written it better. Those who actually know something about boxing. Start with David Remnick and go on from there. There was the rape. The prison sentence. The comeback. Evander Holyfield. The ear bite. Fuck you til you love me, faggot. Don King. The collapse. Dragging boxing down with him.

And always, at the center, that man, that strange, self-victimising madman with the motor mouth. With his mansions abandoned, he is reduced to that hoariest of cliches, the fallen heavyweight champ. The Raging Bull. The Sonny Liston. Long ago a realisation there would be no triumphant Balboa return, horns ablaze. This was it.

When I'm not setting overstuffed boats of prose adrift on these pages, I am occasionally reminded that this thing is actually meant to be a blog. As such, it is honour-bound to pay tribute to a few of the ancient traditions of the medium, established by our once and future kings in a neolithic age of model railway clubs tinkering with supercomputers. I refer of course to the year-end "best of" post. So, I'll bite. I'll give you some lists. My weekly distraction of presenting a radio show devoted to the musical arts has already produced a not-stressed-about-enough plain-old top ten albums of the year list, so I won't retread that here. Let's try a few other things out.

The James McNulty Awards for Excellence in Television

1. The Wire drawing to a close. Say what you will about the relative strength of the newspaper arc relative to previous seasons, but for a show that promised to be the greatest television show ever made, we were not let down -- it finished as so much more than that. It wasn't about cops. It wasn't in the end even about The City, which I'd thought it was for the first few years. It was about hope, about systems, about order, dignity, dreams and change; it was about humanity, about the sheer brutal fucking hopelessness and futility that comes with trying to live and be part of this world. It was pretty funny too. I shan't spoil for those unfinished, but the final scene between Michael and Dookie may just be the most heartbreaking thing I've ever seen. For those entirely Wire virginal, perhaps because too many people have told you how excellent it is and that means you'll never watch it, don't be stupid. Get thee to a downloadery now.
2. The part in the first episode of the new Knight Rider series where the hot young leads strip to their underwear inside KITT, even before the opening credits. After KITT has changed both into and back from a GM pick-up truck. And just after they've been hit by a missile, after escaping from a tuxedo party in "Foreign Consulate, USA". To quote sassy nerd chick back at sassy control bunker full of sassy blinking lights: "Things just got interesting!"
3. David Simon and Ed Burns get a second nod for what was, in the end, an underappreciated series, Generation Kill. This mini-series managed a tough balancing act, presenting a scathing assessment of the early stages of the Iraq war and its planning, while being fair and loving and fiercely proud of the troops on the ground, be they racist fuckup redneck shits or genuinely good sensitive guys lost in a desert far from moral ground. They are the people that were sent there to die. For long-stretches of episodes, nothing happens except the talking of crap. And then things go crazy. And then more crap is talked. We stay frosty, we wait. I'm naive in the art of warfare, I'll admit, but this felt so much more real, immediate and important than any of the hundreds of preachy message films released on same topic by Hollywood this year.
4. Lost not just jumping the Dharma-branded shark but sucking it into a space-time vortex and moving it somewhere where we'll never find it. Season four was glorious and silly and not at all concerned any more for the impatient, or those who don't feel like googling theoretical physicists. As it should never have been.
5. 24: "Redemption", in which JACK BAUER saves Africa in two hours with no help from those pesky UN-ocrats who just won't think of the CHILDREN. See particularly JACK BAUER using Crocodile Dundee-style animal-taming hypnosis against a wild-eyed child soldier.
6. Jimmy Smits on Dexter. The third season of everybody's favourite good-guy serial killer show got mixed reviews -- I loved it, but mostly because I spent the entire season trying to figure out just what the hell was going on with Smits' completely nutso performance. It can be tough to play against everything Michael C. Hall has brought to the title role, but Smits went punch for punch and scalpel blade for scalpel blade.

A screaming comes across the sky. It has happened before, but there is nothing to compare it to now.
-- Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow

In Stephanie Zacharek's wonderful review of Paul Greengrass' United 93 for Salon, she poses the question "What's the value of artistry that sucks the life out of you?". I was wondering that same question in a different context just the other night, watching Mogwai at their raucous best in the crowded confines of the Corner Hotel in Richmond. The noises they were making were undoubtedly beautiful, even when troublesome, but there was something altogether more unwholesome and challenging at play beneath the surface, hidden deep in frequencies we rarely encounter. It was the experience of sonic assault, a sensation of the body's immune system kicking in to attempt to repel the invading sounds, the challenge of not passing out (a challenge which the odd punter around the venue appeared to fail). The finest moment in Mogwai's output--that part on "Christmas Steps" towards the end of Come On, Die Young where the delicately plucked guitars are crept up on by a bass warning of impending doom, where you've been lulled into drowsiness but then slowly pull yourself to, just in time for two guitars to crash in like precision bombs, scattering the remnants of the song in a thousand directions--serves as an introduction to a good hour or so of pure attack. You stand in awe at the artistry of it all, but you also have to wonder just what you're doing subjecting your eardrums and your internals to it. What's the value of this artistry? Why would I subject myself to this pain?

And just two days later, on the other side of the country in the comfort of a beanbag in a private screening room, I experience what in some ways is an even more visceral shock.

It's been five years since September 11. We've begun to see many films dealing with the fallout of the event, and everything that happened since, in America, in Afghanistan, in Iraq. Some incredible films, such as Michael Winterbottom's upcoming Road to Guantanamo, turn a very disturbing critical eye on the American government. But the world was a very different place on the morning of September 11, 2001 and we've not yet had a film which documents, without conspiracy theories and schmaltzy hollywood heroics, that shock of the western world lurching into somewhere new.

There were four planes that crashed on September 11. Two hit the World Trade Center, one hit the Pentagon. The fourth never reached its target -- United Airlines flight 93, which was probably on its way to the White House or the Capitol building in Washington, crashed into a field in Virginia after its passengers, realising their flight was on a suicide mission, overpowered their captors and steered the plane into the ground.

It's the stuff of legend, myth even. What we've pieced together in ensuing years has become part of our post 9-11 culture. That last line former footballer Todd Beamer uttered before the passengers rushed to their death, it's been repeated by presidents and musicians ad nauseum. It became a call to arms. "Let's roll."

United 93 is the story of that flight, and of that day. Many people have asked whether this film needed to be made, or if it needed to be made yet. And I'm not sure I know the answer to that -- it is certainly one of the most harrowing filmgoing experiences I have ever had. For the last 20 minutes of the film, in their painful, woozy inevitability, I found my hands gripped hard to the side of the chair. It hurt like hell.

Technorati Tags: film, greengrass, united 93

I watch hundreds of films a year, but very few have boiled my blood so hotly as current Australian supposed critical darling 2:37. The product of 22 year-old wunderkind Murali K. Thalluri, the film is supposedly one of the best films to come out of the country this year. It screened in Un Certain Regard at Cannes--to ovations--and has been selected in the Toronto International Film Festival. The local distributors are hyping both its director and his story, seductive as they are, and the film is being sold as an important piece of Australian art that has a vital message for teenagers everywhere. A pity that the film is a cynical, almost dangerous exercise in exploitation that risks becoming, when all eventually outs, the poster-child for all that is wrong with our film industry, beyond the usual scapegoats of funding bodies (who had no role in this film other than not funding it).

My problems with the film are only partly aesthetic. Firstly, it so shamelessly rips off Gus Van Sant's Elephant that it is tough to believe so few critics have had the guts to call it on its plagiarism. The issue has been talked around. It's similar, they say. Very similar. Almost too similar. But... Say it! He has taken entire shots from the film. Entire extended sequences. Not in a "Brian de Palma does the Odessa Steps" tribute way, either. It's plagiarism, pure and simple. He's even hired van Sant's sound designer from Elephant to make it just exactly, precisely identical. It amazes me that it was screened at Cannes so soon after Elephant took the Palmes D'Or. David Stratton's review in The Australian this morning struggles to find a single good thing to say about the film, yet gives it three stars. I call this the Australian Film Prop Up. It is one of the many reasons our film industry is sick to its core.

And the genius of this plagiarism? It has allowed a snake oil salesman to pass himself off as a talented director by stealing somebody else's visual invention. I've been unable to say what I've truly felt about this film outside of my circle of friends, but now that it's out there in the media and I can use the word "alleged", I can repeat what my instincts told me when I met the man last week. It is alleged in today's Australian that the suicide of his friend to which he alludes may not have happened. Thalluri has claimed repeatedly that he made this film to save his own life, to deal with the suicide of his friend. When I heard him say this, to my face, it shocked me how little heart seemed to be in the words. It felt like a sales pitch.

I asked him: how, in your early twenties, did you get to the stage of making a film? And he told me an anecdote, about a book that provided inspiration in getting ahead. Catch Me If You Can. The autobiography of Frank W. Abagnale. You know the guy -- possibly the greatest conman of the last fifty years. Took everybody for a ride by posing as a pilot, a doctor, whatever he felt like. Spielberg made the film. Thalluri admitted posing as a qualified actor and using a faked certificate to teach an acting course, where he scooped up the talent for his film. He said this, and something clicked. It all made sense, and I wondered about the chutzpah of someone admitting their inspiration came from a con man. Was the industry happily jumping on Thalluri's grand, classic confidence trick? Could he be that confident in his plan? Or was I reading it all wrong?

The film itself reads like the experience of high school written by somebody who never had any real experience in high school. The parade of characters--an overachieving student with parents who pressure him, a princess hiding her bulimia, a jock struggling with his secret sexuality, a stoner, a fat freak and a pregnant girl--seem as though they were purchased from the heavily-stocked discount racks at 2D High School Characters R Us. Not a single original emotion or sentiment is expressed from any of them, yet Thalluri's script has them unimaginatively plodding towards an inevitable suicide without revealing anything surprising. Essentially the film is a twisted whodunit--somebody will die, but we don't know who. By the time the film has the cojones to hit you in the face with a Usual Suspects ending (presuming you didn't notice the blatant clues as to the real death, obvious to anybody with the slightest bit of filmwatching experience), it's all so absurdly insulting that you just don't care anymore. Extended gratuitous rape and suicide scenes only make things worse, manipulating the audience (and throwing Requiem behind the blood) so they think they've felt something real. And the suicide depiction is perhaps the most irresponsible, immature aspect of the film, showing in lurid, fascinated detail the precise method to slash one's wrists. Most teen wrist-slash suicides fail because they don't know how to do it. Though I'm rarely one to join on the bandwagon of those who say that depictions of rape/abuse/drug use/murder/cannibalism/speeding in films encourage people to act out same in real life (still remembering those absurd warnings after watching Superman on television to not go jumping off buildings, chill'un), something in the suicide scene--I can't say what for sure with all the lurid reds saturating the screen--crossed a line I never knew I had drawn.

For an example of the disconnect between critics and audiences, this page at YourMovies.com.au provides a brilliant illustration -- compare and contrast the critic's view to audience reaction.

I asked him about Elephant, about the (cough) striking similarities. He told me that it was an honour to be mentioned in the same breath as van Sant. Had I any guts, I would have pointed out that I wasn't saying it as a compliment. But live radio sometimes doesn't give you the opportunity to go with your gut. He told me that Gus van Sant actually called him to say that he very much liked the film. This seemed convincing for about the time it took for the interview to finish and him to leave the room. Shortly thereafter, I was visited by l'esprit d'escalier, who told me I may well have been fleeced. I do not for a moment believe that van Sant called Thalluri. Had I followed my gut, I would have put the guy on the rails, demanded details of this phone call and how and when it happened. But I did not. I'm happy to be wrong, but I'm wondering if there's a way the internet can tell us--Gus, have you ever spoken to Murali?

Everything about this film is slowly unravelling. Claims of a 17-minute ovation at Cannes are now looking to be fabrications, and the only foreign review of any substance I can find is a slamming in Variety. This is also the only foreign review quoted on the film's publicity material, using the old trick (to which I myself have fallen victim in the past) of taking the one positive, constructive sentence from an otherwise damning review and putting it on the poster.

I'd love to be wrong about Thalluri. I really would. Perhaps he's just a guy with a gift for getting things done, who really did go through his friend's suicide and his own failed attempt, made a terrible, exploitative film to deal with it, and lucked onto some good reviews, riding on the back of the Australian press's inability to say what it really means about Australian films (or in this case to remember what high school felt like). I really hope that's the case. If it is - Murali, I will apologise in full and in public and retract my suspicions (but not my opinion of your film). And I hope the big Hollywood film you've signed a deal for that you couldn't say anything about is not another fiction.

Something has been screaming to me that there is something else at play in this story. The story being sold was too seductive, too easy to distil into soundbites. "This film saved my life", he says, over and over. As do the distributors. And the critics. And the cinemas. It feels like the machinery of a long, and potentially spectacular, con. I knew a journalist with more guts than I would finally ask him the question I could not, the one that perhaps may have been considered a shield for our director. How can you stare a man in the face and say to him, as he confesses his friend's suicide and how it tore him apart, "prove it"?

One hopes Thalluri is not the film industry's Demidenko or LeRoy, but if he is, then a few old men will rightly have their feathers ruffled and will learn an important lesson: if it looks like shit, and if it smells like shit, the fact that it's Australian shit doesn't mean you need to shovel it.

Technorati Tags: 2:37, film, thalluri

Lord of War opens on a carpet of bullets, abstract swirls of steel forming some kind of twisted main street in some kind of twisted African war-ridden town. Standing amongst the spent shells and dust is Nicolas Cage who--in his trademarked semi-stoned and permanently sardonic tone--provides us with useful statistics on the current state of munitions supply around the globe. Handguns are the real weapons of mass destruction. There is one gun, he says, for every twelve people in the world. The question, he asks, is how to arm the other eleven.

And then we are on what will soon be a bullet, making its way along a conveyor belt in a factory, probably somewhere in Russia. As the credits roll, we follow that newborn angel of death on its journey, through the factory, into crates, to military suppliers, kicked with backhanders to somewhere in Africa, still rolling about but closer to its inevitable end. Through the cracks in the crate, we see militia-men taking its possession, and then we ride on the back of a jeep to the middle of a shootout. Eventually, a hand grabs our hero and loads him into a barrel. We watch his neighbours exit the chamber first, and then it's his turn, ready to go, staring down through the barrel. And then he flies, as he has flown all the way from that factory, between the eyes and into the brain of a boy who could hardly be twelve.

Writer-director Andrew Niccol could hardly be accused of subtlety. While we follow the journey of that lone bullet, we're hearing Buffalo Springfield. "For What It's Worth", for chrissakes. "I think it's time we stop, children, what's that sound. Everybody look what's going down." Lord of War is an angry film, and a funny film, and one that dares take on the darkest of subjects in the riskiest of ways: satire. Previously, Niccol has brilliantly taken on science and genetic engineering in the sadly underloved Gattaca and the nature of media and representation in The Truman Show is never a man afraid to make an angry point, and to make it with a sledgehammer. Truman was loaded with speechmaking, and angry shouts of "you never had a camera in my head!" that should never have worked, but there was something about the tone that let Niccol and his director Peter Weir get away with it and create something beautiful. Sometimes even a sledgehammer can be worth admiring.

Technorati Tags: film