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busterstronghart
Reviews
Bittersweet (2008)
Greg Levin fails analysis of love, writing and directing at the same time.
The introduction to this movie is so bad that I was angry at the director ten minutes or less into the movie, for his self-indulgent portraits of countless couples, pairs of babies, and contrived cute photography of small children. Perhaps a department store baby photographer could learn something from this amateur introduction before the title of the movie, before the name of the film. Or, perhaps I should have taken warning at the point that the title finally is shown on screen, in 'artful' minimal cartography, at the left most side of the frame, something that was new in the fifties. And then there is the boring music. After a scene in which two teenagers, or college kids, maybe, are lounging on the floor drinking a pint of Jack Daniels, (label shown carefully over and over again, by the way) the scene changes to a dance club disco like scene with pounding, very annoying music, the camera shooting from the floor and then from angles that only a contortionist using a hand-held could manage. At this point I fast-forwarded, hoping to make sense of something, only to find one of the couples in the toilet, the female at the throne, head deep into it, tossing up whatever she had ingested that night. This was the point at which I had enough--not because she was vomiting, but because my own stomach was turning over with impatience for the movie to get started. I lost hope and gave up, cowardly leaving my wife to deal with this; just I used to leave her to deal with boring guests at our dinner parties. My wife, a woman of extreme patience with drivel and small children, tells me that basically the writer-director Greg Levins was attempting to dissect the mystery of love and relationship, the chemistry of mutual attraction, and the failure of the magic that ends relationships.
Tyson (2008)
Tyson's story the way it is.
Tyson, the documentary is a new film: When I saw Tyson fight in his younger days, even before he became Heavyweight Champion of the World, when there was only one Heavyweight Champ, I thought that no one would beat him until he would be in his late thirties. I thought he was the only champ who would beat Joe Louis' record 12 year reign...
To me he was furious, the fiercest, most fearsome boxer that I had ever seen. I wanted to check his gloves for the horseshoes that must have been there.
(My father, the real expert, an amateur boxer in his lightweight days, and a real fan, and, further, unlike me, a man who had actually seen fights in person since his short pants days, did not agree -- but he was wrong -- the only time.) -- Dad gave the tip of his hat to Joe Louis, Muhammad Ali, and Rocky Marciano. -- and he wasn't sure about Ali. (But, as I said, he was wrong...) And then I heard Tyson on the radio with Joyce Carol Oates ( a boxing fan who had written a non-fiction book called "On Boxing," and the "Amazin' Bill Mazer, a man with total recall, who knew everything there was to know about every fighter going back and probably beyond bare fisted days, beyond Sullivan, Fitzsimmons and Corbett.
But Mike Tyson, the lispy kid fighter, from Brownsville, who owned the Undisputed World's Heavyweight Championship, was right up there with the Amazin' One, and with Joyce Carol Oates, holding his own in the kind of conversation that Norman Mailer had with Jose Torres, Pete Hamill, and Budd Schulberg.
From that moment on I became a Tyson fan, and his unexpected, shocking downfall has been a twenty year disappointment to me.
The movie opens only in NYC and LA, so you lucky ones who live there should go to see it no matter what you think of Mike The Tragic Tyson. We can all learn, even at this age, from our fallen idols. (Well, Joyce, you're not up there with the rest of us, but you will be.) mek Here's something I wrote 12 months ago: Other important matters: recently a book on boxing was written in England. Joyce Carol Oates reviewed it in the New York Review and she mentioned something similar. You may not be aware of this but Oates is an expert on boxing and a fan. I heard her several years ago, with supralapsarian Mike Tyson (also an authority on the history of boxing) and the Amazin' Mazur, a sports announcer with an encyclopedic memory. She fit right in. And Tyson was pretty good too! This is Oates writing: "The symbolism of boxing does not allow for ambiguity: it is as middleweight Albert Camus put it, 'utterly Manichean.' The rites of boxing 'simplify' everything. Good and evil, the winner and the loser. " Later she writes,: Here's "a quote attributed to Sonny Liston: ' It's always the same story--the good guy verses the bad guy.' " What strikes me here is not so much that Camus and Liston arrive at the same conclusion, but rather that Liston's expression is so perfect, so succinct. The simple use of the five cent word instead of the two dollar word.