Were we kings?

Just watched Ali, a partly fictionalized biopic of Muhammad Ali starring Will Smith. Much of it is a fascinating collage of race, religion, and politics; the backdrop and the side stories are as interesting as the main story. I'm certain that I missed quite a lot of the political stuff (what was up with the sudden appearance of Idi Amin right near the end?); most of what I understood of the political backdrop was because of having read the Autobiography of Malcolm X a few years back.

Will Smith is good in this as usual. The man can be incredibly charismatic when he wants to be. Really, the whole cast is pretty good here. A lot of the dialogue is excellent, too—I assume a lot of it is actual historical quotes. If the dialogue is accurate, Ali was smart and funny and charming as hell, especially in interactions with Howard Cosell.

Jon Voight is fine as Cosell, by the way, except that his face looks like it's made of plastic and about to melt every time he appears. The extreme face-lift look.

Smith does do a couple of weird things. Many of his lines end in oddly flat intonation; I don't think Smith usually talks like that, so I assume it's intended to mimic the real Ali. Also, Smith frequently wears an expression throughout the movie that I tend to interpret as fear/worry; I kept thinking before the fights that he was really afraid that he was going to lose. There are some very nice moments of watching his face in silent emotion when it's quite clear what he's feeling; but there are also some very long moments in which I just wasn't sure what was going through his head.

Apparently the filmmakers were worried, at other moments, that we wouldn't know what was going through his head, 'cause they inserted goofy little voiceovers at four or five moments in the movie. Weird choice.

The movie's comprised of odd and interesting choices, really. The choice of having loud and intrusive music (often with lyrics that explicitly reflect what's going on in the story) through most of the movie was, imo, something of a mistake. The choice of which story to tell, where to begin and end, isn't an obvious one for most real lives, I think; it seemed to me that they largely did a good job with that, though the ending feels a little inconclusive to me simply because it's not the end of Ali's life story. The structural choices the filmmakers made are particularly odd: lots of oblique little scenes, lots of big time jumps with few cues, lots of scenes that go on a little longer than I could see much reason for. Ebert's review says, among other things: "Michael Mann's story of these 10 years is told in the style of events overheard—this isn't a documentary, but it seems to lack a fiction's privileged access to its hero." That's true, and yet I thought it was a kind of interesting effect. Almost as though this is really a bunch of other people's movies (Malcolm X's in particular) that Ali just happens to be a major participant in.

I haven't seen When We Were Kings, so I can't comment on the IMDB reviewer's note that this is much too much like that documentary. But now I'm kinda interested in seeing it. Also in seeing Malcolm X, which I somehow never got around to doing.

I tended to assume through much of this movie that, unlike (say) Apollo 13, it was aimed particularly at people who lived through the time and had a fairly good idea of what was going on in the interstices. Which is why I missed some stuff. For example, I saw LeVar (Geordi La Forge) Burton's name in the opening credits, and spent various bits of the movie wondering who he played; it wasn't until the closing credits that I discovered that he played MLK, who I hadn't thought appeared in the movie at all, and it wasn't until reading some reviews that I figured out that we see him just after he's been shot, only I'd had no idea who it was we were seeing.

But at the same time, my assumptions that various things would make more sense to those more versed in the history made me forgiving of some of the lapses and oddities of the structural choices, so it was probably the right attitude to take.

I could say more, about violence and boxing and the notion (which I'd never encountered 'til recently but I now gather is widely understood to be true) that for most black couples portrayed in movies, the man is darker-skinned and the woman lighter-skinned. But I should go to bed instead.

How likely is it that I'll get around to writing up reviews of Finding Nemo (a.k.a. Fish Story or maybe A Fish's Life) and Winged Migration and The Matrix and Monster's Ball, all of which I've seen (all with Kam, now that I think of it) in the past two weeks, anytime soon? Not very likely, alas. But we'll see.

One Response to “Were we kings?”

  1. M.

    I highly recommend “Malcolm X.” It is, of course, somewhat sensationalised, but Washington’s performace, and his physical control, is fantastic.

    “…for most black couples portrayed in movies, the man is darker-skinned and the woman lighter-skinned.”

    I can’t speak to that particularly, but I can speak to an interesting correlation. In a “Women In Literature” course in college we were studying several African American authors and had a visiting professor. He was black. He spoke to the black women in the class first. He asked, “how many of you have been told to marry a light-skinned man by your mothers, or that you should date a light-skinned man?” It was a small class, and a nice, tight-nit group of all women. Every single one of them raised their hands, laughing. Needless to say, this led to a fantastic discussion of American racial issues (not just African-American) for which 2 hours was not nearly enough.

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