Ali

ALI

I'll be straight up honest right now, I love boxing. Boxing is a sport where I feel I can always find a clear winner and that nothing is ever left to a tie. It's a sport that demands someone to push themselves to the absolute limit of their physical capabilities in order to rival the abilities of their opponent. Many people in the modern era believe boxing to be a brutal sport for barbaric numskulls who never received a proper education. While the latter portion of that statement may be true, I will argue that boxing is one of the most beautiful sports in human history. It takes a special person to be a great boxer, a person with grit, determination, a will of steel, the heart of a lion, and the strategic mind of a Centurion. There are no excuses, the better man will always win.

Muhammad Ali is one of the finest examples of what defines the term "boxer". Considered the "Greatest Of All Time" for all the right reasons, Ali's life is the perfect story for a fresh take on the boxing movie genre. Almost every movie regarding boxers and their craft involve them living in a crime infested section of a major city with no hopes or dreams and suddenly they get the chance of a lifetime that can only be achieved by two hours of personal conflicts and at least one ten minute training montage with an 80's power rock song in the background (I'm looking at you Rocky). The other type of boxing movie doesn't actually really involve the sport at all, but utilizes the sport as a way for a scrawny child to beat up bullies (Damn you Knockout). However, Muhammad Ali's story is a bit different in a surprisingly refreshing way as evidenced in Ali.

Tackling a biopic is one of the toughest challenges any director can face. The goal of a biopic is to visually tell the story of a famous/infamous person's life as accurately as possible and I don't mean accurate in just the way the story is told. The acting MUST be solid and the actors MUST look like their real life counterparts. In fact, I'd go as far to say that getting the physical appearances is the absolute most important part of a biopic. If you get it wrong, the audience will know and you can be damn sure that it'll make them uncomfortable. If you get the appearances right then you can pretty much do damn well whatever you please when it comes to telling a story, for example take a look at Public Enemies, the biopic about the infamous bank robber John Dillinger.

One of those men pictures is a man who refuses to pay taxes, steals money from the federal government, and isn't afraid to get his knuckles skinned in the regular brawl or two. The other is a bank robber. While I may have exaggerated a little about one of them, it's no doubt that with enough people slapping his face with makeup and a wicked mustache Johnny Depp looks an awful lot like Dillinger except Dillinger wasn't a fucking weirdo in real life. And those eyebrows. Depp just can't grow eyebrows. Gah, I'm getting off topic! Anyone who's ever done a little research after seeing Public Energies (See what I did there? You thought I was going to say enemies!!) knows that while most biopics do a little exaggerating here and there, the director actually toned down the visual telling of Dillinger's life! In the honest truth, Dill Winger's life is more epic than the Django Unchained soundtrack. I won't go into specifics but you can do almost anything you want to a person's life in a biopic as long as you get the resemblance and nobody will give a flying fuck! You wanna see Mike Tyson wrestle an alligator on the silver screen? As long as you have Jamie Foxx with a tattoo on his face you can totally do that!

If any of you cast Jamie Foxx in a Mike Tyson biopic, I demand royalties. My idea assholes!

I suppose the point I'm trying to arrive at here is that casting Will Smith as Muhammad Ali was a great decision and while Jamie Foxx is still in our minds, he plays another boxing personality most of us know as Drew Bundini Brown and the resemblance is actually kinda scary. Like, more scary than the random historically accurate bald patch on the top of his character's head. 

When I stated earlier that Ali is a refreshing new story for the boxing movie genre, I wasn't kidding. The first way this movie breaks the genre stereotype is that Muhammad Ali didn't grow up a poverty stricken child who took up boxing to get off the streets. In fact, he started boxing because some kid stole his bike and he wanted to learn how to whoop ass as effectively as possible. The director, Michael Mann, didn't waste a single moment of the film trying to make the audience feel sorry for Ali because we didn't need to. Instead, Mann took a different approach where he successfully portrayed Ali as a stubborn, cocky-yet-focused, and determined man. In other words, he made Will Smith become Muhammad Ali, notice that I said become. Many good biopics feature a good actor acting like the person they're supposed to but a truly great biopic has an actor becoming the person they portray. Daniel Day Lewis is famous for becoming Abraham Lincoln and it's truly a great performance but Will Smith absolutely blows it out of the water. Will Smith learned Ali's fight style from the man himself, learned to talk exactly like him, and even learned how to move his feet in the ring like Muhammad Ali... Hell he sculpted his body to an exact Ali replica... FUCK THE MAKEUP DEPARTMENT STARED AT TONS OF PHOTOGRAPHS OF FIGHTS TO GET THE FUCKING BRUISES EXACTLY RIGHT. That's not just dedication from the director, that's called love. 

Anyways, the movie is a memoir that covers the events of Ali's life from his first encounter as Cassius Clay when he faced Sonny Liston for the World Heavyweight Boxing Championship. The movie continues with his relationship with Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr., his joining of the Black Muslim Brotherhood, his refusal to be drafted into Vietnam, his three marriages, his second fight with Sonny Liston, his loss against Joe Fraizer, and the film concludes with the legendary "Rumble In The Jungle" championship fight against George Foreman. Probably one of my favorite parts about this movie is the classic ABC interviews and weigh-ins where Mann makes sure Will Smith quips classic one liners and barrages of clever insults that will put a smile on anyone's face. Will Smith channels Ali's humorous side and his serious defiant side brilliantly and with perfect execution. There isn't a person alive who didn't chuckle a little inside when they watched Will Smith portray Muhammad Ali shaking away his nerves and running out to tell Sonny Liston that he'll "beat the ugliness right out of you. It'll take a long time, but I'll do it!".

The film is accompanied by a soundtrack consisting of black gospel music and I've gotta say, it's pretty rock solid. Some of the songs are very catchy and will still be in your head long after you close out of the Netflix browser. 

The only fault I can really say about Ali is that there are certain sections of the film that just seem to drag at times. It kind of reminds me of Breaking Bad in the sense that the movie will throw heavy drama at you all at once and then you'll sit through about a half an hour of slow paced conversations before reaching the big fight night. I guess this might be to keep the audience excited about the fights, but this movie is not short by any means. Ali has a run time of two hours and forty-five minutes and it takes its time. The most annoying part is right towards the end when the film is building up for the Foreman fight and there's a ten minute slow motion scene of Ali running the African countryside. There's no talking or anything really dramatic, it's mostly just Ali looking at graffiti on walls and looking at locals. But I can't hit this scene too hard because it's trying to establish that the African people are HIS people and he's THEIR champion.

Final Verdict:

With the exception of a few slow paced scenes, Ali is an excellent biopic that almost perfectly visualize the most important parts of the great Muhammad Ali's storied boxing career. Michael Mann delivers a knockout punch with this masterpiece of a film.

9.5/10

The Virgin Suicides

The Virgin Suicides

Movie critics have literally the best job in the world. We get to watch movies and point out the good and the bad aspects of them. We do it because we love movies and believe that our criticisms help better the film industry as a whole. Most of the movies we watch are, at the very least, slightly above average and were made with a decent bit of effort. I personally will never ever slaughter a film in my reviews unless I really think it deserves it and even then there needs to be a certain amount of criteria that must be met before I go all out and destroy the it. For instance, take the movie "The Last Airbender" as an example. Now, I hate M. Night Shyamalan just as much as the next guy and as much as I would love to rip into him and his films I simply can't. I hate pretty much every single movie he's ever directed but I will never obliterate his movies in any of reviews like I did with "The Running Man" because I know that he made an honest effort. I know that M. Night Shyamalan went to work every single day trying to make the best film he could with the best of his abilities. It just so turns out that these movies come out and they're absolute garbage. When I gave an oral review of "The Last Airbender", I never gave a single ounce of praise to it. I also never once made fun of its stupidity because, for the most part, I consider myself somewhat of a semi-professional in terms of movie reviewing ethics. When someone rips apart a decent effort, to me they don't look like professionals. To me, they look like massive dickheads. That being said, a "decent" effort is monumentally different than a "small" effort. If your actors put in the same amount of effort as the hare did in his race against the tortoise, then expect this: I will rip your soul in half.

Fortunately, most movies put in the minimum effort to escape my scathing reviews and that makes me happy. What doesn't make me happy is that most of the crap you see on Netflix is a complete mess of absolutely zero work done to make it a decent movie. 

"The Virgin Suicides" is an example of one of those messes.

Coming-of-age movies are a bit of a gamble and mainly serve as a nostalgia high for older people. These movies usually feature familiar moments in the children's life that the adults will be able to identify with and chuckle about. I'll tell you what, if you want to remind anybody who was a teenager during the 1970's how awful that decade was, make them watch this. 

These are the people/fish/dog that ruined heroin abuse and split up The Beatles.

"The Virgin Suicides" is about a group of neighborhood boys who's raging hormones attract them to Mr. and Mrs. Libson's five teenager daughters that move into the neighborhood. The youngest one, the thirteen year old named Cecilia, commits suicide because none of the boys talk to her when the family throws a party and invite them over. No seriously I'm not kidding, the movie impales a thirteen year old on a fence and the movie hasn't even reached the twenty minute mark (17:42 to be exact). This movie starts out stupid and continues to be stupid throughout the film. In fact, you can't even call this a review because all it's going to be is an endless rant and mocking of the entire thing. If you're a dreamy teenage girl who's still high off "The Fault in Our Stars" (ugh) and you found some amount of good in this movie, just get out. Your kind isn't welcome here. Seriously, I went on Twitter last night and looked up the movie's hashtag. People loved the shit out of it and then there was my tweet: "This movie is fucking abysmal." all alone by itself. Now that I think about it, I don't remember seeing any user praising it that wasn't older than fourteen.

Before I go on, I should mention that the only bright spots in this whole movie that I could see were Spider-Man Lady *ahem* I mean Kirsten Dunst and when The Styx played "Come Sail Away" at the homecoming scene. Even Dunst (Mary Jane) can't save it when you realize that when this movie came out in 1999 she was eighteen years old and was playing a fourteen year old... Who's name was Lux...

Now that that's out of the way, I get to slaughter the stupidity of this movie. So after Cecilia dies, it cuts to a scene where the hearse is carrying her to the cemetery and for some random reason the grave diggers are on strike, protesting things... And then they get out of the way and are never seen again. That scene as a whole doesn't really make a ton of sense in my mind and doesn't provide any sort of emotional drama. There are all sorts of these scenes littered throughout the film and none of them even matter, which is the most grating part of the whole movie. There's really not much to talk about when it comes to reviewing the story because it's largely the result of trying to adapt a teenage girl's young adult novel into a series of unconnected, unimportant moments.

Now, I want to jump forward to the climax of the story where some dude bangs Lux on the football field after the homecoming and the dickwad leaves during the night. She comes home late, blah blah blah, her parents ground her and her sisters for life or something. Stupid. My favorite part of the whole movie is when the parents force Lux to burn all her vinyl records because they believe rock music is the driving force behind rebellious teenage behavior. I found it absolutely hilarious when Lux went and begged at her mother's feet to let her keep her KISS record, which in all fairness would've been an improvement to the music industry. I listened to KISS once, in fact I've got a vinyl record of their "Rock and Roll Over" album. Once I set the needle onto the record I was slapped in the face by Gene Simmons' "creativity".

Future Rock and Roll Hall of Famers. Let that depressing fact sink in.

Final  Verdict:

2/10