Blog O’ Leaps

Credited to news.com.au, from the OptusZoo website, which may or may not have stuck a delicate editorial finger in it:

“A letter claiming to have been written by the cyclist involved in an altercation with cricket legend Shane Warne last night has gone viral.”

The LETTER was claiming?! Letters talk now? Finally the conventional postal service strikes back at all this modern electrophonic communications technology.

I’m looking forward to future simplified verbal correspondence from my mailbox in future. When I open the bills, they’ll all say out loud, “Pay me now, you cheapskate!” and I can simply respond, “Rack off, foul blackguard” (or other words to like effect) and it will all be over with, at a considerable saving on eyestrain.

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From the “front page” of an internet service provider’s entertainment/news site:

“Cannibis is world’s most popular illicit drug and Australia and New Zealand top the list of users.”

Not so popular that people know how to spell it, apparently.

When the link was clicked, the full version of the story on the same site spelled it the same way, i.e. the wrong way, in the opening line of the story, but had managed to rustle up the definite article to insert between “is” and “world’s”.

Although the story was credited to news.com.au the fault may or may not have been theirs. For the version of the story in the “hard-copy” Friday Herald Sun, everyone had apparently recovered their wits sufficiently from all the shock-horror to spell “cannabis” correctly.

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I just stumbled over this somewhere in the computrofile jumble and I couldn’t remember it at all, but I liked it, and, as Mrs Slocombe from Are You Being Served used to say, “I am unanimous in this.”

That’s about all I know about it. Hope you can mine the occasional snort of laughter out of it.

ON YO MAMA’S SECRET ASS

He’s back and he’s black! The new realistic direction of the James Bond franchise in Casino Royale is taken one step further as James hits the urban streets of today, armed with his combination pocket global positioning system, bazooka and crack-pipe. 50 Cent stars as James J-Man La Washington Bond MC, and when he hears an evil cartel of former Soviet officials headed by Shijizzel Mafizzel (Snoop Dogg) is invading the ’hood aiming to collect all the fine mamas and insert dynamite in they ass, James goes totally Mau Mau on they heads and whups him some Soviet candy-ass. Includes the poignant hit theme song, “Dynamite Upside My Ass” by Fergie and Sir Paul McCartney.

SEINFELD – THE MOVIE

All your favourite joke returns, as the TV legend goes big-screen, featuring Steve Carell as Jerry Seinfeld, Jack Black as George Costanza, Don Rickles as Kramer, Gwen Stefani as Elaine, and Malcolm McDowell as the power-crazed General Asparagoo. In a complex plot, spanning the globe, Jerry is appalled when his socks lose their fluffiness and even more appalled when one of his girlfriends turns out to be of legal voting age. Kramer is off on a crusade insulting Koreans, and George whines about parking spaces being too rectangular, Elaine is comically sold into white slavery and Jerry finishes the picture with a 45 minute monologue about his socks losing their fluffiness, noting “And what’s the deal with jumpers. They don’t jump. Really.”

DIE HARD – WITH A SPHINCTER PROBLEM

The 83rd commemorative Die Hard picture starts off with a bang, as a light bulb blows, scaring Bruce Willis, who falls and breaks a hip. Helped into a home, he immediately loses his wallet and blames the nurse. Later he puts diced carrots in the fish-tank, and loses his TV lounge privileges. In a thrilling climax, he wrestles three jumbo jets onto their backs, bites the engine off a tank, defeats the evil Major Inabusagain (Malcolm McDowell) in arm to arm combat, and then cries because his oatmeal is lumpy.

MAGGOTY McPLAGUE

In the heart-warming follow-up to Ratattouie, the animated triumph about a rat that handles food, Disney-Pixar present the happy-go-laughy story of a little Scottish blowfly larva that wants to be a great cheesemaker, Maggoty McPlague (voiced by Mike Meyers), and the only human who can understand him, Adolf (Tim Allen). You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll sing, you’ll have a little diarrhoea. Includes the hit song, The Curd Cycle of Life, by Sir Elton John and Tim Rice.

WELCOME BACK KOTTER – THE MUSICAL

Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber’s stage triumph of the West End and other beers, comes to the screen with new life, like Frankenstein. The half-crazed Mr Woodman (Michael Crawford) haunts the school where idealistic wise-cracking teacher Gabe Kotter (Tom Cruise) expresses his jokes in song, and tries to reform those famous sweathogs (a role played entirely in ethnic tapdance by Michael Flatley and the cast of Lord of the Dance) until great tragedy intervenes when Celine Dion, repeating her Broadway role of Rosalita Bazonga, starts singing, and the building collapses killing everyone except Epstein’s Mother (Ian McKellen). Songs include the lilting “Up your Nose with a Rubber Horn Concerto”, and the enigmatic love ballad “Up Your Hole With a Piano Roll”.

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A TALE OF TWO FIGHTS

MANNY PACQUIAO v JUAN MANUEL MARQUEZ III

The style Manny Pacquiao conventionally employs in wearing out his opponents on the way to victory involves extraordinarily fast and accurate punching, and a lot of it, along with two key defensive weapons, one of which is that he’s become one of the better boxers around and is excellent at slipping and otherwise avoiding punches, and the other of which is that even if you hit him, he seems to be all but impossible to hurt.

Juan Manuel Marquez’s style, heavy on the counter-punching, is pretty much kryptonite to Manny’s. Technically, he’s possibly even a better boxer, he hits hard enough to get Pacquiao’s attention, his accuracy is the equal of Pacquiao’s – better in this fight, no matter what the idiot stats did or didn’t say – he seems to be able to get Pacquiao off rhythm as no one else can, and, while known for the counter-punching, is able to strike first, and effectively, as well.

Pre-fight Pacquiao was saying he’d counter-punch the counter-puncher, and basically he couldn’t do it. Marquez, when he initiated the punching, started off with straight quick punches, and established that as a pattern, but then, during Pacquiao’s attempts at firing back, punched “around the corner” very effectively on both sides. He has a deceptively good variety of punches, and he wasn’t missing a lot when it counted.

Pacquiao, robbed off the whirlwind approach to overwhelming his opponent by working very fast and hitting very hard and accurately in great numbers, struggled visibly here, and seemed to lose both his rhythm and a measure of confidence as the fight went on.

Marquez won the tactical battle, seemed to connect more often, and at least as hard as Pacquiao generally did (when he did), and was elated at the final bell, evidently sure he’d won the fight this time. (After previously having been dealt a draw and a loss in their two previous fights, both of which also went the 12-round distance.)

I was sure he had too. I had it to Marquez by 8 rounds to 3, with one tied, or in points, 117-112.

(Neither the commentators or I could see any of the rounds being given by more than one point, i.e. 10-9, and, as it turned out, that was the way all three official judges scored it as well, which is probably the only thing I’d agree with them about.)

The judges gave it to Pacquiao, by “majority decision”, which is boxing-speak for two voting for one fighter and the other calling it a draw. Their final tallies were 114-114, 115-113, and 116-112, the latter two in favour of Pacquiao. The last one, who apparently called it 8 rounds Pacquiao, 4 rounds Marquez, in my opinion has richly earned himself a lengthy holiday from the trials and tribulations of fight judging, not that the statutory bodies in charge of such matters would ever act in such an, err, “proactive” way.

This was a rotten decision, even by boxing’s storied history and long-established standards in that field of accomplishment.

Anyone who knew anything about boxing, has watched plenty of fights, can read a fight, and was paying attention, would have recognised that Marquez had won, and won clearly and decisively. If ever a boxer “wuz robbed” in a major fight, it was him in this one. He did everything right, executed perfectly, got the best fighter in the world off his game and out of his usual element, and still couldn’t walk away with a decision he’d apparently richly earned.

I respect Pacquiao, like everything I’ve seen of him as a person, am amazed by him as a fighter, and have absolutely nothing against him (and thank him for the entertainment he’s given me, at a cost to his body and health, given the business he’s in) but he lost this fight.

My understanding is that pretty much every journo in “reporters’ row” at the fight scored it to Marquez. The three commentators on the TV “world feed” did as well.

That said, it was an extremely high level boxing match – way better and busier than we’re used to seeing these days – only tainted by the decision.

Reportedly Marquez commented – whether before or after the fight I’m not quite sure – that if the long-mooted Mayweather-Pacquio fight finally went ahead (as is apparently somewhat more likely now, judging by post-fight comments by both promoter Bob Arum and Manny) that he felt Manny would struggle with the boxing qualities Floyd has.

Oddly enough, that’s what I was thinking during the fight, i.e. if Pacquiao struggled with the scientific counter-punching approach that Marquez brought, how would he deal with the even more comprehensive array of boxing technique (and more aggressive approach, and arguably greater natural size and strength) that Mayweather would bring to the table, presuming he can turn up in prime shape and mentally ready, given his age and numerous lay-offs.

Mayweather all but shut Marquez out the one time they fought, the judges basically giving 10-12 rounds to Floyd. That basically leaves Pacquiao-Floyd as the big intrigue fight left on the table around this weight – basically welterweight for those guys these days – presuming “Pretty Boy Floyd” can be brought to the table.

But if Juan Manuel Marquez, in his late 30s, still has one more performance at or near his career-best left in him, there’s grounds for a fourth fight with Pacquiao now, and it wouldn’t exactly be a tough sell. If he’s up to it, I wish him better luck with the judges next time.

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AUSTIN TROUT v FRANK LoPORTO

Due to a scheduled opponent for the inconveniently-named WBA junior-middleweight champ Trout falling through, Melbourne’s Frankie LoPorto found himself in the equally unlikely-dubbed Cohen Stadium in El Paso, Texas, for a ShowTime telecast title bout. (Shown here live, without additional charges, on Fox Sports.)

With absolutely no meanness or disrespect intended to LoPorto, who is apparently as game as the average opera is long, how can a guy with a 15-4 record (prior to the fight) be ranked top 15 by a worldwide boxing authority, and be in a title fight? By all means let a fight go ahead, since Trout needed the scheduled national US exposure in a TV outing that was already booked, but make it a non-title fight. I can’t see how a guy with a 15-4 record who is a late substitute can be sanctioned for a world title shot, even as little as “world titles” mean these days, presuming one is still making the mistake of taking all this stuff seriously.

(And to give some indication of what world titles do mean these days, the undefeated – 23-0 before this fight – Trout was ranked #9 junior-middleweight in the world by colour commentator Steve Farhood prior to the fight, and is rated #7 by the BoxRec website.)

Also, with the benefit of 20/20 hindsight, this particular fight should never have been booked. As nicely as you could put it, was exactly the sort of spectacle that allows boxing to effortlessly command such bad press.

Trout had all the skills, punching arsenal, power, timing, and any other salient qualities you care to shake out of the thesaurus, and LoPorto had an incredible chin and plenty of guts. Maybe the “late notice” thing had something to do with it, but they looked on two completely different levels as fighters, and it looked exactly like the type of fight which should never have been made. LoPorto hardly landed one effective punch and Trout apparently couldn’t stop landing them.

I thought the ref stopped it late, and the corner could have stopped it earlier, and other than Trout’s fans, I don’t think anyone particularly would have enjoyed seeing this. It had all the inherent pleasure of seeing a guy getting his face pulped before your eyes with no viable defence.

Commentators mentioned that Anthony Mundine is the next mandatory defence for Trout. It’s an interesting idea, presuming Team Mundine didn’t see how Trout was punching in this fight, and that he was engaging even though LoPorto, particularly early, kept moving forward and trying to knock Trout’s block off. (Unfortunately for him, to no effect whatsoever.)

Even with Trout’s less than intimidating career KO record, and being unable to KO LoPorto clean in this fight, I think the Mundine camp probably saw plenty that they didn’t like the look of.

It would be quite an interesting fight, if it happened. Both are elusive. Both have some boxing skills. Trout looked like more of a boxer-puncher in this, and Mundine is more the straight boxer (when he’s not really on his bike) which traditionally can make for an interesting fight. Trout is a southpaw, which Team Mundane may find off-putting.

It’s Mundine’s chance to win a title from an incumbent champion, something he’s never done. He probably won’t go anywhere near the consensus #1 junior-middle, Miguel Angel Cotto, who throws bombs. Can’t see that Trout’s handlers would be in a huge hurry for that fight either.

My guess is that Trout would win – although Mundine offers a completely different level of challenge to Frankie LoPorto – and maybe by KO, and that Mundine’s people will duck this fight, thus keeping intact Mundine’s record of naming comparatively major opposition “targets” and then not fighting them.

As for LoPorto, I hope the folks managing his career keep him out of “opportunities” like this in future. Too many opportunities like that can really mess you up later in life.

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Joe Frazier was a great fighter - one of the all-time heavyweight greats to my mind - and to anyone who grew up at a certain time and was into boxing, or sport in general, was that rarest of genuine examples of an unfortunately massively overused terms, an iconic figure.

Anyway, the guys, including Ali’s former trainer Angelo Dundee, who said Frazier will be missed, are the ones who undoubtedly got it right.

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THE THRILLER IN MANILA (2008)

There’s a saying that history is written by the victors. There was probably a time when it was true, too, give or take.

These days you could make a solid case that history is written by whoever made the last documentary on a subject that’s old enough or obscure enough to be outside the scope of general public knowledge, and has the conviction, balls, ignorance or all the above to present the contents as fact. Given the apparently ever-increasing limitations of general public knowledge, that gives a lot of scope to work with.

As to how old is old enough, “not too old” is probably the simplest answer. Ask two people about an event both were at, or involved with, or watched on television even 20 years ago, let alone 30, and you’ll probably get some major discrepancies between the two stories. People romanticise, exaggerate the level of their involvement, get things confused and incorporate other incidents that happened to them, but just didn’t happen at the time in question. Heck, it doesn’t have to be 20 years. Five or ten can be plenty.

Go back any further than 30 years, and history, even on a major world event or matter of public record, is more or less completely up for grabs. There’ll be experts in the field who may know better, but the general public won’t, and an unscrupulous, or careless, or, to put a more euphemistic spin on it, “determined” documentary maker can put a strong point of view over and make it stick with an audience that doesn’t know better. On a topic from the dim and distant past, with many or most of the protagonists dead, survivors with faded memories, or perhaps who were at best fringe-players to the main action under investigation, and the remaining testimony coming from purported experts who may be anything but, a movie storyteller can tell pretty much whichever story they choose by picking an angle, and being selective with the footage they use to back it up. On that level, history becomes completely up for grabs.

A few years back, at one of the Melbourne Film Festivals, I saw a documentary on the heavyweight boxers Joe Louis and Max Schmeling, centred on their second fight, but also about the men, both before and afterwards. Though not without fascinating moments, and two immensely interesting subjects, it was a mean-spirited exercise apparently dedicated to trying to ruthlessly disparage the memory of the German fighter Max Schmeling. He was portrayed as kind of a Nazi dupe, a loyal and more or less unquestioning German soldier under the Nazi regime, and a kind of lucky dope who stumbled into business success after the war, just as he’d fortunately blundered into being a cynosure for the Hitler regime to his benefit and been able to turn that to his advantage. His post-fight relationship with Louis was “exposed” as something grossly “exaggerated”.

Louis was portrayed as a symbol of freedom, and an inspiration to all Americans, but particularly African-Americans, who served his country in wartime, and may have had one or two unfortunate weaknesses in later life, when he was exploited by others, but was basically a pretty good egg.

Some of what was included in this whitewash was, in a way, nearly as amazing as what was left out.

It was mentioned that Schmeling had a role in saving the lives of some Jewish childen and kind of glossed over, seemingly because it didn’t fit the profile the film-maker was trying to build up. I believe it was mentioned in passing, and fleetingly so, that Schmeling paid for Louis’s funeral. It was mentioned that Yossel Jacobs, Schmeling’s manager, was Jewish.

What wasn’t mentioned was that Schmeling had already risked getting on the Nazi’s shit-list, (and almost certainly was on it), well before Louis crushed him in their second fight, mainly because he resisted all Nazi pressure to dump his Jewish manager, who was anything but shy about making it known that he was Jewish. Obviously Schmeling knew the risks there, but he stuck by his manager. He would have known the even greater risks in hiding anyone from the Nazis, as he apparently did for the aforementioned children.

Many many other accounts have stated that Schmeling would meet with Louis when he could, and gave him money on many occasions, and that they were good friends in the decades following the fights, although how often they saw each other or chatted on the phone I have no more idea than the filmmakers did. Well, perhaps slightly more idea than they did.

As to war service, it was completely glossed over that Schmeling, by then certainly not the Nazis #1 pin-up boy, served as a paratrooper in battle, in harm’s way, whereas Louis’s service was largely publicity/morale oriented, as he gave physical training to other troops, gave exhibition tours under Army aegis, and was not placed on active duty in a theatre of war. This is not to say Louis shied away from any duty, just to point out that this was the deal he had. (When the military was trying to talk Muhammad Ali out of his conscientious objection stance on a different war many years later, it has been suggested, in pretty much these exact terms, that he was offered the “Joe Louis deal”.)

As to his “dumb luck” following the war, Schmeling saw an opening and got in pretty much on the ground floor of Coca-Cola’s expansion into Europe, and became a major executive of long-standing.

Joe Louis is one of the all-time legendary heavyweight boxers, and is, and/or was unquestionably a respected and much-loved figure in the sport world, but while they were busy putting the boots unmercifully to Schmeling in this doco, they glossed over Louis’s less salient qualities to such an extent that the whole thing unavoidably became pure propaganda rather than any sort of fairly balanced documentary.

Louis had problems, and then some, occasioned by his womanising (somewhat mentioned), substance problems (barely mentioned and pretty much glossed over), and basically being an ongoing financial disaster area, particularly, but not limited to, the area of taxes (again, included on a “once over lightly” kind of basis).

Long before the end of his life, he was reduced to being employed as a “casino greeter”, a major public figure of the past a facility would use to schmooze the customers.

How any of this would be Max Schmeling’s fault exactly is beyond me, just as Max Schmeling’s post-boxing prosperity was hardly a direct result of Joe’s woes, but this seemed to be the story the documentary wanted to tell. Hell, it WAS the story it wanted to tell. Why, the good Lord only knows.

Anyone with a skerrick or two of knowledge about the people, events and times concerned would have found more than enough logical and factual inconsistencies to smell something odd wafting from a Denmark-ly direction long before the nasty little smear-job of a doco was over. What worries me is the hefty percentages of the audience who were not boxing fans, probably hadn’t previously heard of Schmeling and almost certainly not of Louis either, or were born several years too late to ever have heard any of this stuff before, other than a vague inkling that there was a World War II at some point. To them it was a compelling story, with a lot of historical footage and old people talking like they were right there all the way through the actual events, not to mention a very authoritative narrative tone, and why wouldn’t they believe it all?

And at that distance, history is up for grabs.

Which brings us to The Thriller in Manila, a documentary about another world heavyweight title fight, Muhammad Ali v Smokin’ Joe Frazier, in 1975. Once again, this doco tries to draw greater social implications from the fight and the fighters. Once again one fighter is demonised (Ali, in the Schmeling role, kind of) and the other is portrayed as a flawed but fundamentally honest, decent and hard-done-by champion, treated roughly and unfairly by fate. (Joe Frazier stars as Joe Louis, minus the drugs, the womanising, the casino-greeter career and quite the same level of unbelievable fiscal disaster, but perhaps also minus quite the same regard as an all-time highest level heavyweight great.)

That the documentary is presented largely from the Frazier camp point of view is not a problem in itself. The basis thesis seems to be that Ali has had plenty of chances to represent himself in the media over the years, but the Frazier perspective has been swept under the carpet. It’s not the worst idea for a documentary, and not an unfair one, in itself.

That’s about where the rollercoaster leaves the rails though. From that point on in, it’s heavily weighted towards distortions, omissions, deck-stacking, factual errors, and not a few outright lies, some of them by omission.

Let me give you some examples. Former Ali entourage member, or as he likes to style himself, “The Fight Doctor”, Ferdie Pacheco is quoted throughout, and Ferdie’s conviction as to his grasp of reality might differ from the opinion of others (not excluding the audience who I saw this with, who were laughing out loud at some of Dr Ferdie’s extravagant schtick.)

Ferdie alleges at the start of the picture that big fights are held where dictators need them held to distract the people and rebellious factions from oppressive realities, i.e. that’s why the fight was held in Manila. The only problem is, that would probably hold true for exactly two big fights of the time, Ali-Frazier III in Manila, and Ali-Foreman in Zaire, and pretty much none of the others. The real key factor in why those fights were held where they were is sitting right there in shot for an awful lot of the footage in this movie, and is not named, referred to, or identified in graphics or narration once in the entire movie. He might look a lot younger, but I doubt anyone would have any great degree of trouble in identifying Don King. Leaving him out of the story is basically leaving out tremendous chunks of the story. They leave him out of the story.

The basic premise is that Frazier befriended Ali when Ali was unable to box professionally in the wake of his conscientious objector stance in the Vietnam War, and that Frazier supported him personally and financially. There’s a story about Frazier slipping him money on one occasion, with I think an implication that he financially supported him and/or lent him money on other occasions as well.

Personally, based on the extensive amount I’ve heard/read/seen of the men and the time, I think this is basically a crock. That Frazier and Ali were friendly or at least civil and communicating at the time has been suggested elsewhere and can pretty much be considered documented. In his “autobiography” The Greatest, Ali himself includes what is supposedly a transcription of a taped conversation during a lift Joe Frazier gave him from Philadelphia to New York City. I don’t know how real it is, but I know it’s one of the relatively few things in the book, that, especially given the known personalities of the two guys, reads like something credible.

Were they in each other’s pockets? Doubt it. Was Ali calling up every other day, as stated somewhere in there? Almost certainly not.

But as to Ali being that destitute at the time that Frazier had to financially support him in any significant way, sounds like complete garbage. Could he have spotted Ali a 20 or 50 when Ali was cash-light one time? Well, that would sound a little more like it.

There’s also the implication, well actually it’s said flat-out, that Frazier gave Ali a huge opportunity, by promoting the idea of a fight between them at a time (in Ali’s boxing-exile years) when Ali’s light as an attraction was dimming.

That one is downright hilarious. Yeah, an unbeaten former heavyweight champion who was already arguably the greatest attraction ever in the sport, and suddenly people weren’t interested in seeing him fight. Quite frankly, he could have drawn money fighting Zora Folley again at the time (it’s all right – if you’re not a boxing fan, you’re not meant to know) if someone would have given him a licence and cleared a venue for him to legally fight. Frazier-Ali I was always going to be a big draw, and certainly the biggest available in boxing at the time, but Ali didn’t need Joe Frazier’s name on a contract to generate interest or money.

One of the many odd things that’s said in The Thriller in Manila is that the only thing that stood between Frazier and being remembered as one of boxing’s immortals is Ali. That’s a crock for two reasons. One, Frazier IS remembered as one of boxing’s immortals (or great heavyweights, or whatever the exact phrasing is in this reality-ambush of a doco). Two – George Foreman. Foreman bounced Frazier around the canvas like a basketball, knocking him out in two rounds in taking the title from him. In their only rematch, which saw Frazier make two inexplicably bad decisions, i.e. bulking up way outside his normal fighting weight, and even worse, shaving his head bald, George bounced him around some more, but just took longer, KOing him in 5 this time.

Frazier was a formidable heavyweight fighter before meeting Ali, and was a worthy world champion, but in terms of becoming an icon, that was Ali that took him to that status. Frazier had greatness in him, but Ali gave him a world stage to display it to everyone. Frazier was cool, man. How he looked, how he carried himself, how he moved and worked in the ring. But it was Ali’s force of character, the international fascination with that guy, and the bizarre way they meshed perfectly as combatants – that was what took Frazier to the level of international renown he received.

(What should also not be ignored, and it’s something that isn’t adequately emphasised in the movie, and something that will be foreign to a substantial portion of an audience below a certain age, is that boxing’s heavyweight title was itself one of sport’s greatest attractions in those days. That was also a factor. But anyone in the promoting business in that or a vaguely analogous area, including pro wrestling for example, will tell you that the belt and the title can get you so far in promoting an event, but it’s who’s carrying the belt and who’s fighting for the title than can take it those extra yards.)

Frazier’s hold on posterity was not diminished by Ali winning two out of their three fights. It’s specifically because of those three fights that he became such a world famous figure. (So much so that one of a completely different sport’s icons, cricket’s Viv Richards, bore “Smokin’ Joe” as a career nickname because of the perceived physical resemblance.)

But if he isn’t remembered in an evaluative sense as one of the top very few all-time heavyweights (and some would still put him there, or close) it’s got a lot more to do with being destroyed twice by Big George Foreman than it has to being shaded by Ali in a legendary three fight series.

There’s so much more that’s squirrelly, oppressively slanted, or tricked up like an amusement park funhouse about this doco, that I just can’t go into all of it here, or I’ll be writing until the next Richmond premiership or until I run out of internet.

However, the treatment of the second Ali-Frazier fight is indicative, and should give any viewer fair warning about taking all the sociological sidesteps and racial long-bows drawn in the rest of the picture too much to heart, at least unquestioned.

At first it’s skidded past virtually unmentioned. Later it’s brought up and dismissed as a disappointment, one blamed on Ali’s tactics of clinching and running while apparently throwing the odd jab. (Despite the fact it’s been hailed as part of a series of “three epic contests” or words to extremely similar effect, earlier in the doco when it suited them. I guess it was the ‘epic confrontation that disappointed’, and you have to admit, you don’t see too many of those.) The clear implication is that there was something cowardly or unsportsmanlike about this.

For starters, people could actually watch the fight, in which Ali comprehensively outboxed Frazier, and won easily. Secondly, there’s not a thing in the rules that says you can’t stick and move. Ali’s slogan, quoted many times in this movie, was, in fact, “Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee.” That it’s a lot more relevant to the first era of Ali’s career from the early 60s-1968, than it was to this era, which was a clearly distinct Part 2, is not clarified during the film.)

Thirdly, and idiotically, it’s said flat-out that the ref Tony Perez favoured Ali by allowing him to clinch. There is exactly one famous incident which garnered Tony Perez unwanted notoriety from Ali-Frazier II, and it wasn’t in Ali’s favour. In round 2, I believe it was, Ali caught Frazier late in the round with a volley of punches, and Joe’s legs appeared to go a bit, and he seemed to be in big trouble, because Ali was doing that thing where he started to amp the combinations up to warp speed, Mr Sulu. All of a sudden Perez stepped in between them and declared the round over. Only problem was, there hadn’t been a bell, and there were ten seconds left in it.

It’s the one incident from this fight written and talked about over and over again. It’s the only incident about which I’ve previously heard anyone claim any advantage to one fighter or the other, as a result of anything ref Tony Perez did. (He has steadfastly denied any wrongdoing, incidentally.) And it’s not mentioned in The Thriller in Manila at all. It’s not shown either, because as with Ali-Frazier I, aka “The Fight of the Century”, there is no footage from either of these fights included, only still photos.

As to Ali clinching, well he clinched when it suited him in fights throughout the 1970s. Tales of his surprising and underrated grip-strength in these situations are well-documented to the point of being legion. If the ref allowed it, and the refs of the time often did – Ali-Frazier II is hardly an isolated incidence of this phenomenon – Ali would do it. As shown, in Ali-Frazier III when ref Carlos Padilla persisted in disallowing the tactic, Ali had to follow instructions. As to him just running away and throwing the odd jab, well, it’s not like it’s hard to find a copy of that second Ali-Frazier fight to watch and dispel this bizarre interpretation. Have a look for yourself. Just don’t expect to see any of it in The Thriller in Manila. The story of Ali-Frazier II is the inevitable answer to an old fight fan’s question – what would happen in an Ali-Frazier fight if Joe didn’t have one of the best nights of his life in the ring, and Ali was in some sort of form. The answer was, it wasn’t very competitive. I guess some people would prefer that that question had never been answered.

Such inconsistencies, inaccuracies and falsehoods, whether accidental, by omission, or by some more deliberately skewed intention, to suit the director’s general thesis on the two protagonists, should give viewers all the reason in the world to proceed with caution on some of the loftier, and dead-weightier attempts at social significance throughout, not to mention a fairly dedicated campaign in this movie to denigrate Muhammad Ali.

There’s nothing original in it. It’s been said before that Joe Frazier was genuinely working class, while Ali claimed to represent the black working class.

It’s been said before that Ali stepped over the line in calling Frazier an “Uncle Tom” and “ignorant” while promoting the fight. (Incidentally, they fudge the time-line on exactly when Ali was meant to have made the “racial slurs” against Frazier, strongly implying that this was an ongoing campaign stretching for at least a half-decade. Actually they simply don’t specify what exactly was said before the first fight, and what was said before the third. It’s just all allowed to run into the one blur. It seems to suit the makers’ purpose to do exactly this.)

Perhaps never has so much helium been blown in the attempt to make Ali into a horrible villain for the “racial slur” of repeatedly referring to Frazier as a “gorilla”, before their final fight. The idea promoted is that to call a black man this is a terrible racial slur and for Ali as a black man to call Frazier that was somehow even worse.

Maybe I’m speaking out of turn and out of the right school here, but I’ll take the risk in the vague hope of inserting a molecule of sanity to this debate. It has never occurred to me for one thin second of my life, including at any point during this movie while they were trying to ram the idea down my throat by any means possible - not excluding extremely dignified and distinguished-sounding English-person narration - that Ali called Frazier a gorilla for any racially motivated reason. (And given that he’s a black American, why he would insult another black American person with an epithet supposedly calculated to denigrate black people as a whole is a fair question they never once approach in this movie.)

Personally, I think Ali called Frazier a gorilla repeatedly for the specific, if not only, reason that he needed a silly gimmick name to insult him with, and gorilla rhymed with Manila. As in, “It’ll be a thrilla, and a chilla, and a killa, when I get the gorilla in Manila.” As he repeated, with variations, only around 300,000 times before the fight.

Like he called George Foreman “The Mummy”. He, or Bundini Brown, or whoever, thought Foreman moved a bit like the Mummy in an old horror movie, and he, or someone in his camp, thought Frazier looked enough like a gorilla for the gimmick to stick.

It’s not the nicest thing you could say to anyone. (Although he wasn’t trying to be nice.) It may be a stupid thing to say in terms of well, anyone, but especially where the door was open for it to be thought of as some sort of racial epithet, because pig-ignorant white racists had used it, or similar, about black people in the past.

But the key point, mentioned in passing here, but deliberately slewed off in terms of positioning and editing of the film, is that Ali was trying to promote a fight and have fun doing it, in his peculiar style, and Frazier took offence on a level that Ali almost certainly didn’t intend, and probably was oblivious to, especially for one main reason.

One of the key moments in all sport bizness history, but one known by too few, and perhaps understood by fewer, is a time in the early 60s when Ali was meant to be promoting a fight in a radio station appearance, I think in Hawaii. As Ali has said by his own testimony, he did the typical sportsman of the time “Yes sir, no sir, I hope I win, I been training hard” type interview, but was then galvanised when a professional wrestler also being interviewed in the studio tore up a storm delivering his bad guy promo for the local arena match at the weekend, growling and spraying about how he was going to tear his opponent in half. By the end of it, Ali, who knew nothing about the two guys in the wrestling main event prior to the interview, admitted that he was all but panting to see those guys tear into it. He also realised he’d been missing something from how he’d been portraying himself and promoting his matches and it planted a major seed, as this was something he felt he could do very well himself. He turned out to be pretty much right about that.

(Ali invariably said in interviews that the pro wrestler in the radio studio was Gorgeous George. George was a famous attraction of the 50s and 60s, an early television star, and one of the most known wrestlers around the world ever, to this day. However, those who’ve looked a little further into this story from a wrestling point of view suggest that at that time and place, it’s unlikely it was Gorgeous George. The loud-mouthed blonde heel wrestler who dazzled Ali with his promo, and inadvertently changed the course of the legit sport business was probably Fred Blassie. Blassie was also a wrestler from the 1950s, who was a star name for another three decades, and was also known around the world, if not perhaps as iconic a star as Gorgeous George, although the latter had a shorter career on top. Blassie met and/or worked with Ali on a number of occasions. Apparently he once brought up, in a private conversation, that Ali always said it was Gorgeous George who’d captured his attention in that radio studio, but pointed out that it was actually him (i.e. Blassie). Ali admitted his error, agreed that it had been him, and then went straight back in all press interviews to saying it was Gorgeous George whenever the story came up. Although Blassie didn’t do the kind of vaudeville “gay” gimmick that George did, the two kind of superficially looked alike, and the chances were that Ali simply couldn’t remember who it was, and went with the more famous name. Also he’d probably watched George on TV in the 1950s back home in Louisville.)

Ali for years, in the 70s particularly, but also before, used pro wrestling type verbal techniques to help promote the matches and, as they’d say in the wrestling biz, “get heat on himself”. Sonny Liston was “The Ugly Bear” in an Ali pre-fight promo even before Joe Frazier HAD a professional career. (It may have even been while Ali was still Clay. If not, it’s a long way back anyway.)

There was nothing racial about that, and I have deep and abiding doubts that there was anything more “racial” in Ali’s mind in calling Joe Frazier a “gorilla”.

Some of the stuff Ali said was arguably meaner than necessary (for me the “ignorant” line of attack is a viable example), but it’s simply the truth that he talked the Ali-Frazier fights into untold millions of dollars, extraordinary purses for the fighters by the standards of the time, and bazillions of viewers and unprecedented worldwide interest, while captivating and entertaining people throughout. He turned them both into greater icons than they would have been without Ali’s peculiar variant on hype, which in a way I guess means Ali being Ali.

None of which means, he couldn’t have apologised afterwards if Frazier had taken offence.

As the movie makes clear, he apologised afterwards, and on more than one occasion. I don’t think it makes it anywhere near clear on how many occasions Ali has expressed nothing but extreme goodwill towards his former great opponent over the three and a half decades since Ali-Frazier III. If Ali has publicly said a bad word about Smokin’ Joe since then, I have to admit I’m unaware of it.

Frazier still hasn’t got his head around it the best part of 35 years later. Frazier indeed expresses pride at the thought that he might have been substantially responsible for Ali’s latter-day degenerative physical condition. That’s “not letting go of something” in the extreme. I don’t know whether at this late date, a rational person would blame Ali for this state of play rather than Joe Frazier. However, the movie, which is not a rational person, basically seems to. I find this surpassingly bizarre.

There’s one great story about Joe Frazier’s undying enmity for the man he’ll be perpetually manacled to in terms of posterity. In 1996, when Ali lit the torch at the Atlanta Games, there was a story reported around that time, which I found hysterical, but probably for all the wrong reasons, because as much as I love both guys, there was something about this that was classic, no bullshit Joe Frazier, even as “wrong” as it was.

Frazier was reported, and reasonably widely, as having remarked, when he saw Ali trembling so much when he went to light the torch, that he was sitting there watching the TV, just hoping he’d fall in.

Typically, in the movie, they get Frazier’s son Marvis to tell the story, and he screws it up, saying Joe Frazier hoped someone would “push him in”. Why would anyone push him in? Joe’s version is just so wrong, it’s hilarious. It’s like in his mind, they’re the Roadrunner and the Coyote going at it forever.

Please don’t misunderstand me about Joe Frazier. I think he’s one of the all-time legends of sport, and one of the great heavyweight boxers, but more than that too. He has unbelievable presence as a person and there’s just something about him that always has and always will galvanise me about him every time I see him, with the sole exception of when he tries to be a singer. Even in his abiding hatred, or whatever it is, of Muhammad Ali, as much as I wish for their mutual benefit that he could let it go, he’s a very honest person with his own peculiar integrity, who can’t help but tell it exactly the way he sees it, and that thing he has for Ali is a part of it.

But I just think this is a bullshit movie, filled with fabrication and fairy-floss, which just happens to be on a great subject. I wonder if anyone critically involved with it reflected for one second on the irony that the subject they’re disparaging throughout is pretty much directly responsible for the lion’s share of any fame or profit that comes to them from it.

And how too simply delightful to see IMG’s logo come up at the end. To me, the foundation for an IMG (or equivalent) to even exist comes back to the worldwide fascination for a Muhammad Ali back then (and maybe the odd Pele or George Best or so). Would that be the pound of flesh, or the thirty pieces of silver, sir? And to think there’s people that dare to suggest that Don King’s an exploitative dirtbag. The very idea. Well, whatever Don’s faults, even were they to be legion, they don’t include having anything to do with this movie, apparently. You figure if Don had had any involvement, they at least would have mentioned who he was at some point.

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EVERYBODY’S GOING SCREWLOOSE

According to the amazing storehouse of world knowledge that is the front page of my interweb provider’s general information site, someone in Hollywood who’s apparently considerably harder up for ideas than even the geniuses who came up with a movie version of The Dukes of Hazzard has remade Footloose. Yeah, the dancing movie from beyond time. They’ve topped this conceptually – believe it or don’t – because this version is apparently centred on the dance craze from beyond time, line dancing.

Probably I’m wrong – because I always forget to follow the entertainment industry’s sterling example of perennially underestimating the intelligence (and boredom-threshold regarding sheer tat) of mass audiences – and it will be a massive hit smashing all cash-register capacities and box-office records.

However, right now, I’m struggling to see the teen audiences of the planet stampeding in to catch a remake, or reworking, or grave-robbing – whatever it is, exactly – of a hit movie property of a different century that they’ve never heard of before, let alone one nominally revitalised by the inclusion of Billy Ray Cyrus’s favourite dance-form, scoot-booting.

Just to add to the general incipient world adoration of this piece of film marketing genius at work, I watched a trailer, and it apparently contains precisely nobody that anyone from this planet Earth has seen or heard of before. Maybe the cast was assembled only from teens on witness protection programs.

Also the trailer was about 92 seconds long and due to wear and tear on the human will to live, I pulled up about 22 seconds short of the end of it. Some combination of the high school production-style Thoroughly Modern Millie-level dramatics and the emphatic eyelid-slamming effect of young skinny people scoot-booting in strict rank-and-file formation for no reason readily apparent in the year 2011 seemed ideally calculated to murder the attention span.

However I certainly wish these intrepid artisans all the best with their appalling movie, and anxiously await further developments, which one imagines will, all but inevitably, involve a remake of The Jazz Singer, with a no-star cast, retooled to include either the Macarena or the Bird Dance.

RUGBY SEE, RUGBY DOO-DOO

Due to Channel Nine relenting on its previously strict principles of hiding away the 2011 rugby union World Cup matches at times chiefly suitable for drug dealers, shift workers, long-haul truck drivers and those suffering from sleep disorders, I was able to watch a couple of the quarter finals live today.

Rather bravely, they aired the knockout final involving Australia (v South Africa) on the main network channel, before reverting to something rather more resembling type, and shunting the other southern hemisphere quarter final – New Zealand v Argentina – over to the third-tier digital channel, GEM.

(The second-tier GO! Channel being occupied with the important business of re-screening a late-breaking 1990 movie called The Witches, which was no doubt setting the ratings-recording boxes afire in that scant number of homes privileged enough to host them.)

To say I don’t know a lot about rugby union is to veer into an area of monumental understatement along the lines of positing that perhaps the odd finer point concerning both popular and mass culture – whether film, television, music, or any other manifestation – might occasionally escape that chap attached to Richard Wilkins’ famous hairstyle.

However, I do know enough to know what I don’t know, and both you and I may be able to agree that this knowledge, or perspective, may be sufficient to justify the observations which follow - which, I must necessarily add, are entirely my personal opinion, not arrived at in conjunction or consultation with anyone else.

(Unless you count my viewing partner, and sainted mother, Ma Leapster, who couldn’t make heads nor tails of what they thought they were doing either.)

I cannot honestly say that I’ve never seen ad breaks so consistently inserted, let alone with such barbaric intrusiveness, in all the wrong places, every single time.

This is because just the other day, I was watching a couple of the failed megaplex spudtacular type movies that are very much the grist to the digital channels’ mills, (one, I think, was the Lost in Space movie and the other has mercifully been flushed from my memory), and all the ad breaks were arranged on exactly this plan – i.e. they were dropped in the middle of scenes, in the middle of sentences, and with an almost clinical accuracy, right into the non-existent niche when a climactic scene has already started but before it has had time to adequately establish itself to any degree of dramatic momentum.

Had the most determined and painstaking mind on the planet put themselves to the task of destroying these movies with ad breaks, they could not possibly have done a better job.

However, I can say, regarding the RWC quarters, that I’ve never seen execution to rival this kind of demolition derby via ad break on a live sporting telecast. If it was done by a machine, which seems the only viable conclusion, they need to oil it, and in the unlikely event that this kind of malpractice could have been achieved via a human being, they probably need to oil the brain concerned as well, and I’d go in via the earhole. Or at least confine the work-experience kid to the coffee orders and keep him/her away from the grown-up buttons in future.

Whoever, or whatever, was doing it apparently knew nothing about rugby, and on the evidence to hand, possibly had never seen sport before, and maybe hadn’t previously come across television.

The other major problem concerned visual direction, and more particularly, the choices made in vision-switching between different cameras and angles. Where this particularly showed up was in regard to refereeing decisions, or to put it another, more pertinent way, this was precisely where the video we needed to see DIDN’T turn up.

An unusually brief departure here, at least by the standards of this fairly windy outpost of the interweb.

My contention is essentially that rugby union rules – and thus refereeing decisions – are largely opaque, if not arcane, to you if you weren’t brought up on rugby from the crib. For those whose interest, and/or participation, was honed in another football sport, the game of rugby union arguably becomes a labyrinthine mystery once the player in possession is taken to ground with the ball. From this point, both carnage and confusion may appear to ensue. *

However the referee’s (and his assistants’) determinations in this circumstance are vital, perhaps even in a more emphatic way than other football codes. This is not only due to these decisions determining who will next have possession, or a scrum-feed, or the line-out throw, or such Earth-shaking matters as that.

Moreso, this is because this is where penalties get awarded, and, in rugby union, penalties within goal-kicking distance can result in scores, and games can be decided on those three-point scores.

And this was exactly where the visual coverage that we saw, on Nine and Gem – whether it was controlled by Nine Australia, or was in some manner tailored for audiences here from partly NZ sources, or was entirely a New Zealand production triumph – demonstrated all the uncanny reverse alacrity of the Phantom Ad Break Inserter from Hades.

It was little short of dizzyingly impressive how unfailingly the replays following key refereeing decisions started way too early in the play concerned and then cut away before we could see the actual incident that determined the ruling. This happened again and again. It seemed like whoever was in charge of the replay machine was on some sort of satanic mission to deprive viewers of any remote chance of understanding how the ref had come to any important conclusion. At least as far as I was concerned, I would have to say, with a note of awed congratulation in my voice, “Mission accomplished.”

Contentious plays such as alleged forward passes were routinely shown from such an angle that it was impossible for the home viewer to determine what had happened. Not only shown live this way, but shown this way IN REPLAY, sometimes repeatedly.

It wasn’t just contentious play, actually, it was a lot of play. At one point, I think during a New Zealand phase of possession, (don’t quote me on it – they’d got me pretty dizzy by then, which at least saved me money on alcohol, since they’d got me disoriented when I was stone cold sober) they cut away from the fairly pitched and busy play with the ball to cut out wide, from a way different angle, to where the guys were standing around in formation doing nothing. This was just long enough for the viewer to cry “What the hell is going on?” before they cut back to the ball action, and just long enough for you to have lost temporary track of what was happening back at the proverbial ranch. Bear in mind that this was just one example, and while it may have been the market-leader in dunderheadedness for the day, it was not exactly starved for company.

Again, all this wasn’t the camera shots themselves, which generally managed to get the play, players and ball all on-screen and in focus at least, but with how the shots were being thrown together, which at certain times suggested they had Rick Wakeman at the vision-switching keyboard in one of his more hyper-active modes playing his largely forgotten meisterwerk The Six Wives of Henry VIII while not looking at rugby.

In conclusion, I’m glad I’m not a big rugby union fan, as between the random outbreaks of ads in the middle of play and the rigorously-applied Wrongway Feldman approach to visual coverage, I would have probably kicked the screen in, and it wasn’t my TV.

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* (Even rugby league – hardly the first football language of those of a soccer or Australian Rules background – is relatively simple in this regard. Eventually the hulking types that have smashed the ball carrier to the ground are obliged to let him up to make that play where he chicken-scratches the ball behind him to a teammate, and off they go again.

I think that’s basically how all that stuff goes. Please cut me a little slack if you’re better informed and I didn’t polish the proverbial doorknob of all that detail just right. Remember, my understanding of any rugby code, inc. American or Canadian football, is strictly English-as-a-Second-Language level.)

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or

WHAT GOES AROUND, GOES AROUND, AND THEN IT GOES AROUND SOME MORE, AND EVENTUALLY YOU’RE DEAD

You can get the feeling in popular culture, particularly with mainstream movies and television that you’ve seen pretty much all of it before.

It’s probably worth bearing in mind that this doesn’t necessarily make you particularly smart or perceptive – it’s more like the people signing off on the money to make the movies are that clueless, or think the audience is sufficiently young OR dumb that they won’t notice.

As a result, the movies and TV shows feed endlessly on the poop of old movies and TV shows, plenty of which weren’t such brilliant ideas in the full bloom of their youth. It’s no real challenge to pick the trend. It’s not like they’re hiding it. It’s also not like anyone involved would have the skill to hide it even if they wanted to.

Saw a trailer for a new Hugh Jackman movie, which is about gigantic robot boxers and directed by the guy who made the Night in the Museum movies – a combination of attributes which seems to have been arrived at via some off-ramp in hell.

The brain may have been having a slow day, so it probably wasn’t until about three seconds into the “teaser” style trailer that I realised that: (a) this is about robot boxers; (b) what the hell is Hugh Jackman doing in this picture – has he got some sort of gambling problem that he needed the money that bad, and is it going to be one of those “Celebrity Circus” type TV shows next; and (c) I think I’ve seen this all before, and a few times at that.

A book of boxing stories called In the Ring turned up two of these from the old pulp magazines: one, by a Larry Sternig, about giant boxing robots (with an interplanetary theme worked in) called Scrap Iron, from 1945, which I’d largely forgotten about, until I picked up the book again after seeing the trailer; and the one that stuck with me a little more, Richard Matheson’s story Steel, from 1956. *

The latter concerned a future where boxing was conducted between somewhat human-like robots, but the boxing game itself hadn’t changed so much, so the down-on-his-luck trainer and his beaten-up robot were working for scraps on the cheap and sleazy end of the scale, getting exploited by crooks, and the long and the short of it is the trainer/owner forms a bond with his “fighter”.

The other reason this story stayed in my mind is that when I watched a DVD set of original Twilight Zone episodes (fifth season), it turned up in there, adapted by Matheson. (And starring Lee Marvin.) It’s pretty good, too, for what it is. Watched it again, in between writing this. Holds up just fine.

As far as I can ascertain right now, the credits for Real Steel – the giant boxing robot movie we’ve apparently all been waiting for, starring Hugh Jackman – feature no mention of either Matheson or Sternig. Apparently they’ve come up with a robot boxing movie all of their very own.

(In the one article I’ve chanced to read about it, from a mainstream pop culture website, the interviewer made mention of the originality of the premise, which possibly gives you some idea of the extraordinarily well-informed people we have covering this sort of territory these days.)

I have no idea at this point what, if anything, Real Steel owes to the stories I’ve cited. (Other than it reminded me of them within five seconds of the trailer starting.) My guess is, going on how other source material is treated in adaptation these days, and has been for years, if there was a connection, they’ve probably done Matheson and/or Sternig a substantial favour in every way short of the financial by not mentioning it.

Twilight Zone is an interesting case study, particularly to look back on now. It respected the writer, and source material, not to mention the audience’s intelligence. It would routinely cast character actors in feature roles who were patently not traditional leading man or woman types selected with a view to attracting audiences via their looks.

US television went through a period in the 1950s of live TV drama production which may not have always hit the high points, but in terms of writer selection, casting subject matter and general approach, were unmistakably aiming for quality. One-off television plays in 60 or sometimes 90-minute time slots.

(Twilight Zone, though a product of this era – and main writer Rod Serling had written some of the most famous of the live TV drama plays – was not live, it was filmed. However, despite the series format and the Rod Serling introductions and after-words that were part of that, it was really all one-off mini-plays as well.)

I’ve seen kinescope copies of a few of the 50s US TV dramas – all of them Serling teleplays, I think – and the thing that struck me on viewing them, and moreso now, with the line of reflection I’m pursuing here, is that this approach could basically never have happened again in mainstream US television from that time up until much more recently, when cable TV started producing the “movie quality” shows – in terms of writing, acting, cinematography, production and direction – from the time of The Sopranos.

Meanwhile, as the movies have become more technologically advanced, they’ve basically become dumber, particularly in the mainstream. Not only are things remade or retooled from television where you’re dumbstruck that anyone could have mistaken these as viable concepts for a feature movie in the first place, but when anything is adapted they change it all anyway, on the famous “This is Hollywood – we change everything here” principle.

We’ve just lived, or are still living, through a time when the cutting-edge of large screen entertainment were sourced from comic books dating back 40-50 years in many cases, and only 35 or so in the more daringly modern variants. Even then, in most cases, they merged and melded and CGI’d and redesigned and reinterpreted in detail and in essence, often just about to death. With very few exceptions, the ones that worked best were the ones that cleaved closest to the spirit of the original works. Which is a no-brainer thing to say anyway – what made them attractive properties to adapt now was obviously the concepts and storylines that a writer and an artist or two had originated back then.

Some folks were, to me, unfathomably kind to the whopper of a bloated mess that the horses’ patoots concerned made out of Get Smart when they tried to turn it into a movie. (And a James Bond movie at that.) You look at that thing and the only conclusion possible is that the numbats concerned watched the TV series Get Smart and didn’t understand that ALL the appeal was in the gags and the playing, and that the plot was just there to hold the laughs in place so that they didn’t go flying off around the room. So they came up with a plotfest that was more of a blotfest, and strenuously pretended that anyone might care whether the guy got the girl and made good, and forgot that little part about making people laugh, which was the whole point of the original show. I guess if the main aim of the enterprise was to prove, at least in that context, that Anne Hathaway couldn’t play comedy in a movie, they did a pretty great job.

Just this evening, I watched the highly-promoted first episode of the new TV adaptation of the old TV series, via the movie adaptation of the original series, once removed, Charlie’s Angels.

You know, when they first announced, some years ago, that they were doing a movie version of Charlie’s Angels, I thought this was Showbiz Inc’s way of publicly clarifying that they were out of their tiny minds.

(I was apparently mistaken. This was just a loud, sustained shriek for help. When someone dug through the tip and came up with Dukes of Hazzard as a viable premise for a hideously expensive movie, THAT was Showbiz Inc openly ram-raiding the doors of the asylum.)

Putting untoward (and comprehensively unearned) nostalgia firmly to one side in the general refuse bin, the original TV series Charlie’s Angels was an exercise in astounding quantities of unrelieved sheer drivel.

However, the movie adaptations avoided both the painstakingly dreary earnestness of the TV series (which was the transparent theoretical cover for its jiggle-fest actual selling point) and avoided its carpet-wearing actressing and astoundingly content-free writing, to come up with something that was light, quirky, occasionally funny, and otherwise full of explosions and people flying through the air.

To say that those movies were slight is arguably to pay them a compliment, but they passed the time, refused to get serious enough about themselves to insult the intelligence, and were more or less, within a few degrees, give or take, of being fun. What they unmistakably were, was an improvement over the source material. I guess you could say that they picked the right source material to achieve that goal, but that might be a little grudging.

So with the new series, a brainwave it only took someone the solitary eleven years to come up with, after the first of the Drew Barrymore movies, (or to look at it more charitably, eight years after the second one), they’ve cunningly kept the high-end market nominally modern look, and removed all traces of the movies’ quirky humour, underplayed self-mockery and blithe atypical characterisations (all things being relative).

Instead they’ve enterprisingly returned to the knit-browed, brain deadening do-goodery of the original series. Now all the Angels look different but they’re all the same character. What a triumph. The spirit-crushing earnestness, strictly-from-famine writing and paint-curling actressing is all back in place as well. Hallay-freakin-looya.

Maybe we shouldn’t be entirely surprised that the one time Hollywood applies itself intensely to recreating the style and essential content of a source work, they choose something that was rodent poop to begin with.

Meanwhile I’m figuring about 20-30 years in a bunker with those old Twilight Zone episodes, and maybe a few reels of Charlie Chaplin shorts and W.C. Fields movies, ought to just about see me off. It’s very difficult to believe I’ll be missing much either.

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* (Richard Matheson wrote a lot of other interesting stuff as well, generally in some way involving the fantastic, SF or horror. He wrote the novel I am Legend which a few movies have been based on, one sharing that title, plus The Last Man on Earth with Vincent Price (the only adaptation one he worked on the screenplay of), and The Omega Man, with Charlton Heston. He wrote a few of the Poe movies for Roger Corman, the short story and screenplay adaptation of Duel, which arguably remains one of Stephen Spielberg’s best films, the novel and adaptation of The Incredible Shrinking Man, and both source material and a co-write on the screenplay for Trilogy of Terror, the particularly well-remembered Karen Black telemovie from 1975 that used to show up all over network TV here for years, until entertainment on TV was barred by act of parliament, or whatever it was that happened that resulted in television largely dominating by infomercials for mutant gym equipment, helium-inflated talent shows, and dramatic cookery presentations.)

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Some varyingly random observations about footy, on a “For footy fans only” type basis.

EITHER A JOB DONE WELL, OR A JOB WELL AND TRULY DONE

In a week or two, AFL football and Channel Ten are shot of each other, and I guess it’s time to bid those zany funsters at Ten Central a fond adieu.

Here’s some of the stuff I won’t be missing from Channel Ten coverage:

(1) The spiky-haired radio rocky-jockey type, Whatsisface Howard, and perennially bumptious purveyor of nothing particularly worth hearing, Maestro Maher

(2) The general air of a 1950s army recruiting campaign of the commentary with all the exceedingly earnest bumph about fierce contests, stout-hearted men, sacrifice and physical derring-do. I mean, we have eyes. We’ve watched footy before. We kind of know all that stuff. In 100 years or however long Ten had the footy, how about telling us the occasional thing we DON’T already know.

(3) Malcolm Blight about 50% of the time. The problem with Malcolm is that sometimes he’ll tell you plenty you don’t know, but on the nights where he’s fishing on a different planet, you don’t understand what any of them are. Most of what he said in the second half of St Kilda-Sydney final was really so much air-hockey, and when when it was intelligible, it was of the “bleeding obvious” school as well. When Tim Lane called him “The Nutty Professor” near the end of the telecast, it was the funniest thing Tim said all year. Or, probably, during his entire Ten-ure.

(4) Special comments guys who tell you nothing that you couldn’t have worked out for yourself, or that you hadn’t worked out for yourself about half a match before they got around to it. To be honest, from my point of view, with the possible exception of Matthew Lloyd as he improved over time, (and then mostly talking about forward set-ups, but he improved talking about other aspects of the game as well), they never came up with anyone better than Peter Daicos, who they jettisoned fairly early in the run. About 50% of the half of the time Malcolm Blight actually was floating somewhere around the surface of Planet Earth on the night, he’d say something that would tweak the ear and give you a different, interesting perspective on some aspect of the match, a player or a team. But the strike-rate wasn’t exactly guaranteed there, and he was probably second best after Lloyd. Precisely NONE of their colour guys came anywhere near what Wayne Carey was in the year or so he was on Foxtel, or Gary Lyon on Nine, or what Dunstall had been in Seven’s “lame duck” year, the last season they had the footy before they lost it for five years. Or what Leigh Matthews or Richo can give you now.

(5) Those stupid summary comments that were meant to be chirpy or quirky or Lord only knows what exactly, that they used to put at the bottom of the quarter-break score-box. “Hawks firing”, “Swans struggling” etc. They should have been sending us all a cheque for needless wear and tear on TV screen pixels.

(6) The “five-minute warning” aka the Ten tribute to the movie A Few Good Men, aka “You can’t HANDLE the truth.” I guess the intended moral here was, “When you’ve got a truly awful idea, stick to it.”

(7) This is a slight reiteration, but it bears repetition as it was the major factor that resulted in my heart sinking when I remembered a match I was going to watch was on Ten. It’s fitting that the station once had a keynote character who was named “Deadly Earnest”. The tone of the footy commentary on Ten completely lived up to this tradition. Give or take the odd accident occasioned by a Blight brain-fade, or the occasional Anthony Hudson wry comment generally concerning umpiring snafus, it was a consistent white bread avalanche of humour-proof sober-sidedness. This came with a generous side-serve of product being pushed down your throat – a seeming “what’s good for the game is saying the game is good” orientation, along with a feel of pushing the AFL agenda barrow, and that every game covered had to be pushed as being of monumental importance outstripping any paltry world war. As a mate said, once you’ve started off yelling like the world coming to an end has coincided with a global nude bake-off day, you’ve really got nowhere else to go. All you can do is keep yelling. They kept yelling. If I was stretching for a summing up, there was far too much yelling.

(8) Rod Mullinar doing those “1000 Year Old Man” voice-overs on the “special introductions” that seemed to go on for a slow half-year in Hades.

In the interests of brimming bonhomie, and a transparent, and no doubt vain, stab at balance, I ought to say something nice about Ten’s footy coverage as well.

I thought in terms of visual coverage, it improved significantly as it went along. Early on, it was waay-hey-hey too “old school Channel Seven”, particularly when it came to gluing the camera to players’ biceps and nostrils for unnecessary close-ups every other shot.

I’m sure they’d be loathe to admit it, but over time they either looked at Nine’s Friday night coverage and learned from its innovations and departures, or it replicated those developments by independent means. Either way, it definitely got better over time, and a lot better at that.

In terms of how they packaged their Saturday AFL coverage, running delayed afternoon game into the “News”, light footy chat show, and then evening game, they really gave more of a feel of incorporating AFL product into the station mainstream – and thus a sense that they valued that content – that any of the other free TV networks had managed since the first “consortium era”. I’d have to say that includes Seven right now, although we’ll see how things develop when they’re sitting on four games per week next season.

The fact that the games Ten had were often delayed wasn’t their fault – it was a condition of the first “consortium” contract which was rolled over into the second consortium period.

Stephen Quartermain was perhaps placed, if not hatched in a pod, on this Earth to host the Brownlow telecast. He did it more smoothly and less mawkishly or awkwardly than anyone else I can think of. I wouldn’t have him host the Academy Awards or anything, (although I bet he couldn’t do worse than plenty of the plonkers who’ve had a go at the Logies), and on any list of my top 40 TV football commentators, I might not put him in as high as #80 *, but he was custom-built for this job, and made a gruellingly lengthy televised pie night just that little bit less painful.

Beyond that, I’d be struggling for high points. I never really came at their “nibble the hand that feeds very gently” Saturday night football “humour” show either.

Oh, I guess that Fifth Quarter show or whatever it was called, on a Saturday night after the evening game was a more or less painless summary of the round to that point, with a plentiful and good use of footage, by and large. How painless it was for me was a function of who was hosting it. This was the one place where I thought Michael Christian’s unaffected viewer-friendly approach and simple clear communication style was a solid “fit” and outweighed any negatives from the reliably insight-lite nature of whatever he generally had to say about footy on air. Andy Maher, I always found a different, if not difficult, kettle of mackerel entirely. Luke Darcy, well I guess I always enjoyed the Stifler routine more in the context of the American Pie movies.

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WHERE A COMPROMISED DRAW BECOMES THE TWISTY-FRIES DRAW

An interesting point (well, to me) arose from a chat I was having with my mate Big Nick K after we watched today’s (Saturday 10th Sept) finals.

We were gabbing a bit about next season, re the draft, and the prospects for the Could-They-Think-Up-A-Proper-Name-For-This-Club-Already Giants.

Big Nick remarked that to an extent he was still trying to get his head around the idea that there’d be another team in the comp next year. I pointed out that some people were probably still getting used to the idea that there’d be an extra match per round as well.

As, ahem, finely tuned football minds will under pressure of a day’s beer and footy chat, we conceptually slid from there to considerations arising from the resultant adjustments to next year’s draw.

And came up with something disconcerting, and new, about the 2012 (and future) arrangements that may affect the fortunes of at least some teams and have impact on ladder positioning and finals.

I’m not going to say categorically that I came up with this perspective first, because it occurs to me that with all the fanatical footy fans out there – some of them far more fanatical than I am – that this line of thought must have occurred to someone else, and that they could well have written about it in print, or in some far-flung corner of the interweb, before I did. Why the hell not?

However, allow me to spiel this one out for you.

We need to start with AFL Grand Poo-Bah Andrew Demetriou’s “admission” during the week that the fixture/draw is completely compromised, something he then laughed off by commenting that somehow each year the top 4 finishing sides still all end up playing each other in the preliminary finals, hahaha.

Actually, I can’t see for the life of me what one thing has to do with the other. The way the current final eight system is designed/seeded/jury-rigged, exactly what it’s meant to deliver, all things being equal, is the top four finishing teams from the home-and-away matches playing each other in the preliminary finals. That has nothing to do with whether the ladder finish after the final round would have delivered the same four teams, or different ones, or a different order of top four finishers, if the draw was less, more or otherwise differently “compromised”.

I mean, I’m perfectly happy to go along with the notion that with as many teams as the competition now has, we’re stuck with a “compromised” draw, in that we’re just not going to have a situation where every club plays every other club an equal number of times, but the validity or otherwise of that arrangement cannot logically be determined by looking at the finals system, or who it delivers into which post-finals finishing positions. They’re two different animals.

That to one side, Big Andy is apparently ok on admitting the draw is compromised.

But exactly to what degree it will be compromised next season, and for prospective seasons to follow is something that’s REAL interesting to take a look at.

The arrangement we’re looking at next year is 22 rounds, 22 matches per club, and 18 clubs in the AFL. (One week will be taken off, or they’ll do the old split-round arrangement, more likely, giving one “bye” week per team during the season, not that this is germane to the point I’m making here.)

How this results, unless they’re making a more radical change to competition fixturing than has been announced to this point, is that each club will play 12 other clubs once, and five clubs twice.

To put it another way, each club has five spaces on its proverbial dance-card for rival clubs that it plays a repeat engagement against.

And right there is where things get real interesting, if not a little screwy, with the potential, depending on how this is handled, to affect how well clubs perform during the year, and maybe who gets into the finals, and who gets into the top four.

Unless the AFL changes policy in view of the new arrangements, certain club match-ups are guaranteed a repeat engagement during the season.

Ones you’d figure you could write in until you hear different are: Collingwood-Essendon, Carlton-Essendon, possibly Carlton-Richmond (due to the first round game being guaranteed between these two teams with a season left to go, and it’s a solid draw), Crows-Port, Fremantle-West Coast, most probably Sydney-GWS, you’d think Brisbane-GC would be a chance, you’d think Collingwood-Carlton would be tempting, and if there’s any other obvious ones I’ve left out, please accept all due apologies if your team is involved. (Come to think of it, in recent years, I’m pretty sure that with the “Dreamtime” match as a given, Essendon-Richmond has usually been a repeat fixture.)

Before I go any further down that line, this is where I’m headed. Not all men are created equal, (or so they tell me in a rather callous fashion on the rare occasions I stray into a doctor’s office), and neither are football teams at any given point.

There are certain teams that look more like easy-beats right now than others. The SSW Giants are one of those. Gold Coast Suns would be another one. Port, you could make a case for. Maybe right now, some would look at Melbourne, I don’t know.

The point is, clubs playing at least three of these teams twice next year (or whoever turns out to be next year’s easybeats, but let’s go with the current standings and likelihoods as our guide) are staring down the barrel of eight points in the bank in each case.

And there’s only five double-match spots on everybody’s dance card. Those “free match points” are not going to be distributed evenly – CANNOT be distributed equally – and this has the potential, on paper, to influence club fortunes next season.

Look at Collingwood – not that it should probably make any difference to them, but who knows. If my guesses for their dance-card are right, they’ve already got at least two places out of five filled for repeat matches – against Essendon and Carlton. Carlton may have two or three. Essendon may have two filled. That cuts down the “easy-beats” double-shot options for those clubs.

Right now I’m thinking that, mathematically, there’s a better chance for the clubs who haven’t got dance-card spots locked up with feature matches to catch the lower-ranked teams for a repeat encounter in a given season.

If the AFL goes with the idea of the “Sydney derby” being of value, Sydney has one of the soon to be much-prized GWS “double plays” locked up. Could be eight points in the bank. Probably will be.

Now that there is no guarantee or concept whatsoever of any sort of long-term rotation factor in the draw that evens things out, as far as we know, the AFL is pretty much on an open slather, come-as-you-are basis in terms of who they whack in to play whom.

Now think about this. Can you honestly see the AFL feeding the Giants, or even the Suns to Collingwood or Geelong twice in the one season when they don’t have to? Maybe I’m being cynical here, but I honestly can’t see it. Other than the Swans, if the AFL sees a GWS derby as desirable for dual exposure, I’m struggling to see anyone else in this year’s final eight that the league would be desperate to play against the Giants twice, put it that way.

There are other tendencies in the draw in recent years that may also influence things here. Certain teams tend to be seen as “low prime time potential” for want of a better description. If you’re a Melbourne-based team that seems to get a lot of twilight or early Sunday games, you may be one of those. Certain teams, which may include some of the previous group are considered low-drawing teams, with a numerically lower supporter base.

This is pure speculation, although I’d suggest not beyond any reasonable bounds of possibility, but it may be reasonable to surmise that clubs from either group, or both, just mentioned, might be among the ones more likely to fill a spot on their double-play dance-card with one of the lower interstate teams. Or maybe two. Or even more.

Here’s exactly where I’m going with this. Let’s say the three teams who won’t perform well next year are GWS Giants, GC Suns and Port. (Hell, it could be that Suns head mid-table, and Brisbane have a stinker. Maybe Port bounces back. Or maybe none of these three teams will be in the cellar area. But just stick with those names for this hypothetical exercise.)

If you got one of them in your repeat-games dance-card, that could be eight points in the bank.

If you got two of them, that could be 16 points in the bank.

If you got all three, then I guess you start booking finals tickets for 2012 just after the draw hits the papers later this year. (Slight exaggeration for nominally humorous effect.)

I think by now you can probably see where I’m coming from here.

This has the potential to result in a draw which is not just compromised in the sense of some forlorn lost ideal of everybody playing everyone else twice, like the old 12-team VFL, or like the English Premier League is now.

This has the potential to create a draw which is pulverised. Depending on how it is handled, and how even the distribution is of repeat-games against certain clubs, it seems to have the potential to significantly impact on how a club performs over the season, could make the difference to some in terms of making or missing out on finals, and might even affect the composition of the top 4.

I haven’t had a real chance to think it through beyond the above, and I’m not sure what the real implications of this are. It may be that I don’t have the mathematical turn of mind to determine the results of a 22 match season where each club plays 12 teams once and five teams twice.

The repercussions may be as potentially skewed and undesirable as I’ve speculated above, or maybe I’m being a panic merchant.

But there’s one thing I’m sure about. When the AFL draw for Season 2012 is published later this year, I’m going to be taking a real close comparative look at who each club is drawn to play twice, and I’ll be bold enough to suggest that I won’t be the only one.

The other thing I’d suggest is that this probably won’t be the last you’ll hear of this topic, even if I never give myself another headache by writing about it again.

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* (Stephen Quartermain as part of a calling team on the radio on MMM I found a different experience entirely. He was more relaxed, expansive and displayed a sense of humour - all of which I found improvements compared to his TV calling role.)

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Seen on the front page of an internet provider’s news/entertainment site today (4/9/’11):

“Too Many Too Soon - help prevent youth suidice.” (sic)

Yes, well, they may need to coordinate this program with the fight against adult sydlexia.

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(Well, here’s something a little different. I’m prefacing this with a few ill-chosen words because it is something different, for both me and the wegsite, and because I don’t want certain inferences to be drawn by the reader.

You know this is really too big an introduction for what is probably a fairly piffling peom. But if nothing else, I guess you can always say that at least the introduction was better than the poem.)

2nd of September, 2011 (The Best Thing I’ve Heard All Day)

Suddenly

For no apparent reason

It’s silent night in Crazytown

On a bright Spring afternoon

It’s like someone slapped invisible headphones on

Or jammed in intangible earplugs

Only the quiet sounds are loud

The noisy ones suddenly barred from existence

No crazy yelling druggie insanity

No domestic dirty linen aired

In screaming street-shattering roars of hatred

Even the kerbside pimps are quietly mumbling in the cab of their van

The traffic sounds a pleasant voosh in the distance

A pillow of air

Someone’s radio playing quietly (for once)

“I know this much is true”

Kind of acousticky

Finally Spandau Ballet has its day

I can hear the aged slight crazy looking lady

(Deluding herself with some bad plastic surgery)

Humming some little tune happily to herself as she walks by

I can hear some musical noise from a window in a side-street

The type no irritable neighbour could ever complain about

A kid banging away artlessly on a toy xylophone

Like Bugs Bunny or the Roadrunner

Playing “Those Endearing Young Charms”

Missing wildly on the last notes of every other line

With a clattering carelessness

It’s the best thing I’ve heard all day

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