Blog O’ Leaps

A number of people – who clearly have never successfully absorbed the wisdom of the old folk expression beginning “Be careful what you wish for…” – have asked my opinion on the 122 seconds of lickety-split sporting history that comprised the entire Danny Green-Roy Jones Jr fight from last week.

Since I’m now getting nearly as nauseous hearing myself repeating the same thing over and over again as I do watching bank commercials on television, I’ve decided to commit the whole screed to electrophonic print, so I can now simply point to it and say “Lookie over thar” rather than repeatedly running through the exact same, none-too-gripping, ten act operetta until the Earth falls screaming into the Sun.

Being of sharp mind and sound analytical faculties compared to the average zoo baboon, one thing I noticed when people asked me my opinion about the fight, was that it was basically, at very least in part, an excuse to offer theirs.

I’m bound by honour, and a comprehensive inability to keep my trap shut, to say that I thought some of the reaction was slightly bizarre, to, say circus sideshow levels, what with people running around with their arms waving in the air like streamers, hollering about the fight being a bunch of crap, or “fixed”, if not an unholy amalgam of the two.

On that point, I was just saying to a mate recently, that I think in certain cases of big fights, particularly when an Australian is involved, you get a lot of people watching that don’t exactly have anything you’d confuse with an extensive history of following the sport of boxing.

For a fight - big or otherwise - to finish this quickly is not exactly an unprecedented circumstance. That’s the risk you take when you pay for a fight. It’s how boxing goes, sometimes.

Re “fixed”, this is what some folks automatically bellow anytime an event doesn’t go the way they thought it would. It’s just an inevitable and natural reaction for them. I don’t know whether you ought to pay a lot of credence to all that stuff. When a person’s leg kicks out sharply because a doctor has struck them on their knee with a hammer, you don’t immediately assume that person is planning to enter a career in tap-dancing.

A LITTLE BACKGROUND IN THE FOREGROUND

Anyway, here’s what I thought. Jones looked great in his last fight - probably better than he has done for years, and the guy (former world super-middleweight champ, Jeff Lacy) wasn’t a complete bum. But the reality is, it’s been quite a while since Jones was so dominant at light-heavyweight, he basically single-handedly killed the division, and also his chances of big paydays within it.

(Something that took him up to heavyweight, for one fight, where he won a version of the title from John Ruiz, even though Jones at 193-odd pounds wasn’t even at the minimum heavyweight limit. And later took him into the fight with Calzaghe, where he got beat. And the Green fight, for that matter.)

His career slide started around five years ago, when he was KO’d by Antonio Tarver and Glen Johnson at light-heavyweight - guys who were ok, but basically couldn’t have held his jock in his heyday at that weight. (The only fight he’d lost before those was on a DQ, and he later avenged that, from memory, with a 1st round KO of the same guy.)

So his jaw wasn’t the same with age, and probably not his speed and movement either. Green always had a puncher’s chance in the fight, which generally isn’t much of a chance, but it’s there, and perhaps moreso in this case for a few reasons.

If Jones was super-serious about winning this, I think he was ill-advised to come in at as low a weight as he did. He weighed a quarter-pound more than Green on the scales, but Green is a naturally bigger guy, and whatever rehydration and solid work at the lasagne buffet Green had put in in the day and a bit since the weigh-in seemed to count, as he looked a fair bit bigger than Jones in the ring.

Jones’s people should have, and I presume would have, known all this. If Jones could get up to a career high 193lb for the Ruiz fight, and the cruiserweight limit is 200 these days, I think he should have been setting himself for at least 185 if not 190, rather than 179-and-change. (If there was an agreement between the two camps that neither would weigh in over 180, I’m unaware of it. This would change things, but then, in theory it shouldn’t have been an official cruiserweight title fight if the upper limit wasn’t 90kg/200lb, and it was for the IBO cruiserweight title, for whatever that’s worth.)

I’m thinking he needed that kind of size and the extra power and punch absorption ability that goes with it, to best deal with Green.

Either he didn’t want to do the kind of weight work and cardio to get that kind of size and stay in shape at his age, or he underestimated Green, and thought he could win based on his skills edge standing on his ear, regardless of the size he came in at. (Or he just didn’t care, is the third possibility.)

ANALYSIS MANY TIMES LONGER THAN THE FIGHT ITSELF

Of the fight itself, I thought in the first 30 seconds that Green looked better prepared than I expected, and looked effectively aggressive, and seemed to be doing better. The punch he caught Jones with hit him high up on the left side of the head, with power, and knocked him silly, which was the knockdown. Some people thought this looked suspicious, or odd, that a punch in that area would have that effect. I’ve seen enough fights to suggest to me that punches that land with power to the temple or the side of the head, if anything, have better KO potential than the ones that land right on the jaw-button, contrary to popular wisdom. This was one of those and it landed pretty good.

From there, after the mandatory eight count, Green attacked, and Jones had his hands up covering his head, but wasn’t throwing anything. After a ref break, Jones, in going back to the ropes, clearly staggered for a moment. I think the ref saw this and didn’t like the looks of it much. Green moved in and continued the barrage. Again, Jones had his gloves up covering his head and face. The ref stopped it.

I thought it wasn’t a horribly early stoppage, but it was just a little early. I think there would have been less controversy and the crowd/viewers would have “got it” better if the ref had allowed another 20 to 30 seconds for Jones to either prove he was gone, or that he had got his head back together somewhat and was capable of continuing for at least a while.

I’m not one to make a big deal out of knocking a slightly early stoppage when the call is made reasonably, and for the right reasons. I’m all for protecting the fighters, and the idea of “Live to fight another day”. That said, I think this was just a little early, but nothing to make a federal case out of.

I think the probability was that Jones had had his bell rung, and wasn’t coming back from it. Green was trying to finish, and if Jones threw a punch after the knockdown, I can’t remember it.

What people forget is, as great as Jones once was, past a certain age and point in their careers, fighters can age very rapidly, and Jones as a fighter had been showing his age for half a decade before this. (The actual age this happens at varies per individual fighter, but generally once you’re in your 40s, you’re pretty much on borrowed time, if not before that point. Bernard Hopkins with a mixture of guile, psychology, experience, and just being a freak in general has been able to fight creditably into his mid-40s, but those guys are certainly the exception rather than the rule. And, even there, Calzaghe beat Hopkins too.)

Green was too big, too young, too strong, and Jones isn’t what he was. If people feel they got “taken in” by the pre-fight hype, well, that’s exactly what pre-fight hype is designed to do in a sense. It’s there to make you want to buy the fight.

WILDLY WAFTY WAFFLY WHIFFLE-BALL SPECULATION

I guess the question mark is how seriously Jones took the fight. Did he think he had it in the bag, and all he had to do was show up vaguely in shape? Did he see this purely as his “gold watch” retirement fight, and only showed up for the money? (And I believe the money would have been pretty good.) Was it something more “sinister” than that?

I have no idea which of these, if any, is correct, and nor does anyone who doesn’t personally know Jones or have some sort of in with one, if not both, fighters’ camps, no matter what various loudmouth self-appointed sharpsters think they know.

I have very little doubt from viewing the fight a couple of times, that Green had serious intentions of winning, and had come to fight. If Jones wasn’t 100% committed to the fight, Green didn’t seem to have any inkling of it.

I don’t buy that it was any sort of “fix”, or to put the same thing slightly differently, I don’t agree that anyone could infer that from the fight footage with any conclusiveness whatsoever.

Whether or not Jones saw this as a big payout last fight, I’ve got no way of knowing. He sure looked like he got clouted a good one though.

OTHER THAN DOWNHILL, WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE?

All I can say beyond that is that Green as a cruiserweight is something of a bizarre concept. I’m not familiar with the idea of the champion of a division weighing in at 9kg under that division’s upper limit. The cruiserweight division is not now, or traditionally, a talent-studded weight class. But there are other guys in it, who probably have a good bump in experience, if not skill-set as well, over Danny Green, and who are really what used to be called “small heavyweights”. (Whether they’ve got Green’s heart and will is another matter, but if they’re 9kg heavier and can punch and take a punch, there’s only so far that heart and will can take you. Green’s a better boxer than he used to be, but Floyd Mayweather Jr he’s not.)

Green’s not a small heavyweight. He weighed in at 179-and-change, which is basically four pounds over the light-heavy limit. He’s a light-heavyweight who apparently just doesn’t want to have to think about cutting weight.

I guess this will only be a problem if he wants to mount some sort of campaign at cruiserweight. All the above makes me think he doesn’t. I think Green and his camp are probably after whatever bigger money fights they can squeeze in before he finally calls it quits, which at his age, can’t be a lot more than three or four years away, tops.

They’d want the Bernard Hopkins fight, which may work out the same way for Danny as the Jones fight - he gets another legend on his record - or may be a poisoned chalice. Hopkins is devilishly tricky, has an enormous experience edge on Green in every way (and I’m not just talking about age or rounds fought - his knowledge edge and smarts in using it has bamboozled and demoralised guys a lot more talented and achieved than D. Green), and will do anything that works, legal, borderline or dirty, to get in his opponent’s head and suck the fight out of them.

I don’t seriously believe that Hopkins would accept this fight at cruiserweight. Although he’s fought comfortably and strongly at light-heavyweight, he’s basically a great former middleweight champion who, at his age, can’t be bothered about thinking about cutting the weight, and doesn’t have to cut it to come in fit.

I think he’ll make Green fight him at 175lb, tops, and he’ll have the whip hand in the negotiations to do it, because Green needs Hopkins a lot more than Hopkins needs him. That takes the size factor, and to an extent the strength factor out of it. Not to mention it would get in Green’s head (being the guy who fights at a weight class he’s essentially too small for, because he doesn’t want to cut a few pounds to light-heavy), which is perfectly in line with the usual Hopkins modus operandi.

Then the question mark on Hopkins is the age thing. So far, it really hasn’t been a factor in his “Twilight Years/Zone” fights, (although he would have had a better chance with Calzaghe a few years earlier) but, as I mentioned before at this kind of age, generally when fighters do start to show the effects of age, it marches in at double-quick time. This is purely in the “who knows?” category. When/if he fights Green it may be the proverbial “one fight too many”, but there’s no way of saying for sure.

The other big money fight available for Green is obviously Anthony Mundine. Apparently Mundine’s now got this conceptual comedy skit going where, in order to avoid anyone dangerous at a given weight class, he keeps running to lighter and lighter divisions. For the purposes of his next fight, he’s a junior-middleweight, apparently. If he keeps this up, in a few years’ time, he’s going to have to fight under an electron microscope for people to see it.

Although “The Man” mouthed off about fighting Green in the aftermath of the Jones fight, it must be generally accepted by now that this means nothing, as Mundine regularly, and for quite some time, has mouthed off about a variety of big name guys, none of whom he’s actually got around to fighting.

Obviously Mundine must be aware that Green-Mundine II is a very big money fight - depending on what slips happen between cup and lip, it could be promoted into a bigger money fight than their first one, which coined it in - but it has to be admitted that preparing to fight a guy who campaigns at cruiserweight by moving from super-middleweight to middleweight to junior-middleweight is, at best, a little bit odd, and seems to be the kind of career path that Wrongway Feldman would have come up with.

I don’t think there’s any way Green would take this fight at super-middleweight again. (Forget anything lower than that.) He would hold the whip hand in negotiations in this case. The best Mundine might be able to get out of him is a catchweight just over the light-heavyweight limit, say around 178 or 179. If Green won’t cut to 175 right now, I can’t see any way he’ll do it for Mundine’s convenience. A weight like that takes young Anthony way out of his comfort zone.

Green’s a better and more experienced fighter now than he was when he fought Mundine (and he’d want to be.) Mundine now, as opposed to then, well it’s pure guesswork, given the level of opposition he’s fought. I can’t say from what I’ve seen of him that he’s significantly declined, (you can’t really tell, against bums and shoeshine punchers) and there’s absolutely no reason whatsoever to assume he’s significantly improved.

Some folks are saying he’s slipped. Well, he got hit a lot against Daniel Geale. I don’t know what that tells anyone exactly. Every appearance suggested that he wasn’t running or covering up against Geale because he knew that Daniel Geale didn’t have anything to throw that could actually hurt him. Team Mundine wouldn’t have taken that fight if they’d thought Daniel Geale was holding anything to hurt him. Anyone who thinks Mundine would fight the same way as the Geale fight against Danny Green in a rematch must think boxing is exclusively what the gift-wrap counter people do at Myer prior to the holiday season.

But, if the Green guys think that the weight limit could be a significant influence in changing things around from the first fight, I think they’re probably on the right track. The higher that Green can come in, short of him coming in with a beer-gut the size of Unca Leapster’s, the better for him. Mundine is realistically a super-middleweight at his heaviest effective fighting weight. That’s really as high as we’ve seen him fight at. Beyond that limit, I think he’s just putting on weight for no demonstrable advantage.

[The case with Roy Jones was different. He was able to fight effectively against a limited but larger opponent at 193 pounds. Mundine has never fought a significant fight over 168, and has instead cut back to 160 (and now apparently to 154) since then. Incidentally, I can’t see how all this ping-ponging around in weight can possibly be helpful to an athlete of Mundine’s age. Let alone to try and blow back up to, say 180 pounds or that vicinity, for a Green rematch. That sounds like a recipe for ageing as a boxer at a tremendous rate.]

Whether an edge in size and power, plus the improvement in skill-set and experience since the first fight, would be enough for Green to cover the gulf in speed and effectiveness revealed between the two in Mundine-Green I is up for grabs. It’s the question that you sell the fight on really, apart from the personalities involved. But you’d have to at least note and acknowledge the possibility now.

Mundine’s apparent flakiness in career-path, and his steadfast determination to avoid serious major opposition must make people at least consider the possibility that Green has a better chance the second time.

Whether the fight will ever happen is at least as much a matter for speculation, I guess. I can’t see how either can ultimately ignore the money this fight would generate, but Mundine has been avoiding serious money-making fights with name opposition for years. However, at some point, I’ve always felt that when Team Mundine feel they’ve worked the “Bum of the Month” club mine down to the last seam of pocket change, they were always going to have to take at least one “dangerous” fight as Anthony’s last-shot “gold watch” fight. It wouldn’t shock me if Danny Green turned out to be the one. But, as with any consideration of Mundine being involved with the prospect of an even vaguely competitive opponent in a fight, it pays to take an “I’ll believe it when I see it” approach.

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YOU KILL ME (2007)

This unusual – and as far as I’m aware, largely ignored – skewed variant on a crime-based movie, has no shortage of comparison points with the TV series The Sopranos. You Kill Me is more reflective, and less operatically pitched than The Sopranos, but like that series, it’s inherently ‘hi-concept’, but not so focussed on that that it fails to sketch in intriguing characterisations, nor to include some memorably off-kilter whimsical humour.

In The Sopranos the ‘hi-concept’ part the show was sold on was that an organised crime guy could also be the other type of family guy, with all the usual problems anyone might face, leading him to enter therapy with a psychologist.

In You Kill Me, Ben Kingsley plays Frank Falenczyk, a hitman for a Polish mob group of dwindling influence in his home town of Buffalo, NY, who, due to his extreme and regular abuse of alcohol, botches one job too many, and is sent by his uncle (Philip Baker Hall), the Polish mob’s leader, to dry out in San Francisco, under the supervision of a contact (Bill Pullman). The latter, who gives every impression of being a complete douche-bag, arranges regular work for Falenczyk, which turns out to be in the business, or ‘backstage’, area of a funeral home, and arranges for him to attend AA meetings.

Frank is the kind of closed-in guy who is about as likely to “open up and share” as the average school headmaster of the 1960s and 70s, so the AA meetings where everyone pours their guts out pretty much drive him nuts in the early going. Also this not drinking business has little immediate appeal for him.

However, he turns out to have something of a knack for his new work, dealing with another side of the death process than he’s used to, and in the course of his new duties meets a woman he’s interested in, Laurel Pearson (Tea Leoni) – the step-daughter of one of his ‘dear departed’ clients.

It’s when he starts to share a few more details (well, actually pretty much all of them) of what exactly he does for a living with her, and his AA sponsor (Luke Wilson), that the muted black humour of You Kill Me begins to take on a particularly surreal edge.

Director John Dahl (probably best known for the Matt Damon poker movie Rounders, but also somewhat known for his breakthrough picture Red Rock West) lays himself out a curious tightrope to tread here. As played by Kingsley, who is tremendous, the Frank Falenczyk character is realistic and likable, which is a tough sell for a professional killer. The main characters in the movie want him to succeed in defeating his alcoholism and regaining control of his personal and professional life. To an extent, the audience is also encouraged to want him to succeed in these areas. However, there’s that little business of him killing people.

The line Dahl has to walk is to get the viewer on-side, at least to some extent, with Frank and Laurel, while also acknowledging the bizarre and unpalatable (at least) qualities of what exactly his real line of work is.

Actually, within the seamless little world of small triumphs, failures and ironies comprising You Kill Me, he does about as good a job of reconciling this both dramatically, and for comic value, as possible. With a good whack of suspension of disbelief and a temporary suspension of ‘real world’ moral judgement, most viewers ought to be able to get there.

It’s a movie gifted with very solid support performances. Tea Leoni in the co-lead shows a great ability to create a sympathetic character from one not particularly overburdened with likeable traits. Her Laurel is dark-humoured, somewhat abrasive, and has clearly seen a certain amount of damage from previous relationships and life in general. (There’s a vague similarity to the character played by Lisa Kudrow, in her jaw-droppingly strong performance in The Opposite of Sex, but the Leoni character here isn’t quite THAT damaged, and You Kill Me isn’t emotionally quite as jagged.)

Dennis Farina is perfectly cast to exploit his inherent qualities on screen, in terms of affably loathsome smarminess, as the leader of Buffalo’s Irish crime family, which is intent on squeezing the last atoms of life out of the Polish mob’s influence. He might not look outstandingly Irish, but in a movie where Ben Kingsley is playing a Polish-American, presumably one makes certain allowances.

Pullman really gives his loudmouth real estate-broker/arsehole character a stink that lingers in what probably should have been a minor role in terms of screen-time, but resonates a bit beyond any per-line basis; and Luke Wilson has just the right combination of likeability, confusion and being just a bit ‘off’ as the AA sponsor. As usual he’s more engaging and more amusing than his brother Owen ever quite seems to manage.

You Kill Me is probably, on any further, deeper reflection, a slight movie, but it’s also about as engaging, flavoursome, and endearingly odd as one of those gets. Pretty much everything about it is well done, right down to Winnipeg, Manitoba doubling for the US in location shooting, and, perhaps most of all, the virtually unheard of running-time of 92 minutes for a modern movie, when that’s the length it actually needed to be.

About the only major thing I can fault it on is the title. It sounds like they were thinking of some caper-crime type Vegas wiseguy comedy movie with Danny DeVito and Bette Midler from a couple of decades ago. Apart from the word ‘Kill’ it conveys little of the content of this movie, and precisely nothing of the tone. Had they called it The Rootin’-Tootin’ Boozin’ Shootin’ Movie, they could have hardly have done it any less of a favour.

(8.5 out of 11, on the industry-standard MPHOAH scale)

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About two years ago, I posted this elsewhere on the site.

Now someone famous is remaking this movie in the typical dynamic go-getting approach of the day, i.e. unnecessarily, so before they make a royal corn beef hash of it, I thought I’d remind you of the original.

Harvey with Jimmy Stewart used to be held as a quiet favourite by hardcore olde-Hollywood movie fans, and over time, possibly for reasons of political correctness to do with part of the subject matter and possibly by the sheer general attrition of attention that affects the status of some older movies, because everyone’s keeping up with the ‘latest and greatest’ - we could call it plain critical ignorance for short - has become the even quieter favourite of somewhat fewer fans.

So, after they’ve pretty much inevitably gone right ahead and ruined it in remake, take the time out to try and catch the unspoiled original.

HARVEY (1950)

Now almost forgotten, this used to be on TV enough that it was considered something of a family classic.

The reason it doesn’t get a run much now is probably partly because it’s black and white, but mostly because the hero is an alcoholic, and that’s pretty much presented as a positive thing. Just imagine trying to pitch that one to a studio today. Yep, folks, we got us a loveable kid-friendly picture for the whole family about a guy who drinks in every scene in the movie and has an imaginary buddy who’s a white rabbit over six foot tall. You’d probably land in the nuthouse on the first bounce.

Anyway, it’s a shame, because this is one of those rare mold-denying timeless Hollywood studio pictures that effortlessly maintains a blithe tone of unforced farce. It captures a kind of idealized small-town life and makes its little points about the interesting and different ways people have their heads bent by everyday life, without the slightest strain or pain on the part of either movie or audience. (In a way it’s kind of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest territory thematically, but makes the same points doing a lot less overt hard work.)

Jimmy Stewart is at his most absent-mindedly likeable as Elwood P. Dowd who apparently has blithering piles of money and lives in a huge house, but doesn’t care about any of that, he just likes to go out drinking in low-life bars where he cheers everyone up with his generosity, unfailingly gentle, accepting manner, and also confuses them with his invisible giant rabbit buddy, Harvey.

His sister is a little more concerned, mainly because Dowd’s harmless eccentricity interferes with her plans to marry off her social-climbing hatchet-faced daughter, due to everyone figuring he’s mad. Also she’s starting to see the rabbit as well, which is bothering her.

Naturally, she tries to have Elwood committed, and naturally this works out a lot easier and better on paper than it does in real life, since the staff at the fairly demented local insane asylum wrongly assumes that she’s the jittery lunatic and that Dowd is just a regular happy guy, which on the surface of things is admittedly an easy mistake to make.

The story unfolds in a leisurely amiable series of confusions, and in general Harvey kind of feels like Arsenic and Old Lace (right down to one of the same cast members, Josephine Hull, who won an Oscar in this as the sister) only with a lot less pushing and running around. Stewart probably never had a better vehicle for his most familiar screen persona than this picture. The on-screen explanation for how his character became that way comes late in the piece, and is the perfect rationale. Everything that’s done here is done well. If you’re not familiar with Harvey, or haven’t seen it in years, make the effort to catch it. It’s a real one-off.

(10 out of 11, on the MPHOAH scale)

Wrote an email to a friend, and realised in the glowing AfterMASH of composing it, that the subjects covered were of general-enough interest to form the basis for a fire-up restart for this long dormant/just about healed over webslight. So I tidied it up a little, and hyar she blows. (Possibly quite literally.)

So all due thanks for completely inadvertent inspiration to my semi-anonymous pal Buddy Dennis, and to the upcoming Hulk Hogan tour that provided the unlikely stimulus for the lively email exchange. (And which, out of clemency, is not mentioned below at all.)

THE ACKNOWLEDGED WORLD CENTRE OF PURE SHOWBIZ GOLD

If you love a good Aussie showbiz disaster, please avail yourself of Channel Ten’s The Spearman Experiment before they yank it off television, which going by the first show I saw, could be within the proverbial New York minute.

It’s Nine’s 20-to-1 show (a programme I’ve always felt was innovatively named after the viewer’s likely odds of getting any entertainment out of the show) except the young, swingin’, bopster hepcat version, in theory, which actually translates to nostalgia stuff aimed at people watching television in the 1980s, so Ten’s idea of cutting-edge young people’s TV is actually aimed at 40 year olds.

The show I saw was about the “great Australian TV comedy characters”, and I’m now convinced that the real greatest Australian TV comedy characters would include Jim Waley, Laurie Oakes and Tony Barber in the wake of the ones they came up with, such as Kylie Mole, two of the scintillating comic characterisations by the ever-hilarious Glenn Whatsisface who used to be on The Panel, and anyone else who ever was in a comedy show on Channel Ten.

Just to pull the shroud over the deceased, they had “celebrities” talking with their great comedic knowledge about the ‘great comedy characters’, in a manner that suggested they’d just been brained with a baseball bat prior to taping, and most of them were “television personalities” I’d never previously seen or heard of. I’d guess they were from the Witness Protection Program channel.

The finishing hold was provided by the hosting of Magda Szubanski, and I can honestly say without any hyperbole that this was the single coldest, unfriendliest job of hosting anything on TV I’d seen, perhaps since Bryant Gumble was at the height of being tired with his co-host/weather presenter combo on NBC’s Today show, or anything Daryl Somers has done in the last 20 years, minus the smarm. I don’t know whether she was trying for being ‘cool’ or ‘dry’, or some other aspect of personality that a deodorant might have, but it seemed like one of the greatest examples in television history of a host clearly conveying to an audience that she’d rather be lying in a puddle of cold mud than hosting the show she was presenting.

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ROCKETING TO THE POORHOUSE

This business of music promoters (and in some cases I mean alleged music promoters, as there’s no apparent promotion involved) bringing out music acts to Australia that have a specialist appeal - i.e. not mainstream, but there’s probably a cult audience there if you can tap into it - and then murdering any chance of success by not doing anything other than hanging the shingle of the act’s name out there, and assuming this will draw an audience without any other advertising, explanation or promotion, has gone from being a definite trend a few years back to a confirmed epidemic. They book the dates, they buy the plane tickets, they book the hotel rooms, and then they sit back with a stupid smirk on their faces and assume the deal is done, and fans will flock in.

Recently I went to see the LA pop singer-songwriter Aimee Mann at the Palais. (Explanations would take up valuable time, but I’m a fan of her stuff.) She should have a solid little cult following here (did the soundtrack for a movie called Magnolia which a lot of the alternative types seem to know her from, and she was in the band Til Tuesday in the 80s) but the show pulled about 50% capacity, maybe 1000 people being generous. She’s never been out here before. The reaction when I mentioned going to the show to a fellow fan a few days later was, and this is close enough to verbatim: “Really? Aimee Mann? When is she playing?” I’m guessing the message didn’t quite get out to the people who knew her stuff, or to other folks who would have liked her music but weren’t aware who she was or what she played.

When the 70s heavy metal band Budgie came out here a couple of years ago, there was no advertising to speak of, and nobody explained to the kids that, wait a minute, these guys were contemporaries of Zeppelin and Sabbath, were covered a couple of times by Metallica, and were the roots of the metal we’ve had since. They drew about 200 people at the Forum. Now someone, who I’m imagining needs a major tax loss on the books for the current financial year, is touring them again! I’ll bet you anything that the level of publicity will guarantee another venue mostly filled with dry ice, tumbleweeds and cicadas. Those poor guys will be going back to Wales and telling everyone that Australia must have a population of around 2000 people, and that you see more koalas than human beings there.

Even when the Dictators came out here a fair while back - and that was a band that was a super-easy sell, being the pre-Ramones roots of punk rock, and contemporaries of the New York Dolls, the Heartbreakers, KISS etc - nobody remembered to do the sell, and with a stacked support card, they still didn’t do much better than about 60% fill the Corner Hotel, and the show at The Tote was fairly packed, but if a quarter of my brother-in-law’s family members turned up, the Tote would be chockers. Had they been sold properly and advertised adequately, I think they could have done a Forum show at least, and maybe a Palace (Metro) or Billboard sized venue. (And the bizarre thing was, when Whitesnake came out last time, which was only a few weeks prior to WASP from memory, and it was apparently promoted on the basis that it was some sort of official state secret, they (a) put them in the Palace/Metro, when I think that properly promoted, that’s at least a Festival Hall/Vodaphone gig, and (b) thanks to the hardcores, it was apparently chockers anyway.)

It’s amazing how often people miss the boat on this stuff. I think touring bands here is like the old tablecloth trick of movie and stage magic fame – where a guy tries and whips the cloth off the table in one snappy motion, leaving all plates, cutlery and glassware atop it undisturbed. Basically there’s a lot of drunk people who think they can do this, and none of them realise they have no idea whatsoever until we’re all knee-high in food scraps and crockery fragments and drenched in leftover wine.

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BASE PLUG FOR CURRENT MOVIE

Regarding this latter sentiment, and for a bunch of other reasons, you should make an effort if you can to catch the movie Anvil - The Story of Anvilwhile it’s still in the cinemas. This is being promoted as a real life equivalent to This is Spinal Tap, which in some ways isn’t a bad description. These guys are a real-life Canadian metal band, who had influential albums out in the early-mid 1980s, but while virtually everyone else they played with went on to become multi-million sellers, nothing ever happened for them. There are still two original members, now in their 50s, still touring around as Anvil, with a couple of younger guys. The movie, in part, follows them on possibly the worst-organised European tour since Germany’s tour of Stalingrad in WWII. You have just got to see the wacko woman booker who promotes this tour in action. She’s incoherent in any language she encounters - actually I couldn’t even work out what her first language might be, other than it’s definitely not English - and screws up every single date, venue, and train/plane transfer, one after another. It’s so well organised that at one venue the club manager attempts to pay them in bowls of goulash. I’m not making this up.

The movie is actually kind of a feel-good movie because the two main guys are so likeable. Also (and this point is made by various of their contemporaries, including Slash and Lemmy) they’re actually a pretty damn good metal band. In some ways it’s a lot like the movie The Wrestler because the main guys are working Joe-jobs throughout the week to feed their families, and then keeping the dream alive working crappy clubs on the weekends. However, it’s more feel-good than that (well, almost anything bar The Spearman Experiment is) because the band is good, and by the end, they kind of start to finally get a break, and play a big show in Japan. (And the movie has kind of given them a career, I gather.)

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BURNING DOWN THE HOUSE (2009)

You know, you watch a movie like this, presuming you’re of a certain age, and perhaps disposition, and you start to think about posterity, and the mark you or anyone else might be likely to leave on it. This can get a little depressing.

In the case of Hilly Krystal, who ran the rock club CBGB’s in New York City for the best part of three decades, his legacy is assured, if also perhaps slightly depressing. The music that came out of there, thanks to the then no-name groups he allowed to play there in the early-mid 1970s, was critically lauded for what constituted forever in the 20th Century, and likely will be for as long as anyone remembers or cares about rock music. Television, the Talking Heads, the Ramones, Blondie, Richard Hell and the Voidoids, the Heartbreakers (Thunders, not Petty) – they all played there, as did everyone else in the New York punk scene at the time. Hell, it kind of WAS the New York punk scene.

(The New York Dolls mostly played elsewhere, and maybe a little before this time-frame, I think. This doco doesn’t mention the Mercer Avenue Arts whatever-it-was, where they played, nor is Max’s Kansas City – a New York venue despite the name – mentioned at all.)

Hilly Krystal was a former male chorus singer (in a heterosexual type of way, one gathers) at Radio City Music Hall, who had ambitions of being some kind of bluegrass artist, and never made it as such. He opened up a club called CBGB, which stood for Country, Bluegrass and Blues, and lived to see it become an icon for precisely none of those kinds of music.

According to this movie, by all testimonies given therein, his joint was a complete rat-hole in the early 70s, which he never spent a dime on if he could avoid it, with the one exception being a then-state of the art PA he had put in, roughly (it isn’t quite specified in the movie) around the time that he started booking the bands that were to become known as “Punk Rock”.

This was a happy accident, or a brilliant selective use of available capital, as the sound in CBGB was apparently excellent. (You have to trust them on this, because most footage included in the movie from the old days is rugged as hell for both sound and visuals. Actually, they even have an unrelated clip of Aerosmith which is just about digitising, it’s so crappy. Anyway, I’ve been in there, and the sound was good.)

By the way, him “booking” these bands is kind of an overstatement. CBGB was a dive on the Bowery, which was a street for down and outs that, in general, made the venue almost posh by comparison, “almost” being the key word. Again, by all testimony, there was no young rock scene indigenous to New York at the time. Bands like Television and Richard Hell’s band were around and wanted to play somewhere. One gathers that they saw CBGB as a place shitty enough and with low-enough standards and expectations, that they might be allowed to play there, since they and their friends being there would boost the bar-tab.

Krystal went along with it, and, as a result, history subsequently happened in his long, skinny, divey rock bar. He was a kind of absent-minded accommodator of the arts, in a kind of not-quite beatnik (he had played at Cafe Wha? and that NY coffee-house set-up of the early 60s that gave rise to Bob Dylan, among others – incidentally on an unrelated note of bizarre cross-culture pollenisation, David Lee Roth in his autobiography mentions that Cafe Wha? was run by his Uncle Manny), not-quite hippy kind of way. That tendency to nurture the somewhat wayward musical artists and the otherwise artistic, and the sound-system he put in, are probably the foundation of his legacy, along with having his “colourful” club in an even more colourful street.

The movie is not a history of the NY punk scene, although there’s plenty of that in there, and principals from the time are interviewed, including Debbie Harry, Tommy Ramone, Cheetah Chrome etc.

One good thing about Burning Down The House is that it DOESN’T stop with the club’s famous days. It continues through the hardcore punk days of the 1980s, and the times when it booked grunge era bands in the 90s, which is just as well, because those periods of CBGB are relatively undocumented, and while no more revolutions came out of there, people around the world still iconicised the joint, mostly with some time-locked idealised vision of what it represented, and some documentation of the fact it continued as an active rock venue, and what was played there, was due, and probably overdue.

Unfortunately, this is only partly a documentary on CBGB, or Hilly Krystal. The framework director Mandy Stein (daughter of Linda Stein, former Ramones manager, and, I presume, Seymour Stein of Sire Records) has chosen to construct the picture around is Krystal’s final fight for the venue’s survival, when the landlord, a non-profit organisation aimed at helping the homeless, was trying to kick them out.

Many points are made about the gentrification of the Bowery, and of New York in general, and of the vital cultural nature of what CBGB represented. It’s difficult to avoid the feeling that something irreplaceable and valuable was lost, no matter how crappy in some ways it might have quite literally been. (The legendary CBGB toilets – a Manhattan version of the Black Hole of Calcutta – are cited many times over, not to mention the frequent prevalence of dog poo and worse throughout the club. It’s hard not to get the impression that the only money Hilly Krystal spent on the joint after the PA was on liquor to stock the bar, and whatever staff wages amounted to.)

However, it’s also difficult to escape the feeling that change like this is inevitable, and happens all over the place. In general, given the way things are going, it’s easy to believe that in 50 years’ time, the shittiest of live music bars, clubs or pubs that people fondly complain about would be unrecognisably shimmering, streamlined, clean and modern to those of us with a 70s or 80s start-date for rock joint attendance, and basically look something like the Legion of Superheroes club-house in the year 3000.

It’s also a factor that the Ee-vill landlord bent on cleaning CBGB out of its hidey-hole is an organisation which assists homeless people. If it had been a case of clearing Krystal and CBGB’s out of there to put in some rich nob’s expensive apartment building or something, the fight over the space would have a different feel to it, put it that way.

But probably the biggest factor is that the details – legal, logistical and otherwise – of this fight to save CBGB become tedious by comparison to discussion of the music that was played there, and the interview snippets with the musicians themselves.

Hilly Krystal’s story is a story worth telling, and it’s as big a part of the CBGB story as anything but the best-remembered music that came out of there, but the incredibly detailed recounting of the long, drawn-out and ultimately hopeless final battle to save it is hardly the most riveting portion of this documentary. Unfortunately, it’s a lot of this documentary.

But for anyone interested in any of the music that happened there, there’s still more than enough interest generated to make it absolutely worth your while. The footage of the final concert (Patti Smith, The Dictators, among others) and the venue’s final days is pretty fascinating. The stuff about the merchandising generating CBGB’s survival money in its later years is real interesting. There’s plenty of stuff in there about the scene of the 1970s and interviews with people whose music became an acknowledged part of international music history, as well as mainstays like Wayne/Jayne County, and the Dictators, who didn’t so much.

It’s actually worth it just to see Hilly Krystal’s office, a clutter of such baroque, toweringly filthy magnitude that it’s difficult to believe a single decision that generated so much as a dollar was made from there.

You get to see the joint pulled apart, which has its eerie hold on the viewer as well.

The final irony is seeing various mementos from CBGB enshrined in a New York rock museum, ironically in (presumably) the same Mercer Avenue which used to host the Dolls. They tore the joint down, but saved some scraps to put under glass. Kind of bizarre.

If you were into any of the bands mentioned, and/or the Dead Boys, the Tuff Darts (nice clip!), or whoever, make sure you see it, despite any deficiencies or misjudgements mentioned above. It might not all be great history, but it’s the history of something great.

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(I went to CBGB’s exactly once, in the early 1980s, either ’81 or ’82. There were three bands on – one was called Great Jones, another I can’t remember the name of, and Sylvain Sylvain from the New York Dolls was the headliner. The venue was very very thin, and long. Beers were not cheap. I don’t know if the place had been mildly spruced up since its 70s heyday, but I don’t remember it as being really much shittier than various live music pubs and clubs I was attending here at the time. It just didn’t strike me that way. I can’t remember any poo on the floor, or anything like that. It had a great feel for a rock joint, kind of both welcoming and vaguely threatening, like it says at one point in the doco. But then, there were places like that here too, only I knew them better. I went down to the notorious CBGB toilets. Hell, when I need to go for a beer pee, I’ll go to anyone’s famous toilets. It was all cracked, marked, spattered and splattered, but I’ve seen as bad if not worse in pub toilets here. Maybe I caught it on a relatively good day. That said, you probably wouldn’t have wanted to consume a sandwich in there, or anything. Some kid who looked like Andy Warhol tried to score drugs off me. This is not so remarkable in itself in that (a) about one in six people in there looked like Andy Warhol, and (b) I have a lifetime history of being mistaken for a drug dealer, by civilians, police and drug dealers alike, even though I basically don’t use drugs at all, and have never dealt them. However when you’re a fairly young-looking 21 year old from Australia City, with at best mid-length hair, no facial hair, no tattoos, no earrings, and some guy who looks like Andy Warhol approaches you to score drugs in the CBGB toilet on your first visit to the Big Apple, it’s kind of hard not to have that “If I can MAKE it there/I’ll make it ANYWHERE” line going through your head, once you’ve safely established that the guy is not going to ask you out on a date, to take effect almost immediately. By the way, from memory that wasn’t the only time someone tried to score drugs off me that one time at CBGB. Fortunately for my heart-rate, it was the only time someone did so in the toilet, however.)

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Jake Niall, writing in The Age, 3/8/2009, re Melbourne v Richmond:

“Tanking speculation aside, the upshot was that the frenetic final few minutes salvaged one of the season’s worst standard games.”

Pardon me while I beg to differ, with no disrespect intended to Jake, but considerable disrespect intended to Melbourne v Richmond, Round 18.

The “frenetic final few minutes”, if that’s what they were, salvaged nothing. The game, which was seldom detectable as anything resembling senior AFL football, locked the entire claimed crowd of 30,000 and change (looked like around 27/28000 tops to me and various adjacent experienced amateur crowd estimators who are usually pretty much right on the money) into a coma for large portions of the encounter, and reactions from the crowd were eerily non-existent for most of the match.

The quality of the football played therein beggared description. It largely consisted of a glorified and slightly more elaborate game of kick-to-kick, in which Richmond would routinely stream across the centre-line and deliver the ball with pinpoint precision onto the chest of an opponent, following which Melbourne, abetted by an incomprehensible and entirely ineffectual zoning system of Richmond’s, would easily clear the ball from defence and into attack, prior to exhibiting some peculiar brain-fade which was less a case of butchering the football than mutilating it, thus returning possession to Richmond. And so on, and so forth.

There would have hardly been a game of park football played across the state over the weekend which wouldn’t have been better to watch. Probably the vast majority of these games would have given a general indication that either team in it had more clue about what it was doing out there than either Melbourne or Richmond showed.

There’s this bizarre theory out there, at least among the exceptionally easily-pleased, or “theatre-goer” type football fans, or phenomenological train-spotters, that as long as a game is tight on the scoreboard at the end, that this somehow raises it to the level of a spectacle worth beholding, or something. This was a spectacle worth beheading.

When a winning coach is, by his own testimony, disappointed to the level of being quite dispirited by a victory, it tells a story, you’d reckon. Close or not, this was a stinker of incredible magnitude. It must be considered by anyone voting in Worst Game of the Year polls, and was probably duller and more inept than the deadlier portions of that Carlton-Collingwood game in Round 17, which were at least as hard to watch as any proposed Hey Hey It’s Saturday cast reunion.

Naming half a dozen players for each side whose performance didn’t suck by any reasonable standard, probably including their own, would be a monumental chore akin to the twelve labours of Hercules. If the match will be remembered for one stand-out event, and it’s doubtful at best, that would be Jordan McMahon achieving with one kick, what it used to routinely take former Tiger stalwart Greg Tivendale – known to some Richmond fans as “Mr Awesome in August” – an entire month’s worth of games to achieve, in that McMahon is now presumably un-delistable for at least another year. (He kicked the winning goal after the siren, for those who missed it, or were there and already snoring deeply by that point.)

The AFL could considerably advance the code and cause of Australian Rules football by buying any existing master tape, disc, or if necessary any machine containing a hard-drive recording of this match, and burning it. Excelsior!

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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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Just some notes on some of the stuff I’ve self-medicated with recently.

All come in the 330ml, or “cheater” stubby, unless otherwise noted. Prices are generally approximate. The percentages given after the beer’s name are alcohol/volume.

Of the ones that aren’t generally available, which is most of these, your best bet for finding them is probably Acland Cellars, up the Village Belle Hotel end of Acland St, St Kilda, aka “The House of 600 Beers”.

HOLSTEN PREMIUM (Germany, 500ml can, 5%)

Found a tin of this in my spare beer box, from Lord knows when. Very easy, pleasant, undemanding type of customer in the general middle-European lager school. Like a lot of German “international” lagers, has pilsener-ish tendencies, which means it’s a bit herby in the hops department, when it bites in around the side of the tongue. I’ve had plenty crazier in this vein, but if you don’t go for that approach at all, you probably won’t like it so much. If you do, it’s surprisingly satisfying for this “international name-brand lager” type style.

GRIMBERGEN DOUBLE (Belgium, $5, 6.5%)

This is one of the Trappist guys’ beers, which Acland Cellars has been selling cheap recently (by the standards of other monk-driven beers from Belgium), but don’t know how long that deal is on for.

The “Dubbel”/Double bizness presumably means it’s fermented twice, the second time on lees, which is either on the malt or yeast again or something the second time around, or they mean Leeds in England but misspelled it. This kind of process tends to make for solid, as in you could hit someone with them, beers, and Grimbergen Dubbel is right in the normal pocket for those Belgian abbey-produced beers. It’s darkish, buckets of flavour, a tendency to the sweet, and you like it or you don’t.

I like the style a lot, but I’ve had better balanced than this, and more convincingly rich and complex. I guess they’re going for something different, as the alcohol content is lighter than a lot of these, but for me, while it was drinkable and not remotely horrible, it didn’t quite get there. If you’re already pre-disposed towards the hardcore Belgian beers (i.e. not imported real Stella or Belgian Pils, which are different animals entirely, and certainly not the Stella Artois generally available here, which isn’t Belgian) this is worth a try at this kind of price. Otherwise, maybe one stubby out of curiosity. I wouldn’t say it’s a lot worse than Duvel, to give some sort of comparison to work on.

STAROPRAMEN 1869 (Czech, 500ml, $5, 5%)

The Staropramen normally seen here is, going by the packaging, a different beer, usually sold in a four-pack of “cheater” stubbies. That one is kind of like Pilsner Urquell, but with more flavour, less balance, and, while it’s certainly ok, not as good a knock-back drink as Urquell, which handles its malt a bit more suavely and doesn’t glug-up while going down the food tube.

This here one, which I’ve called 1869 because that’s on the label and everything else on the label isn’t in English and I don’t know what in hell else to call it, is more the conventional Euro lager, and in some ways, not a million miles away from the Holsten Premium mentioned above. It didn’t really dazzle me. I found the “first encounter” taste kind of nothing remarkable or noteworthy, and the secondary taste hit, and down-the-hatch satisfaction factors were hitting nothing out of the ball park either. It’s not one I’d really come back to a lot.

SIERRA NEVADA PALE ALE (USA, $7, 5.6%)

The price on this one is purely nominal, since it’s a beer that’s hard to find in stock anywhere at any given time, and the nominated price is whatever it is at the time, given that the main issue is finding it at all.

Within what’s become, by official brewing oddbod conspiracy, known as the ‘US Pale Ale’ style – i.e. indicating something generally coppery in both colour and flavour, with a noticeable body from malt, slapped around with a lot of hops action on top, often producing a flavour some refer to as ‘floral’ – this is simply the best I’ve ever had in the style.

(For those who don’t follow this official mini-brewers style wars game, basically Little Creatures Pale is a fairly extreme version of this style, and Fat Yak is such a mild version of it, it’s only just detectable as being within that style. The latter is probably a good place to start if you want to try something in the US Pale Ale area but haven’t as yet, although I’m not holding it up as a particularly good example of the style. It’s more one that most drinkers of more conventional beers might find palatable within that style. Actually they’ve created a strange paradox with that one. I’ll drink it as a session beer on tap when I want something with a bit more flavour than the standard Aussie tap beer, but if I was really fancying a US Pale Ale, this would be about the last in the style I’d turn to.)

It’s not my favourite style, and some won’t come at it at all. But in terms of grappling the wild hop into line, anchoring the deal with enough malt to provide both satisfaction and flavour balance, and leaving the lifelines open for the possibility of still having an enjoyable rollercoaster ride down the old sluice-gate, Sierra Nevada Pale does an amazing job. If ever a beer transcends a style, this is one of those. They’ve done a great job. But not for everyone, quite pricey, and difficult to find anyway. Incidentally, oddly enough, it’s from California, not Nevada.

INNIS & GUNN BLONDE (Scotland, 6%)

I nearly skipped this one because it came in a clear bottle, strongly resembled a very anemic urine sample indeed, and in short, looked like one of those largely flavourless Mexican beers. However it was recommended to me, so I gave it a burl.

The gimmick with this one is that they put it on American oak for a while. “Carefully matured for 37 days prior to release” it says right there on the label. I have no doubt they know what they’re doing, but I have to say 37 days doesn’t exactly sound like a marathon of the human spirit to me, in alcohol-aging terms. I think the guys in M.A.S.H. sometimes matured the stuff from their gin-mill nearly that long. I’m sure these guys know what they’re doing, but as a slogan it sounds a little like “Fully matured since last Tuesday.”

Anyway, the result is a slight characterisation from the wood, and, for reasons beyond mortal comprehension, a vague flavouring of vanilla, which they’re considerate enough to warn you about on the label at least. The weird thing is, it’s an exceptionally pleasant and refreshing drink. That slight sweetness from the vanilla taste might be a little off-putting to some (and I wasn’t pre-sold on the idea, I can assure you) but the remainder of this beer is a very decent and polished lager, and the rest is what balances the unorthodox flavours on top and makes it all work. You should give it a try. Apparently the other one they make stays on the oak longer, and has more of that characteristic, and isn’t as light, but I’ve been told it’s an even better beer. I’ll be keeping an eye out for it, put it that way. I’d also drink this one again, abso-tively.

CHIMAY TRIPLE (Belgium, $9, 8%)

OK, this is hardcore-to-the-last-Monk’s-dressing-gown-cord type authentic Belgian beer. The Triple means that it’s fermented normally the first time, the second time on lees, and then the third time it continues to ferment in the bottle, I think. If you ferment a beer the fourth time I think the planet implodes. Anyway, you don’t need to have successfully completed an exam on the subject to drink it.

The odd thing about this one is that, unlike others in the style, which have a very particular “rich cream cake” type feel to them, and are an absolute dream to have the one or two of, but not really a “session-beer” in a million years, and are in some ways a complete separate category of beer from the mainstream (in any style), this one has the cloudiness of some kinds of ale and drinks a bit more that way too. That is, it’s rich, and full, and has sweetness to it, but the guts of it is a more conventional ale. It’s an interesting and convincing if not overwhelmingly great, halfway-house between the two approaches, and while, if I want that serious, tongue-roping’n’riding Belgian cream-cake beer style, I’d stick with Forbidden Fruit (imported by Carlton, of all people!), the upmarket Hoegaarden one (not the more generally available witbier version) and Leffe Trippel, I’d absolutely give this one valuable fridge-space from time to time.

GAVROCHE FERMENTATION HAUTE (France, $7, 8.5%)

From the alcohol content and the “on lees” refermentation promise on the bottle, I was again expecting something in the enormous Belgian flavour line, but I was flummoxed by the wily French, who though they have no particular world reputation for it, have a way with brewing a rip-snorting beer from time to time. This is just a really well balanced dark-ish beer (not a Porter or anything like that though), not as sweet as most of the beers under discussion around here, with surprising drinkability for the alcohol content (maybe dangerously so) and literally an uncommon flavour – I’d be hesitant to suggest a style, since even if you just nominated one, it wouldn’t be characteristic of it) and deviously clever balancing of flavour considerations with those of shifting the stuff down your throat without undue let or hindrance.

Not for the proverbial Johnny VB Drinker, I’d think, but otherwise, beer-hunter types should give it a ride.

DON DE DIEU (Canada, around $7-8, around 7%)

A mob called Unibroue from French Canadia basically do the best full-on Belgian-style beers outside Belgium, at least that I’ve found. The one called Fin Du Monde, the one with the devil on the label, and also Trois Pistoles, are all varied but similarly excellent examples of the style. I’ve never come at the witbier styled one, because I don’t like that style, and similarly have avoided the one which is apple-flavoured, because fruit-infused beer has roughly the same appeal to me as maple syrup-flavoured socks. Don de Dieu, like all the others, has a rock-solid, meticulously-brewed body, underpinning a kind of strange variation on the witbier style on top, which results in a pronounced celery flavour of all things. I can’t tell you what a delightful surprise it was to find a beer with a suggestion of celery seasoning, kind of like having a cup of soup flavoured with linoleum floor tiles. I don’t know what’s in it, or how they’s done it, I just know they’s done it.

The rest of the beer was so well done, I finished the stubby, but I just couldn’t get around that celery thing. I think you’ll understand why I can’t recommend this beer at all, although I strongly recommend you try one of their other three beers that I’ve specifically mentioned from Unibroue, presuming you like the heavy-duty Belgian beer style.

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** From a New York Times email update, 24/7/2009:

The [US] Senate will not vote on health care legislation before
leaving for its summer recess on Aug. 8

Well, all I can say is, if they all get injured while indulging in horseplay down at the local creek on their summer holiday, they’d better not come crying to me.

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This is another NY Times email alert, dated 23/7/2009:

F.B.I. agents are sweeping across northern New Jersey
Thursday, making arrests in what is described as a major
corruption probe.

WNBC-TV in New York reported and showed images of the mayors
of Hoboken and Secaucus being taken into F.B.I. headquarters
in Newark. The station also showed rabbis being taken into
custody.

I guess somebody has been making a killing on the quiet on all those spare skullcaps and prayer books around the synagogue.

For some reason, that story reminds me of the old Woody Allen gag about a keenly-awaited New York performance of the ballet Swan Lake, when rumours swept the town that gamblers had drifted in from out of state, and “fixed” the ballet so that the Swan lived.

I now have a strange premonition of rabbis being charged in court for acting in cahoots with big-time professional punters, by altering the Bible so that the Bad Guy wins.

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Finally this one for sport fans, which I found on theage.com.au, from a story by Brent Diamond:

AFL Victoria chief executive Peter Schwab says a rise in AFL list numbers could turn the Victorian Football League into a reserves competition for the elite league.

Schwab is unhappy that the VFL, which is increasingly tagged as “AFL reserves”, is battling a credibility problem, and that it could lose several of its traditional emblems if teams continue to introduce stand-alone clubs and cease alignments.

I’m rarely completely flummoxed by an Australian Rules Football story, but this one left me both flamboozled and babbergasted. The problem being that, of course, everyone other than Peter Schwab, in the States of both Victoria and being awake respectively, already believes with complete conviction that the VFL is a seconds comp for the AFL.

In fact, the only real issue about that which has been raised with any frequency recently, is whether or not it’s a seconds comp of a standard sufficient to give us any idea whether a player who is excelling at that level could even compete play halfway decently at “senior” AFL level.

As to the worry about it increasingly being “tagged” as AFL reserves, this is a lot like sitting in a weatherboard house and worrying that passers-by will increasingly “tag it” as being made from wood. As my dear old Dad used to say, “Too late, she cried.”

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By the way, on a vaguely related subject, permit me, and yourself if you’d like, a small horse-laugh regarding some long-held strong views on the subject of acceptable AFL guernseys. For those who didn’t know, Port Adelaide (AFL) took to the field last weekend in a “strip” (as they say these days) designed by some seven year old girl who won a competition. (I don’t mean that “away” change bird’s egg blue thing they’ve been wearing that looked like a tea-towel that had been washed with a non-colourfast baby blanket.) It was universally hailed by every single straw vote that commented on the issue as the best jumper Port had ever worn. I finally saw it, and it was exactly that. All it was was a solid colour jumper with a “yoke” in variously coloured V’s, in the normal Port colours. It obeyed all the laws that an AFL jumper should – blocks of solid colours, keeping it simple, straight-forward geometric shapes, no circus-clown “mascot” designs on it that looked like a shapeless blob of budgerigar vomit from anything more than two metres away. (Simple monograms formed from letters of the alphabet remain acceptable.) The only problem with it at all was Port’s colours, and specifically that turdbox halfway-house blue-green they call ‘teal’, darling, but there’s nothing you can do about that, apparently.

I’ve always said both traditionally and ideally, any AFL jumper design should be simple enough that a primary school-age child should be able to fairly accurately doodle it in their exercise book with coloured pencils during a dull lesson. However, I admit that I hadn’t realised that the only realistic hope of getting an acceptable new guernsey design was to actually HIRE one of those primary school kids to do it. But, after dozens of unspeakable failures in this field over recent years, costing Lord knows how many thousands of man-hours and dollars to wind up with playing gear that looked like a batik bathmat designed by a colour-blind lunatic who couldn’t rule a straight line, I guess now at least we know the truth.

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BALLS OF FURY (2007)

YOU DON’T MESS WITH THE ZOHAN (2008)

I’m partial to the sub-genre of comedy that, around the heyday of the Chris Farley oeuvre, I termed the “Hitting in the Head comedy movies”. Lord knows, it doesn’t have to be smart to make me laugh. I was just watching some Three Stooges shorts recently, most notably, their only Academy Award-nominated * excursion into face-slapping, Men in Black and experienced the shortness of breath and episodes of dizziness which only coincide with extreme laughter, or becoming overwhelmed by all the helium during the propaganda-oriented commentary on Anthony Mundine fights.

Quite frankly, in the immortal words of cinema-phile Mr T, I “pity the foo’” who derides slapstick comedy, often without knowing what slapstick comedy is **, and sees it as being ‘beneath them’, and then turns around and praises bumph like Seinfeld and twaddly-dee like Frasier as the heights of sophistimicated comedy gold. It’s amazing how often you’ll find the same people doubled over with laughter during inspiration-proof televisual dingleberries such as Australia’s Funniest Home Videos. I put all this down to the spread of too much democracy in the industry, around the time Friends and its cardigan-comedy like began to proliferate, when it was decided that people bereft of a sense of humour needed comedy shows made for them as well. You know, the kind of people who if they ever had to lodge a personals ad, would definitely include the descriptive, “GSOH”. (Which as medical science has since proven beyond doubt, in laboratory test conditions, necessarily means “NSOH”.)

That said, the sub-genre of idiotic comedy movies continues to flourish in abundance, and arguably they’ve never been more insubstantial, nor stupider than they are right now.

The low end of the food chain are those generic titled ones, called Epic Movie or Superhero Movie or whatever, which should all cut their losses and just be called Wiener Movie, with a roman numeral in the title. Or Marketed-As-Comedy Movie, with the disclaimer “Caution – May Not Contain Actual Comedy”. These operate on about the level of a truly uninspired MAD Magazine parody. Sometimes they don’t quite make it to that level, but that appears to be more or less where they’re aiming.

Then there’s the hi-concept ones (which means kind of a fancy-dress party, set in 70s TV news-reading, or 70s pro basketball, or 70s anything, apparently) riddled with whiney, cringing, lead characters, and a supposedly ‘feel-good’ approach, which slowly but surely chokes any attempts at satire, parody, or indeed comedy to death. This is reserved almost exclusively for ex-Saturday Night Live performers, and in particular, Will Ferrell, who has turned them into some sort of bizarre personal cottage industry, rather than ever putting his considerable talents to some worthwhile use.

Also, there’s the gross-out bloke-comedy sub-genre which divide into three or so different strata – the ones with Rob Schneider, the ones about beer and snot from that comedy troupe which has that guy Chandrasekhar in it, and the ones featuring the clean-cut unfunny guys from Saturday Night Live who are all called Will, but not Ferrell. Oddly enough, in between sperm-related attempts at hilarity, these also go the ‘feel-good’ route, according to the Law of Diminishing Returns.

And, of course, there’s the other movie they keep making, where Seth Rogen gets stoned. This movie has one advantage over most of the others, in that Seth Rogen is inherently a funny man, which he had better be, considering they keep making the same movie with him in it over and over again.

What I need out of a stupid comedy movie, which most of these don’t do, is a consistent, funny, point-of-view, no matter how idiotic that is. In writing, directing and performance, it needs to be informed by some guiding intelligence, even if, in this case, the term ‘intelligence’ is used at the most giddy, ridiculous and knot-headed end of the spectrum.

This is why I respect Adam Sandler. While they knocked him for it, and despite the general excoriation of some true clunkers he was responsible for (the animated one about Chanukah comes insistently to mind), he just kept on making silly, inconsequential, hitting-in-the-head comedy movies which had no excuse for their existence other than the oddly idiosyncratic nature of their own light-headed foolishness. When he proved he could be a serious actor, and major box-office, he still went right back to making the stupid movies when he knew the high-minded general reaction would garner him a face-full of crap. Why? Because it’s a CALLING. The guy has a rare gift for doing dumb Adam Sandler movies. A dumb Adam Sandler movie is unlike anyone else’s idiot comedy movie. It’s nice to know the guy is essentially, for however else he’s developed and matured as a person and all that guff, the same happy-go-crackers grinning goofball who looked like he was having a whale of a time hooning around with his mates on Saturday Night Live being silly for a living. He’s the major auteur figure of stupid comedy.

You Don’t Mess with the Zohan is, bless it’s pointy little head, yet another entry in the long-running series of Adam Sandler movies in which people get hit in the head and fall over in funny ways. Yeah, it’s got some well-intentioned stuff in there about Israelis and Palestinians forgetting their enmities and “just getting along, people”, but when their ultimate aim in teaming up is depicted as being the defeat of famed boxing ring-announcer Michael “Let’s Get Ready to Rummm-baaaaalllll” Buffer, it’s hard to take it too seriously, and you’re not meant to take it too seriously.

In fact the gift of the Sandler movies (the real ‘core’ Sandler pix, not the ones in which he’s playing a romantic lead for the big box-office pictures opposite Drew Barrymore or whoever) is that they use the feel-good template for structure, but there is patently no obligation on the part of the audience member to take that stuff remotely seriously either. In a late-breaking shock development in modern comedy movies, the Sandler Stupids are about making you laugh. I’m guessing it won’t catch on as a trend, but it’s nice to have them around.

In Zohan, the funny stuff is the running gag about the Israeli obsession about hoummos, anything else about foodstuffs, the gags about parents, Sandler’s wayward obsessions with toilet and groin-related humour, particularly anything to do with the rear-end, the running gag where he shags the Lainie Kazan character in front of her increasingly traumatised (fully-grown) son, (and Kazan is tremendous in this, as she has been in other comedy movies like My Favourite Year – you wonder why more comedy movies don’t sign her up), and the great stuff about the Israeli-run electronics stores in New York, which will produce gut-shaking bellows of laughter from anyone who’s ever run into recalcitrant, somewhat shady or less-than-helpful staff in this retail field. The basic premise is Sandler’s character is a brilliant Israeli commando who decides to retire and pursue his true ambition of being a hairdresser in New York City. You can see where you’re not meant to take this stuff seriously at all. John Turturro is also funny as his Palestinian counterpart, something vaguely in the eccentric line of his widely-enjoyed performance as the Hispanic bowler in The Big Lebowski. The gags about his fast-food franchise are a constant source of joy.

Don’t get the idea that this is great. It’s a dumb but enjoyable framework to support a lot of gags, a surprising amount of which are funny. Both its bizarreness and its sense of silliness are consistent, even if the quality of the writing isn’t, and that’s probably what makes it work. It kind of falls apart at the end, or, as is customary for movies these days, at its many endings. In the end, I thought it was feel-good, not because of the feel-good stuff at all, but because it made me laugh like a drain here and there.

Balls of Fury is a movie about a ping-pong playing FBI or CIA guy (I can’t remember, and I’ve just seen the movie, which tells you how vitally important the plot of stupid comedy movies is to me, and also how memorable THIS movie is) who due to some evil James Bond type villain’s nefarious schemes, has to defeat the latter at ping-pong, or something like that.

It looked ingratiatingly idiotic in the trailers. Well, once again we learn that with the vast majority of comedy movies, all the funny stuff is in the trailers, and it’s often funnier than when it turns up IN the movies. (Diverse as they may be, Spies Like Us and Muriel’s Wedding may hold the all-time achievement record in this field. In both cases, having seen the trailer, there is absolutely no point in proceeding to watch the movie. However Muriel’s Wedding is a rare case indeed – not only does the trailer hit all the major high points, but it’s actually a superior KIND of movie to the full-length version.)

There’s just nothing here at all, other than breathtaking cynicism. Once again it leans on the standard feel-good “We want the hero to succeed, get the girl, and defeat the creepy bad guy, but only when things get to their lowest ebb can he proceed to triumph” template, but can’t summon the consistency of tone to either milk it, Will Ferrell style, or pat it on the head fondly and generally place it carefully out of the way of the comedy, as in the Adam Sandler approach. It wants it both ways and gets neither.

The tubby guy (Dan Fogler) who’s the hero is kind of ingratiating, and that’s about all she wrote. He’s kind of trying for something in between Seth Rogen and Jack Black, and doesn’t have the sarcastic edge and delivery of the former, or the energy of the latter. I can’t recall him being funny in the whole picture.

The guy who is funny is Christopher Walken as the kind of Fu Manchu type villain. Any super-villain type who makes a grand entrance in full cape and villainous headgear and then makes the opening statement to the assembled masses, “Okey-dokey, Artichokey” is funny, particularly when played by Christopher Walken. It’s also funny when he concludes the same speech with the memorable farewell, “Toodles”.

Apart from that, he looks funny and the delivery is great, but I think he gets about one other funny line in the picture.

Basically, there’s good-stupid and bad-stupid, and Balls of Fury is just stupid. Diedrich Bader is a funny comic actor who gets too few opportunities to show it in general, and manages to be funny working with nothing in a minor role in this. There’s a couple of very attractive female performers in there, one of whom should consider investing part of her salary in the odd can of soup in my opinion. That’s about it. It pretty much works on the level of those parody Wiener Movies mentioned earlier.

The Love Guru was panned by pretty much every straw vote on the planet, (and I think some folks dropped in from Mars to make up the weight), and Mike Myers was written off into some sort of Andrew McCarthy/Emilio Estevez forgotten star netherworld, never to darken the doorways of mass consciousness comedy stardom ever again.

Having seen it, I couldn’t begin to imagine why people had reacted that way, right up until the point where I realised they probably just didn’t get it. Mike Myers’s schtick, in the pictures he really has some control over, is a kind of amiable but extreme eccentricity of point-of-view, grounded by the odd knowing depth-charge of show-biz satire. You go with the flow or you don’t. He doesn’t always pointer all the gags for you like other comedies do. In the Austin Powers movies, people could hang their hats on the James Bond deal. The accessibility of the Wayne’s World movies was provided by a routine familiarity with suburban bogans who were into old-school rock (you either were one, or you knew one), and/or 70s and 80s rock itself.

Myers’ genial obsession with self-help gurus of dubious provenance and insight in The Love Guru doesn’t have the same easy touchstones for a lot of the audience. Also, unlike the main characters in those other movies, his Guru is a little off-putting. The viewers were left to fend for themselves with his idiosyncratic, head-bent comedic viewpoint. They probably just didn’t get it. ***

The Love Guru is actually a fairly funny picture. It meanders all over the joint, despite maintaining a nominal nodding acquaintanceship with the stock-standard feelgood comedy picture template, or “The Ferrell” as modern researchers could now term it. (The Guru has to motivate a failing star ice-hockey player, for reasons which elude me due to both poor memory and not caring at all.)

Along the way, he flirts with a few rather MTV-inflected comedy takes on Bollywood musicals, rather funnier and more pleasingly berserk than everyone else’s Bollywood imitations. He manifests a funny running gag about his obsession with outdoing his rival, the real-life self-help guru Deepak Chopra, and thus his obsession with appearing on Oprah. Ben Kingsley turns up as his instructor, under a very Carry On movie name, which is a funny use for Ben Kingsley in itself. Myers’ Indian accent comes and goes like the proverbial Karma Chameleon (this is also a built-in gag). Various other real-life celebs wander in and out. There’s a very funny gag early based around Myers’ mantra which he blesses his Hollywood devotees with, capped off with another funny celeb guest appearance.

That’s a classic piece of “You get it or you don’t” Mike Myers comedy perspective. Possibly the keynote one, which is kind of the whole picture’s humour in a nutshell in a way, (well that, and the peek-a-boo nature of the Guru’s ethnic origins) and I don’t think is ever “punched up” during the movie, is that the star ice-hockey player is a black guy.

On the “ehh” side of the ledger, Mini-Me Verne Troyer is back, along with all the nut-punching gags, and midget-related humour, a minority of the latter being quite funny and some of it also broad and naggingly insistent enough to be verging on uncomfortable. The guy from The Colbert Report does a routine as an “inappropriate” ice-hockey commentator which should have been a lot funnier than it was, and maybe would have been if Fred Willard, whose role in Best in Show this was fairly obviously based on, had been hired instead.

In the centre-column, Jessica Alba is certainly decorative as the nominal female lead, and that appears to be about as much thought as went into the enterprise.

However, on the upside, the grindingly-unpleasant bodily functions material which “flowered” so insistently in the second and third Austin Powers pictures has, happily, largely gone missing here. It’s strange – with Sandler, that’s an integral part of his weird little comedy worldview and, kept to a dull roar, it works. With Myers, the gross-out stuff almost always seems extraneous, forced and laughter-challenged, and sometimes even in relatively small doses.

Anyway, The Love Guru, much to my surprise is as silly as a wheel in a good way, amiably loopy rather than a bucketing laugh-fest, but has just about enough gags to get you through. But if you just don’t like Myers at all, forget about it.

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On the industry-acknowledged, international smash-hit MPHOAH scale:

The Love Guru………………………………..6.5 out of 11 MPHOAH

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* (Yes, that’s true, and it was THOSE Academy Awards. It was the first of their “Dr Howard, Dr Fine, Dr Howard” epics. It also has a notably more anarchic approach than their more typical later “these guys are just screw-ups” short pictures.)

** (If all someone has to say about Charlie Chaplin or Buster Keaton is “I don’t like slapstick comedy” they’ve got nothing to say to me or anyone else about comedy movies or television. It’s like saying you quite like architecture, but you’ve never enjoyed design, concrete, glass, foundations, or buildings in general. Anyone who can’t see a difference between Laurel & Hardy (the virtual foundation for all character-tension based TV sitcoms) and, say, Abbott & Costello, and who pulls the “Eurgh - slapstick!” card to ward all of them away equally, has nothing to say about comedy at all, end of story. Everyone knows the saying about those who don’t know history being condemned to repeat it, but in this case if you dismiss the history, you don’t repeat anything - you pretty much wind up in an empty corridor, which you get to stand in for life. You might as well take out that personals ad where you talk about your “GSOH” and make it official.

*** (A classic example of the value of a touchstone in this kind of context - and/or some viewers flailing hopelessly without one - is in the Guest/Levy ensemble series of semi-improv comedy pictures. On a mass-market level, the most popular of these is, inevitably, Best in Show. Why? Well, probably because it was centred around cute dogs. Just about everyone gets cute dogs. To me, it’s not the best-balanced, paced, or, arguably, funniest of these movies. The stuff with Parker Posey and the guy playing her husband is tedious domestic squabbling, and not remotely funny. Although the movie is enjoyable, (hilarious when Fred Willard/Jim Piddock and Jennifer Coolidge are on), one of the central flaws is that Chris Guest’s role in it is meticulously observed and thoroughly portrayed, but it’s just not funny. He’s hilarious in Waiting for Guffman and For Your Consideration, and slyly funny in a ’straight’ role as a humourless pedant in A Mighty Wind, particularly when teamed with Michael McKean in the latter. A Mighty Wind gets a lot closer to the blend of comedic and dramatic elements, with a growing tide of irresistible underpunched humour, that they are shooting for than Best in Show does. It’s a better-constructed, funnier movie for mine. And For Your Consideration, they drop the boot into, and go openly for comedy more, with a torch’n'burn approach to show-biz satire which has both gusto and an evil eye for accuracy going for it. But people don’t ‘get’ the naff end of the 60s folk-scene, or the tragicomedy of small-town theatre, or the inherent cheese of fringe Hollywoodiana, like they do cute dogs and “Isnt it funny how dogs resemble their masters?” stuff. The other subjects, they have to be gently led to, flattered and pampered with a lot of developmental information, and then have the gags pumped to arena size before they come around. The Guest/Levy pictures don’t play that game, they lay the stuff out there, don’t punch the gags, and you take what you can get from the smorgasbord. Which is precisely why the cute dogs picture went over bigger than any of the others did.)

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