Tyson: The documentary
When Mike Tyson was approached by the director James Toback about doing a documentary on his life and times, the former heavyweight champion of the world joked, "I was expecting that with any film about my life would only ever end up being sold on street corners."
Tyson may long ago have lost the ability to live up to his self-acclaimed tag as "the baddest man on the planet", but he has seemingly found wit to replace his left hook. Tyson has previously put in two brief appearances as himself in fictional films directed by Toback: a hilarious cameo opposite Robert Downey Jr in hip-hop movie Black and White and a turn in 2004's When Will I Be Loved. Tyson, as he makes known in the documentary, is a boxing historian and he'd know full well that boxing films have made an impact on cinema like no other sport.
The sexagenarian director intermingles archives of fight footage and old interviews with a series of new in-depth interviews in which Tyson talks straight to camera, as if he were sitting on a psychoanalyst's couch. Split screens and overlaid sound are used effectively to make it seem as if Tyson speaks in long rambling monologues, when the truth is that his answers are usually over as quickly as his early fights.
In making a documentary that concentrates so closely on one man, Toback pays homage to Japanese director Hiroshi Teshigahara's brilliant left-right couplet of films about the Puerto Rican light heavyweight champion José Torres. Teshigahara's made his first short film about Torres in 1959, which features the late boxing trainer Constantine "Cus" D'Amato, who trained the young Mike Tyson, and has a brilliant score by the Japanese modernist composer Toru Takemitsu. When Tyson talks in the new documentary about his old manager who taught him how to fight, he visibly holds back the tears. He describes how, at first, he "didn't trust Cus D'Amato", and his reaction to his death: "I lost that belief in myself."
What Toback is brilliant at is getting into the mind of the boxer. He gets Tyson talking about sex – "I love saying no all the time; what I want is extreme" – as well as making the revelation that when he fought Trevor Berbick he suffered more from gonorrhoea than the boxing bout. When he talks about Don King he spouts, "I loved leeches". He is also at his most lucid since converting to Islam.
The result is a documentary that once again highlights that, of all sports, boxing is the one that cinema has been most successful in recording, whether in documentaries, such as When We Were Kings, or feature films such as Raging Bull...
Read entire article at Independent (UK)
Tyson may long ago have lost the ability to live up to his self-acclaimed tag as "the baddest man on the planet", but he has seemingly found wit to replace his left hook. Tyson has previously put in two brief appearances as himself in fictional films directed by Toback: a hilarious cameo opposite Robert Downey Jr in hip-hop movie Black and White and a turn in 2004's When Will I Be Loved. Tyson, as he makes known in the documentary, is a boxing historian and he'd know full well that boxing films have made an impact on cinema like no other sport.
The sexagenarian director intermingles archives of fight footage and old interviews with a series of new in-depth interviews in which Tyson talks straight to camera, as if he were sitting on a psychoanalyst's couch. Split screens and overlaid sound are used effectively to make it seem as if Tyson speaks in long rambling monologues, when the truth is that his answers are usually over as quickly as his early fights.
In making a documentary that concentrates so closely on one man, Toback pays homage to Japanese director Hiroshi Teshigahara's brilliant left-right couplet of films about the Puerto Rican light heavyweight champion José Torres. Teshigahara's made his first short film about Torres in 1959, which features the late boxing trainer Constantine "Cus" D'Amato, who trained the young Mike Tyson, and has a brilliant score by the Japanese modernist composer Toru Takemitsu. When Tyson talks in the new documentary about his old manager who taught him how to fight, he visibly holds back the tears. He describes how, at first, he "didn't trust Cus D'Amato", and his reaction to his death: "I lost that belief in myself."
What Toback is brilliant at is getting into the mind of the boxer. He gets Tyson talking about sex – "I love saying no all the time; what I want is extreme" – as well as making the revelation that when he fought Trevor Berbick he suffered more from gonorrhoea than the boxing bout. When he talks about Don King he spouts, "I loved leeches". He is also at his most lucid since converting to Islam.
The result is a documentary that once again highlights that, of all sports, boxing is the one that cinema has been most successful in recording, whether in documentaries, such as When We Were Kings, or feature films such as Raging Bull...