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First Descent: The World We Live In

If you want to understand the world we live in better you could do worse than to watch First Descent. Although a good extreme sports film in its own right, First Descent also attempts to capture the transition of snowboarding from a fringe activity into a mainstream cultural force. The scene that I felt most effectively exposed how the world is changing takes place in Japan. In that scene some of the United State's most marginalized youth perform flips and jumps at the Nissan X-trail before 40,000 wildly enthusiastic Japanese fans inside the Tokyo Dome. Snowboarding at that level is an art, but unlike say surfing, which I would argue remains a fringe activity, snowboarding is also a business. Unfortunately for the US of A snowboarding, compared with building automobiles or consumer electronics, is not a very good business.

Hollentour

To keep current with my German, I rent films in that language from Netflix without much regard to other content. While occasionally this results in a disappointment, sometimes I end up seeing a real gem. One such film is Hollentour (or Hell on Wheels although an exact translation would be Hell Tour), a documentary about the 2004 Tour de France. What makes this film so great is that it transcends sport and has something important to say about the human condition. As well as being about a bicycle race, Hollentour is about suffering and achieving a state of grace beyond pain.  Although for promotional reasons the tour is described as being hell, perhaps purgatory is a better metaphor for the tour. The riders do suffer a lot, especially when they fall, but when you see interviews with Erik Zabel while he is lying on the masseuse table with a big smile you have to wonder what kind of hell the tour really is. Although riding is very hard physically if you endure there is a sort of satisfaction on the other side, at least that has been my experience riding the mountain passes of Colorado. Enduring necessary suffering is enobling. Human nature being what it is, at the end of time would the souls in Hell be better people for their experience than the souls in Heaven? Perhaps not, but if Hollentour can get me thinking this way it is a great film.

Grizzly Man

Last night I saw a very profound and disturbing documentary called Grizzly Man. It was made  by one of my favorite directors, Werner Hertzog. It is about the nature of Nature, human nature, and the human veiw of nature. Tim Treadwell found his life's purpose by trying to live as closely as he could with the grizzly bears of Alaska.  In the process he crossed an ancient line that serves both men and bears. Treadwell was ultimately as out of place in the social structures of the bear as he was in the social structures of man. His tale is warning about relying too heavily on our dreams.   

Cinderella Man: A Fairy Tale

From dodge ball to ski jumping, of all athletics, boxing makes the greatest films. While the popularity of the sport itself has waned over the decades, the commercial and critical success of movies like On the Waterfront, Raging Bull, Rocky, and Million Dollar Baby has attracted wider and wider audiences. Last night I saw the latest addition to the list of fine boxing films Cinderella Man. Cinderella Man borrows deeply from boxing film genre while still being a fresh vision. The acting is accomplished, the plot suspenseful, the theme universal. Cinderella Man is loosely based (and just how loosely is worth examining) on the boxing career of James Braddock, the heavyweight champion of the world from 1935 to 1937.

Cinderella Man is a good bet when it describes the rich emotional life of Braddock's family and the complex friendship between fighter (played by Russell Crowe) and his manager (played by Paul Giamatti).   The fight scenes build a growing sense of danger and suspense as each fight gets successively harder for the character and last longer on the screen. Some of the scenes of life during the depression are so powerful they are downright scary. Where the movie takes a dive is when it attempts to be uplifting. The promotional material describes it as the story of "one of the most surprising and inspirational sports legends in history". Sort of a "Seabiscut in Boxing Shorts" although in the old Hollywood tradition the makers of Cinderella Man never let facts get in the way of a good story.

The problem they had was that the emotional weight of the film, a good man struggling against fate to protect his family rests on a richer, more complex, darker story. Much of the film's punch would be lost if it was more historically accurate and makers would have been better off making Cinderlla Man as a fictional film.

In the closing scenes we learn that Braddock went on from boxing to own some of the very machinery he used to work on at the docks. Wait a minute. Haven't we stumbled into On The Waterfront territory? For those who have never seen the 1954 classic, On the Waterfront tells the story of corrupt practices in docks. The protagonist, played by Marlon Brando in one of the roles that made him a legend, is a boxer who throws fights when ordered to by the Mafia. This leads to his famous lament "I could have been a contender". Does any of this sound familiar?

Braddock worked on the waterfront, owned a business on the docks, won fights where he was heavy underdog and yet where is the Mafia in Cinderella Man? Boxing is portraited as venal without being corrupt. I am not saying that the fights Braddock fought in were rigged, or if they were rigged he knew anything about them. I don't know because the film never explores this aspect of Braddock's life for plot reasons.

Another historical problem with the film is its portrayal of boxer Max Baer. Again for dramatic reasons, Cinderella Man's Baer is cruel and malevolent - almost a force of nature with which Braddock must contend. In the movie he is described as being unstoppable and having remorselessly killed two men. Yet the historic Max Baer was more inconsistent and human. The historic Baer did kill a man named Frankie Campbell in the ring.  Yet his family tells us that he had nightmares about the incident for the rest of his life. It is also a matter of record that Baer donated prizes from fights to Campbell's family and paid for his children's college education. In 1938 Baer, who was part Jewish, wore a Star of David on his boxing trunks during a fight with German Max Shelling.

Shelling in turn fought for Germany in World War II but never became a member of the NSDAP. During the Kristal Nacht, Shelling took in two teenage sons of a Jewish friend into his apartment. After the war Shelling owned a Coca-Cola distributorship in Germany and served as a pall bearer at the African-American boxer Joe Lewis's funeral. Joe Lewis in turn defeated Braddock for the heavyweight title on June 22, 1937 but not before Braddock negotiated an agreement to receive 10% of Lewis's future earnings.

History teaches us that human beings can play different roles sometimes as heroes, sometimes as villains, sometimes as sidekicks depending on the situation and your point of view.   By not including any color on the Cinderella Man's Godfather Cinderella Man fails as history but succeeds as a fairy tale.