*** Official ALI Discussion Thread (1 Viewer)

[Seth Paxton]

Watch the documentary "When We Were Kings" about the Rumble in the Jungle, the fight between Ali and George Foreman. It's a fantastic piece, as good as any feature film, and represents Ali both as cultural hero and superior athlete. It's better than the film Ali.

Yep, this is the biggest reason it got buried by top critics IIRC. Most people were saying "there's nothing here we haven't already seen". In other words they were looking for deeper character motivation than Mann provided.

However, despite that the film by itself is very good, certainly on par with Mann's library of work. Foxx, Voigt and Smith definitely were all great, and Foxx and Voigt did get their deserved nominations.

The letdown and subsequent negative image the film got had a lot more to do with the expectation for the film to sweep through the Oscars and be a major player, which it wasn't. But in retrospect with the lowered expectations I think you see a very solid film that is downright poignant at times, as well as very nice to look at.

 

[Chris Atkins]

I just watched this one, and Seth is right: the film is very nice to look at (no surprises there with Mann behind the camera).

But the movie did feel like a rush job, bouncing very quickly from fight to fight and incident to incident. In the process I didn't feel like I got to know Ali THE MAN very well...also, the early part of the movie felt like a Malcolm X biopic and not an Ali biopic.

7/10

 

[Nathan V]

After seeing this several times and showing it to various people, I see this as one of the best films of the new decade, pure cinematic bliss. We flow through a segment of the juice that was his life, understanding and observing things as he might have. Mann gets us completely inside the man's head; it's a very internal picture. I know of few other biopics that so transcend the format- here, the triumphs are on a human scale, in small rooms, clusters of people interacting. For me, it's a film of moods and atmospheres, actualizations of deep, hidden reservoirs in our minds, thoughts and feelings and attitudes we can't clearly express in words, but share as experience; in this sense, it reminds me of Malick's The New World.

More later,

Nathan

 

[Chris Atkins]

Nathan:

With The New World, I think the material justifies the use of Malick's dreamy approach. After all, what do we really know about the details of what happened at Jamestown?

Ali's life is much better documented, and thus I don't feel like we need a lightning fast approach to the material.