Life

Some people are content to satisfy their appetites and there are others for whom, appetite and satiety aren’t enough. Ambition may produce rewards but the net result is an utter emptiness as if all the work they had put into their success were simply a sales pitch for something that didn't exist. What is it actually like to be at the top of the heap? There is probably no more famous rock band than The Stones. Keith Richards wrote about being a Stone in Life. What is it like to be Mick Jagger at 72 and facing yet one more tour with thousands of fans cheering wildly? How different his experience is from the would be rock star hard put to get one gig in a down at its heels bar, whose patrons, swilling down their doubles barely acknowledge his or her existence. Their only company at the end of a long night of sets, in which they're essentially singing to themselves, is the beaten up cases in which they walk home with their instruments. Remember Anthony Quinn who played the over the hill boxer, Mountain Rivera, in Requiem for a Heavyweight? The forgotten, those who have lost the lottery are always seeing the reflection of neon bar signs on rain slicked streets. Yet Amy Winehouse whose life was the subject of recently released documentary is an example of the talented, recognized person who seems to have everything and then throws her life away. Was it that she made it to the top and was disappointed to find that there was nothing there?

Creed

Rocky Balboa (Sylvester Stallone) says a couple of good things to his protégé Adonis Johnson (Michael B. Jordan) in Creed. One of them occurs when Adonis is poised in a mirror readying himself to shadowbox. Rocky says, “See that guy staring at you. That’s your toughest opponent.” The rest of the film is pap and no match for instance for films like The Fighter, David O Russell’s portrait of the great Mickey Ward or masterpieces like Requiem for a Heavyweight and Martin Scorsese’s Raging Bull, which told the story of Jake LaMotta. Here Ryan  Coogler, who directed, relies on pat melodrama. Rocky is diagnosed with non Hodgkins lymphoma as young Adonis, who turns out to be the illegitimate son of the legendary Apollo, steps up to the plate against a seasoned opponent, "Pretty" Ricky Conlan (Tony Bellew). Are Rocky and Adonis up for the fight, respectively for and of their lives? But the real question is the fight. You have boxers and fighters, those who are hard to catch (the boring undefeated Floyd Mayweather epitomizes the former) and those who like to mix up like Tyson,  Foreman Frazier, Hagler and Hearns. Adonis is portrayed as green. He’s had 15 fights in Mexico, but only one real win in a sanctioned bout and he has his work cut out for him in fighting a world champ. To begin with, in reality, such an improbable matchup would never happen. Even considering Adonis’ pedigree, the veteran would have too much to lose in such an upset—even considering that the character in the movie is on his way to prison where he’ll be serving a long jail term. But putting boxing promotion aside, it’s really hard to understand what makes these the two Sammy’s run. Adonis starts off looking like a boxer and his opponent is definitely a classic brawler, but by the end of the fight it’s just the story of Adonis waking up in the middle of a tremendous beating to become the fighter he's meant to be. It’s a great idea. Send a mildly talented fighter in the ring against a master and hope something will be ignited. But what would the great Cus D’Amato have advised? What Creed portrays is manslaughter.

Luchino Visconti’s Rocco and His Brothers

Luchino Visconti’s Rocco and His Brothers (1960), in revival at Film Forum through Thursday, is like one of those large intergenerational novels. The disquisition is even presented like a novel with sections devoted to the brothers of the title, Rocco (Alain Delon), Simone (Renato Salvatori), Vincenzo (Spiros Focas), Ciro (Max Cartier) and Luca (Rocco Vidolazzi). They're the sons of Rosaria Parondi (Katina Paxinou) who at one point in the film talks about reuniting them like the five fingers of a hand. The displacement and demoralization of a Sicilian family who migrate to Milan comprises the theme, but the narrative takes the form of a classic fight film, as two of the brothers Simone and Rocco become professional boxers. And their deadly battle over a prostitute named Nadia (Annie Girardot) creates the central melodramatic struggle. Yet while the counterpoint between the two characters is simple their relationship is not. As low as Simone sinks in his criminal behavior, which ultimately includes murder, Rocco never forgets his filial duty. Is he motivated by guilt? Or simply by the mysterious blood ties of the insular Southern Italian world from which he comes? Alberto Lattuada’s Mafioso (1962) negotiates a similar territory in terms of how it treats the cultural disparities between the South and the North (particularly with regard to deep-seeded familial bonds) and even has a character who has migrated to work in the automobile industry as Ciro does in Visconti’s film. However, Rocco and His Brothers is far more gritty and actually has the noir quality of black and white American fight films like Requiem for a Heavyweight (1962), which used the ring as a metaphor both for aspiration and defeat. This almost documentary style of shooting which holds up in neorealist films like Rossellini’s Rome, Open City (1945) looks curiously dated and inert here. After all these years Rocco and His Brothers screens like a period piece that lacks the imperturbability of,  for instance, Visconti’s The Leopard  (l963). If you are a boxing fan you'll find the actual choreography of Alain Delon’s fight scenes to be not lacking in interest. Rocco bobs and weaves, ducks and slips; he has a defensive counterpunching style which is in direct contrast to his brother Simone who is a violent brawler, bully and coward and it mirrors both his contrastingly admirable mixture of vulnerability and guile. There are several spectacular scenes, in particular one between Simone and Nadia which has the quality of a Wagnerian Liebestod and a horrific rape that may give the infamous ll minute take in Gaspar Noe’s Irrerversible (2002) a run for the money. But the romanticism is so extreme in places that you might find yourself nervously giggling at interchanges which were plainly intended to exude high drama.

Requiem for a Junior-Welterweight

Terence Crawford (27-0) fought Dierry Jean(29-2) for the WBO Junior-Welterweight Championship of the World in Omaha on Saturday night. The fight was really a casting call for the challenger to meet Manny Pacquiao in his last performance, now scheduled for April 9, 2016. Crawford was the favorite in the 12 round bout and produced a TKO in the 10^th round—which insured his getting the role. A good deal was a stake since the April 9^th fight will be a big pay day and Crawford fought like that, switching to a southpaw stance early on. His jab was now a power punch and every time Jean threw one of his own he caught Crawford’s right hook. Crawford is a lethal combination of boxer and fighter which is to say he's a defensive counterpuncher who likes to remain right on top of his man. Boxing is a metaphor for the food chain of human life and the fight arenas for these high level gladiatorial events, dotted as they always are with winners and losers, constitute part of the drama. Warren Buffett aka “the sage of Omaha” was in the audience. As you might expect for a man who flaunts his modesty, he was not in a ringside seat—though he did wave to the HBO cameras. The Haitian-born Jean himself has been a sparring partner for Pacquiao and he had a lot of heart in the face of Crawford’s onslaught. But the referee Tony Weeks spared him from his own willpower and from an even worse beating then he was already taking by calling the fight when he did. Yet in one fell swoop he had lost his big chance. In actuality there isn’t as much room at the top in boxing as life. If boxing is a metaphor for life, it’s a hyperbolic one. The Anthony Quinn character in Requiem for a Heavyweight is nicknamed “Mountain" not only because of his size but due to the heights from which he would eventually fall.

E.D.

You’ve heard of E.T., the Extraterrestrial and A.I. Artificial Intelligence. Is there by any chance a new film coming out entitled, E.D, the Erectile Dysfunctional? You never know what new blockbuster will emerge from DreamWorks and the forever fertile imagination of Steven Spielberg. One thing's certain. Anything will be better than the commercials for Viagra and Cialis which depict sedentary couples who have overstayed their welcome on earth, preparing themselves for the unlikely moment when desire will hit. In E.D. Spielberg will treat erectile dysfunction as the monster that it really is, providing a countervailing force of good in the form of the superhero, E.D. created to meet the challenge of the scourge. Instead of bucolic settings, the movie will start in a second story tenement apartment with the neon “Bar” sign flashing outside the window. You’ll recognize the terrain which Anthony Quinn navigated in Requiem for a Heavyweight. The couple are on their last legs after a lifetime of disappointment and failure and sex is the last thing on their minds, when E.D. magically appears. Suddenly, the dreary surroundings are transformed. The husband’s front porch is turned into a six pack and the wrinkles and cellulite mysteriously vanish from the spouse without the help of Botox. E.D.’s magical powers extend into the financial realm too. The rent is overpaid rather than being overdue and the healthcare system actually turns out to owe our couple money. You don’t find a helluva a lot of sex in the average Spielberg movie, but E.D. will earn an NR rating.