Seed NewsvineSports From The Inside Out
Every once in a while, we get films in cinemas like the great "Hoop Dreams" or "When We Were Kings," films that challenge our immediate sense of professional sports. At least our sense of sports existing solely as tangible, understandable and ultimately controllable entities. As spectators, we look at every athlete we admire (or have gambling money riding on) through a self-preservation prism. We don't only like players based on what city their jersey represents. We look for qualities we believe we have and try to find openings in their public persona--and we take cracks at wedging those ideals into those openings; Into people we don't really know. Because, if they're like us, well, then they're alright. And what non-athlete wouldn't want to stay the way they are (couch and life ridden) and still be able to throw a no-hit inning or dunk a basketball?
Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden's (creators of the awesome "Half Nelson") latest narrative film "Sugar" shows us, through extraordinarily personal passages, the unclear journey of some baseball players (mainly non-American) from an international training camp, to the minor rookie league and finally (maybe) the big time. At the center of this piece is Miguel 'Sugar' Santos (played by newcomer Algenis Perez Soto), a talented pitcher with a mean curve ball from the Dominican Republic. Fleck and Boden understand the perils of language barriers and wisely place the audience in various scenarios and problematic situations that speak on universal touchstones that don't need to be spelled out in words but in images: being homesick, starting a new job, getting rejected by that "first" girl and making that scary decision you never want to make. The subtitles shouldn't scare away the audience. This is one of the best sports films ever made and is also one of the best films of 2009.
Where Miguel 'Sugar' Santos is a new figure in the (fictional) movie sports world, there is hardly a person out there who doesn't know who Mike "The Baddest Guy On The Planet" Tyson is. Or was."Tyson" is a fast, entertaining and thought-provoking piece of work. This isn't your ESPN behind the athlete profile piece. This is Tyson, candid and open, sitting in front of the camera telling his life story (intercut with photos and archival fight footage).
But another central character in the exciting new documentary is the Director: James Toback. The name might not be so familiar to the average reader and moviegoer but the life of Toback as a person, in some ways, parallels his subject, Tyson. A Harvard graduate, Toback's personal life has always been very public; he is a self-proclaimed womanizer, gambler and is known for taking the most hits of LSD ever recorded. It pays to know this going into "Tyson." As I mentioned earlier, we look to sports figures for some sort of personal closure or affirmation. Tyson is a melting pot. We know this. Toback knows this. In an earlier film of his--1999's "Black and White"--Toback cast Tyson opposite Robert Downey Jr. in the film's most electrifying scene which you can watch here. The tension in that scene runs under every scene in his documentary about Tyson. Beneath Tyson's much-mocked voice and speech pattern curdles an unseen aggression that seems to build endlessly. It's dangerous. Toback's latest work is perhaps the most potent example of spectator and sport, only this time we get the motivations that rest outside of scoreboards, stat boxes, and marquee matchups. More than 30 years after "Rocky," we finally get knocked out of our seats in a more self-affirming way.
