THE HAPPIEST DAY IN THE LIFE OF OLLI MAKI - Review By Greg Klymkiw - Finnish Boxing

The Happiest Day in the Life of Olli Mäki (2016)
Dir. Juho Kuosmanen
Scr. Kuosmanen and Mikko Myllylahti
Starring: Jarkko Lahti, Oona Airola, Eero Milonoff, John Bosco Jr.

Review By Greg Klymkiw




Is it possible for anyone to have a happy day in Finland? Well, amateur boxer and former Olympic champ Olli Mäki (Jarkko Lahti) hopes so. It's 1962 and his friend, manager and former boxer Elis Ask (Eero Milonoff) is not only counting on it, but he comes close to promising that Olli will indeed experience the happiest day in his life - if Olli works for it, harder than ever before. Olli's no slouch in the pugilistic sweepstakes. His record is impressive, but now the stakes are going to be very high because he's been entered into a professional bout in Helsinki against the formidable American fighter Davey Moore (John Bosco Jr.), a lean, mean boxer with over 60 wins behind him.

Can a sweet, young fighter from the sticks really hold his own in a bout touted as Finland's big shot at boxing supremacy on the world stage? For all intents and purposes, Olli is Finland's "Great White Hope" and the pressures placed upon him seem insurmountable.

Worst of all, Olli is severely distracted. He's falling in love.

The love of Olli's life is Raija (Oona Airola), a vivacious, gorgeous, fresh-faced beauty from his hometown. Manager Elis is understandably concerned. The only love Olli should keep in his heart is boxing and the will to win. Olli has other priorities. He's shy, humble and just wants to do his best, but in the world of professional sports, best isn't good enough. He's got to be the best of the best.

The Happiest Day in the Life of Olli Maki is one of the best boxing films ever made. Kuosmanen's direction is infused with attention to the smallest details and results in a picture where the stuff of life provides indelible moments of dramatic and emotional resonance far beyond the cliches which litter so many sports films. The love story itself is wildly, deliriously romantic to the point of instilling the most delightful frissons of loving goooseflesh. It's one of the few movies I've seen which manages to create a feeling of butterflies in the tummy which only mad, passionate love can inspire.




Kuosmanen's cast hits all the right notes while cinematographer J-P Passi’s monochrome images carry us back to a time of simplicity, beauty and the promise the early 60s offered, in spite of the Cold-War, which tried to overshadow basic elements of humanity, but lost out to the decency of the hearts and minds of simple men the world over. The period details in the film are first-rate, but never stand out like glistening sore thumbs. They're inextricably linked to character and drama.

And if you don't know the true story of Olli Mäki, avoid looking it up before seeing the picture. Your experience will be blessed with added profundity and joy.

THE FILM CORNER RATING: **** 4-Stars

The Happiest Day in the Life of Olli Mäki, a Norther Banner release, plays at TIFF 2016

A HEAVY HEART - Review By Greg Klymkiw - Old Boxer's Last Bout ****TIFF TOP-PICK****

A Heavy Heart (2015)
Dir. Thomas Stuber
Scr. Stuber, Clemens Meyer, Paul Salisbury
Starring: Peter Kurth, Lina Wendel, Lena Lauzemis, Edin Hasanovic

Review By Greg Klymkiw

WARNING: Do not attend this film without a box of Kleenex.

What is it about old boxers that gets the tear ducts flowing like Kakabeka Falls? Perhaps because it's a thankless sport which renders most of its practitioners to mincemeat and eventually forces them into poverty in their waning years. Perhaps it's their youthful devotion to a sport which estranged them from all those they loved. Perhaps it's the fear of being forgotten, or worse yet, being remembered as a great boxer who could have been a contender, but never quite assailed the heights that seemed so assured. Perhaps it's because old boxers are almost never really all that old, but their middle age resembles those years more suited to senior citizens. Perhaps it's all of the aforementioned and then some.

A Heavy Heart (I much prefer its German title Herbert) is a knockout in more ways than one. It is director Thomas Stuber's first professional feature film from a fine screenplay he wrote with Clemens Meyer and based on a Paul Salisbury story, and after several short films and an award winning student feature, he's delivered a most assured debut. He handles the tough, gritty elements of the story and its heartbreaking sentiment with equal force. Even more telling in terms of his natural filmmaking gifts is how he tempers the sentiment with a warts-and-all realism which gives it even greater power.

Herbert (Peter Kurth) is a mountainous figure, shuffling and breathing heavily through his sordid life as a bouncer and strong-arm collection agent for a gangster - still busting heads for a living, but with none of the accolades of his former life. His one and only true joy is training Eddy (Edin Hasanovic), a talented young boxer who has a very real chance to attain a title shot (something which eluded poor Herbert during his years as a pugilist in the former East Germany). Try as he might, though, Herbert's fatal flaw is pushing those people away who, for whatever reason have not given up on him and still love him. His long-suffering girlfriend (Lina Wendel) is a case in point. Even when she plans a lovely birthday celebration for him, he arrives late, drunk and in no mood to even pay attention to her.

Something is more seriously wrong with Herbert. Painful muscle spasms, fatigue and an increasing inability to perform simple tasks, all get worse by the day. Though he ignores the symptoms with even more contempt than those who love him, he's eventually forced to succumb to a battery of tests which confirm the worst possible diagnosis.

He is afflicted with ALS (Lou Gehrig's Disease) and it will kill him - quickly. All his hopes of living vicariously through his talented protégé are dashed. He reaches out to his beleaguered girlfriend who selflessly becomes his caregiver, but most importantly, he has a huge hole in his heart that he's created for himself: Sandra (Lena Lauzemis), the daughter he estranged himself from so long ago. Worse yet, he discovers he's a grandfather. Time, however is running out.

The final hour of the film is perhaps one of the more harrowing cinematic renderings of the ravages of a disease I've seen. Stuber doesn't shield us from Herbert's rapid deterioration and it's as painful an experience as anything you're likely to have in any film. Stuber is, of course blessed with the stunning performance of Peter Kurth. Anyone who has had to helplessly watch a loved one die from ALS (I have) will be faced with an on-screen realism that's seldom been matched. Kurth's often Buster-Keaton-like stone face is betrayed by his evocative eyes, all displaying a gamut of emotion - pain, sorrow, regret and yes, even happiness and love. (And just so Herbert is never too saintly, the film and Kurth don't shy away from those moments of frustration the sick and dying are wont to have which, to put a fine point on it, reveals just how much they can be all-out pricks.)

This is one great boxing picture. Stuber's work here renders a film that's as powerful and moving as some of the best like Anatole Litvak's City For Conquest, Robert Wise's The Set-Up, John Huston's Fat City and even evoking the pain and emotion of William Saroyan's great short story "Dear Baby".

But I warn you again. Do not see this film unprepared. I suggest the heavy duty triple-ply Kleenex tissue. It will serve you well whilst watching A Heavy Heart.

THE FILM CORNER RATING: ***** 5-Stars

A Heavy Heart (Herbert) receives its World Premiere in the TIFF Contemporary World Cinema program at TIFF 2015. For dates, times and tix, visit the TIFF website HERE.

SOUTHPAW - Review By Meraj Dhir - The Film Corner's Ghee Time Scribe Craps on Fuqua

Ladies and Gentlemen, it's GHEE-TIME again as Klymkiw is too shagged to write and the Film Corner's trusty Ghee-Time Columnist, Harvard PhD candidate Meraj Dhir steps in to take a solid crap upon Antoine Fuqua's by-the-numbers boring melodrama SOUTHPAW.

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Southpaw (2015)
Dir. Antoine Fuqua
Starring: Jake Gyllenhaal, Forest Whitaker,
Rachel McAdams, Victor Ortiz
Curtis "50 Cent" Jackson

Guest Review
By Meraj Dhir
The Film Corner's
Ghee Time Columnist

If you've seen the trailer for Southpaw, there's no reason to see the intolerably dull film. The trailer deftly encapsulates what otherwise takes 124 lugubrious minutes to slog through. However, if you're amenable to gazing at Jake Gyllenhaal's chiseled torso, Curtis "Fifty Cent" Jackson's ivory white veneers and Forest Whitaker spewing out a veritable geyser of scene-chomping dialogue, all amidst plenty of predictable boxing melodrama with dashes of crime sprinkled on, then please help yourself.

Antoine Fuqua (The Equalizer, Training Day) is one of the most reliably boring paint-by-numbers directors working in major motion pictures today, but he cant be solely blamed for this dross since the screenplay, penned by Kurt Sutter (Sons of Anarchy) resembles a computer-engineered piece of software (the softer elements of said ware residing mostly between Sutter's ears) to generate a generic fight picture.

Bursting with the force of a hamster in a microwave oven, all the necessary by-rote fucking-up, redemption and rehabilitation plot points, shoehorned into all the "proper" places, results in a movie we've seen many times before. Though it will please anyone who buys into the generic rules belched out by screenwriting gurus like Robert McKee, the rest of us (unless we're as brain dead as this movie's filmmakers) can snore through every second of this film.

Here's a handy checklist of the events of the film.

I bet you haven't seen any of this before:

Fighter loses everything because he is a fuck-up.

The losses include the death of his wife to the bullet of a thug and custody of his daughter (because on both counts he's a fuck-up of the highest order and brings tragedy upon himself).

He requires one last fight to make his comeback.

In order to achieve this, our hero must accept humility and control his anger in and out of the ring. Cue rousing training montage a la any Rocky film (take your pick - all or one).

Crawl to a dull climactic fighting match with plenty of in and out of the ring editing and bargain basement Raging Bull camera pyrotechnics a la Raging Bull. This might be enough to keep one's attention, but bothering to do so instead of nodding off will merely hammer home the fact that the movie has been solely crafted to offer Jake Gyllenhaal a decent Oscar Nomination and/or free training to get into the best physical condition of his life.

There are movies, like Gavin O'Connor's Warrior and David O. Russell's The Fighter, which push the genre forward, but Southpaw does little more than vaguely hold one's attention until one realizes it's doing little more than fulfilling the aforementioned checklist.

THE FILM CORNER RATING: * One-Star

Southpaw is a Weinstein Company release through eOne.

CHAMPS - Review By Greg Klymkiw - Compelling Boxing Doc takes fresh perspective

Champs (2014)
Dir. Bert Marcus
Starring: Mike Tyson, Evander Holyfield, Bernard Hopkins,
Mark Wahlberg, Denzel Washington, Ron Howard, Spike Lee, Mary J. Blige, 50 Cent

Review By Greg Klymkiw

This compelling documentary about three world championship boxers is comprised of the usual mix of archival footage, "guest" celebrity commentators (like Mark Wahlberg, Denzel Washington, Ron Howard, Spike Lee, Mary J. Blige and 50 Cent) and some decent re-enactments, but the real cinematic pile-driver is found in the superb interviews with boxers Mike Tyson, Evander Holyfield and Bernard Hopkins.

When the camera eye of director Bert Marcus gives over to the faces and voices of these punch-ugly old guys and just lets them tell their stories, Champs is not only magical, but one of the most insightful approaches to capturing the lives, both successes and failures, of the world's greatest living boxers.

Surprisingly, the least of this film's concerns is the boxing, it's everything that took these men from the bottom to the top (and sometimes back down again). And don't worry, there's plenty of pugilistic action, but the movie's raison d'être is the humanity of these men and how their lives have been a constant struggle to find it in themselves.

Focusing upon the notion of boxers as modern-day gladiators, each of these men came from abject poverty, neglect, abuse and childhoods devoted to crime. Their only defence on the mean streets was being able to use their fists. Two of the subjects (Tyson and Holyfield) found their way to local boxing clubs to find a way out, while one of them (Hopkins) makes his mark in prison before his release into the free world to ply his trade.

Most poignantly, Tyson and Holyfield recount pulling all manner of heists for whatever money the local thug bosses would toss their way, but at least they could scramble enough together for basic needs like food and clothing. Hopkins laments how prisons have become privatized to the hilt and how programs like the amateur prison boxing leagues are being decimated.

As several of the commentators in the film state more than once, you don't see "rich kids" lining up to be boxers, it's a "poor man's sport" aimed at fans willing to pay top-dollar to see human beings pulverize each other like slabs of meat being tenderized. Those men who beat themselves senseless for the edification of well-heeled audiences can often earn money that barely takes them above the poverty line.

One of the more sickening revelations is the lack of standardized safety rules, most of which are legislated at state-wide or even civic levels. Boxing is such big business, that many unscrupulous politicians lower the standards to whatever will ensure the greatest profits (for everyone but the boxers). This extends to healthcare also. In order to maintain proper medical maintenance, one needs to be a genuine champion and even then, money mysteriously disappears into the black holes of "expenses".

Though Champs could have done without the celebrity commentators and a bit less of the dramatic re-enactments, the picture is slickly made and, for the most part, careens along at a snappy pace. The real stars, though, are the trio of boxers and one only wishes the whole film could have gone against tradition and kept most of the proceedings to "talking heads".

Far too many critics and even financiers (broadcasters, distributors, commissioning editors, etc.) use the knee-jerk "talking heads" fall-back perspective. However, if the subjects are genuinely great (as they are here) and when the skill of the interviewer (director Marcus) yields so much rich material, "talking heads" become highly cinematic.

THE FILM CORNER RATING: *** 3-stars

Champs is available on DVD via Anchor Bay/Anchor Bay Entertainment Canada.

MIKE TYSON: UNDISPUTED TRUTH - Review By Greg Klymkiw - Spike Lee serves up a brilliant document of boxer Mike Tyson's astounding one-man-show.

HBO Films presents Spike Lee's latest Joint, a biographical portrait of boxer "Iron Mike" Tyson via his hit one-man stage production which wends its way through the triumph and turmoil of his storied life.



Mike Tyson: Undisputed Truth (2013) ****
Dir. Spike Lee
Starring: Mike Tyson

Review By Greg Klymkiw

Most boxers are genuinely great natural story-tellers. So many of them, it seems, spring from tough, colourful, Runyonesque mean streets of various squalid, crime-ridden urban jungles and no matter how punch-drunk they've become, no matter how many decades have passed, they all seem to remember every single detail worth recounting about their rich lives in and out of the ring.

In fact, I've personally never met a boxer who couldn't spin compelling autobiographical yarns. That said, one doesn't need to actually be sitting face-to-face with one of these grand old guys in a booth at some greasy diner to enjoy their tales of glory since there's a wealth of interview material out there with any number of pugilists.

These guys seem to have the hard-wired DNA to recount stirring narrative accounts that are as humorous as they are heartbreaking, as hiply cool as they are harrowing. Mike Tyson: Undisputed Truth is a magical thing all unto itself - at least when it comes to documentary portraits of boxing and bluntly, it's impossible to imagine anyone other than the scrappy stylist Spike Lee to so perfectly capture the essence of one of the world's greatest boxing legends.

One of the aspects of Lee's film that was most apparent to me was the notion that its scope and style of presentation was not just the work of a genuine filmmaker (as opposed to the typical camera jockey that captures such events for television), but that it indeed, did not feel like a television special at all, but rather, a bonafide feature film. Like a previous HBO Film, Steven Soderbergh's astonishing Liberace biopic Behind the Candelabra, my immediate response to Mike Tyson: Undisputed Truth was just how much I would have loved to see the movie theatrically - in a real movie theatre, with a real audience.

With this film in particular, I was reminded of the terrific tradition in theatrical exhibition of presenting work that can collectively be typified as "concert/live performance films." Unlike classic rock concert films, however, like Gimme Shelter from the Maysles Brothers and Charlotte Zwerin or Monterey Pop by D. A. Pennebaker, Spike Lee's film is more in the tradition of stand-up style concert films like the immortal Richard Pryor: Live in Concert, Eddie Murphy Delirious, but crossed with Jonathan Demme's groundbreaking Spalding Gray monologue masterwork Swimming To Cambodia.

All of these films shared a number of elements with Lee's film. First of all, they were shot before live audiences. Secondly, the stage presentations were conceived with being captured on film. Thirdly, as theatrical feature films, they shared the unique viewing experience wherein the movie audience watched a cinematically rich approach to filming an event that included on-screen audiences responding to the material. Sitting in a huge movie theatre with hundreds of people laughing in unison with audiences reacting to the show on-screen was an experience unique to cinema and one that was so special, so indelible that watching Mike Tyson: Undisputed Truth at home, on television with a very small (albeit delightful) audience that included my wife and twelve-year-old daughter made me immediately yearn to have seen this terrific movie (with said wife and child) in a real movie theatre, with real people and a larger-than-life screen.

Lee's mise-en-scene is certainly larger-than-life and this, given the subject, is as it should be and could only be. Mike Tyson was the undisputed heavyweight boxing champion of the world and the youngest man to ever win several coveted titles. Most of his fights were won by completely knocking out his opponents and usually in the first or second round. For many years, he seemed unstoppable, but a series of turbulent personal travails wreaked enough havoc upon him that he did, indeed, start to lose. During one losing bout, Tyson savagely bit off part of his opponent's ear - not once, but twice. Add to this the blight of various domestic disputes, bankruptcy and a rape conviction leading to three years in prison and Tyson has a story as huge as that of any immortal God of Ancient Greece.

Using a series of simple, but evocative lighting effects, still images, film footage and a great music track, Lee shoots Tyson as he sits and struts upon the huge stage like a lion in a cage - his very life forming the bars and the appreciative audience providing the eventual redemption within the tale he weaves. We learn about Tyson's rough childhood - a beloved mother who was a substance abuser and sometime street hooker, an abusive step-father, an irascibly flamboyant pimp as his birth father and a huge juvenile criminal record. Tyson seems thankful for these early years of crime and incarceration, as his time in juvenile detention led to a relationship with a trainer and mentor who promised Tyson that he would indeed groom the lad into becoming the youngest world boxing champ.

Tyson comes across as a plain-spoken orator - an entertainer from the streets of life and the school of hard knocks. He's pretty damn riveting and Lee clearly knows how and where to place the camera - the lens of which that truly, madly and deeply loves the ex-champ. Unfortunately, it's impossible to be completely sold on his redemption - the physically brutality he exacted upon his young wife Robin Givens is avoided in favour of exposing her "gold digging" ways and the manner in which Tyson represents his rape conviction is full of denial and mean-spiritedness towards his victim. Instead, we get a parade of all the celebrities who came to visit him in prison. (Shame on all of them!) These are big hurdles to get over and I'm not sure if most audiences will be able to do so. I suspect, however, that Lee's dazzling direction will indeed keep them watching at the very least.

Ultimately, what the film achieves is not so much myth-making since Lee knows that this ground's already been tread upon (via James Toback's excellent, though surprisingly straightforward feature doc Tyson). Instead, we get "Iron Mike" up close, personal and almost oxymoronically, bigger than life. As the camera scrutinizes the big man, there's no denying that there will be plenty of room for audiences to see what they need or want to see. Most will see a young man from a hellhole, his rise to the top and his rock-bottom crash. We'll see a man in denial and yet, this is what we'll clearly see and believe. Finally, we'll see a man, a human being - one who looks ahead to new beginnings and new challenges.

And for all the achievements and all his fame, he'll still be a thug - a thug who parlayed his gifts as a thug into becoming a much-beloved hero and celebrity - an American Icon.

Only in America. No wonder the country is collapsing.

"Mike Tyson: Undisputed Truth" can be seen on HBO Canada. For info, visit the website HERE.
Playdates in Canada are as follows:
Saturday Nov.16 8:01PM ET / MT
Sunday Nov.17 2:16AM ET / MT
Saturday Nov.30 11:45PM ET / MT
Sunday Dec.8 9:40AM ET / MT
Sunday Dec.8 6:30PM ET / MT

For info on U.S. dates and times, visit HERE.