Category — Lights, camera... action!

For a brief time a couple of years ago I was a fan of Forrest Griffin. A very brief time. It began after I read his first book, Got Fight?: The 50 Zen Principles of Hand-to-Face Combat. It ended a couple of months later when he Usain Bolted from the octagon after being punched in his pride by Anderson Silva’s fade-away right at UFC 101.

Until Griffin embarrassed himself – not by losing to the best fighter on the planet but by sprinting for the locker room like he’d pissed himself and refusing to comment for months afterward – I thought he had something to say about what it takes to be a fighter, a mixed martial artist and to a lesser degree, what it takes to be a man. Something to say and something worth listening to.

It was redneck Neanderthal wisdom, to be certain, delivered tongue-in-cheek but with the tangible understanding that this guy knows what he’s talking about, at least when it comes to getting in a cage and trying to tear somebody’s head off. He was the original Ultimate Fighter and a former champ, after all, and his opinions were worth noting, and respecting.

Now, I’m getting a similar good sense about Tim Credeur. While he hasn’t fought the battles Griffin has, and he has no plans to write a book (at least not that I’m aware of), this Ultimate Fighter alumnus has something to say about what it means to be a mixed martial artist, a folksy I-can-talk-the-talk-precisely-because-I-walk-the-walk insight that’s grounded in a hardscrabble for-the-love-of-the-gameness and an underlying respect for the martial arts.

Credeur, who makes his return to the octagon at The Ultimate Fighter Finale 13 in June after nearly two years away from the cage due to a brain abnormality, is the subject of the documentary Fightville, which I effused about a couple of weeks ago. Fightville has its Hot Docs premiere in Toronto on Thursday and it’s a must-see for MMA fans.

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There’s little in this trailer for Like Water, the documentary about UFC middleweight champ Anderson Silva, to suggest that it’s anything but a hagiographic handjob with a Tapout commercial sheen. It’ll play well with the folks who like the UFC Primetime specials, which is really just MMA training porn interrupted by Facebook status platitudes. And that’s what this movie, which will play the Tribeca Film Festival in Manhattan, will be. With bird-shitting parables. And subtitles. If you want to see an MMA documentary with actual depth, you can’t go wrong with Fightville, which I guarantee is superior to Like Water. Unless you like birdshit parables and subtitles.

Fightville is a gritty and brilliantly gripping bruises-and-all documentary about small town fighters with UFC dreams, and it far surpasses my already high expectations. I’ve just come from a screening of the film, which focuses on UFC vet Tim Credeur and a couple of his proteges (notably, UFC newcomer Dustin Poirier), and I’ll be writing a full review a little closer to its premiere at the Hot Docs festival in Toronto on April 28. But I want to get a few impressions out there while they’re still fresh (and while you still have time to seek out tickets to one of its three Hot Docs screenings).

No hyperbole here, this is a sharply observed and richly told drama about what it means to be a fighter. Not the big-money contracts and sponsorship deals and pay-per-view bonuses, not the ring card girls and cage fighter groupies, not the glamour and the glory and spectacle of arena-filling action heroes like Anderson Silva or Georges St. Pierre. This isn’t some glorified Tapout commercial.

This is about the average guy, the average guy who also likes to throw down, who likes to hit and be hit, who finds a certain peace and centeredness once the cage door clangs shut behind him, who goes from mild-mannered Clark Kent to Superman-punching cage fighter, who does it because he doesn’t know how to do anything else, even if it means making 500 bucks a night to get his face punched in while working in a restaurant kitchen to make the mortgage payments.

Guys like Poirier can be found in almost every serious, legitimate MMA gym in the world. And filmmakers Mike “The Truth” Tucker and Petra Epperlein, who made the amazing Iraq War doc Gunner Palace, take us into that world in a way that is visceral and real and as intense as any documentary can be. After the screening several critics asked me if that’s what the MMA world is really like and the answer, plain and simple, is yes.

It’s obvious that the filmmakers were given unprecedented access to their subjects, notably Poirier and Gil Guillory, an always-hustling promoter for the barn-burning feeder organization USA MMA and a family man who’s earnest passion for keeping his business afloat is a sharp and refreshing contrast to the image of shady promoters with a used car salesmen sheen. In fact, it’s Guillory and his wife who help put the whole sport in perspective with their insights into the school of hard knocks.

The photography is vibrant and alive and in-your-face, especially during the training sessions and bouts, but without that amped-up and over-processed Tapout commercial gloss, which makes the stories being told all the more vivid and their impact all the sharper, like the snap of a four-ounce glove to your cerebral cortex. Oh yeah, and the soundtrack just plain rocks.

And not to take anything away from Tucker and Epperlein, but they struck cinematic gold with their cast. Credeur is a grizzled marine-drill-instructor-type character who reminded me of a slightly gentler, more philosophical (and definitely crazier) John Kreese whom young fighters willingly follow into battle, grinding it out day after day in a few hundred square feet of gym in Lafayette, Louisiana, all in the hopes of earning a spot on Guillory’s roster.

As I’d hoped, Fightville does what all great documentaries do – it burrows deep into its subject to unearth larger, more universal truths. Sure, the film will easily satisfy MMA fans (at least to the point that they’ll be tearing up the seats demanding more), but it should also excite casual viewers who perhaps aren’t interested in fighting or are even turned off by the thought of it. Because while the moral/political good-or-evil debate surrounding MMA is touched on, the film shies away from making any judgments and simply humanizes the people involved. It shows what it means to be a fighter, blood and broken bones and bad pay cheques and all, and it does it with respect for its subjects and for its audience. I couldn’t ask for more than than.

Addition: I’ll get into more of this at a later date, but I couldn’t not mention Albert Stainback, one of the young fighters profiled in the film whose cage entrance is an homage to A Clockwork Orange. Fucking brilliant. Jason “Mayhem” Miller must be kicking himself for not having thought of it first.

I was feeling like Warrior might actually be a good, perhaps even great MMA movie. I’d been hearing positive buzz for the solid cast, including Tom Hardy (Bronson, Inception, Mad Max 4) and Nick Nolte (in grouchy Mickey from Rocky mode), and fight scenes that look like they’ve gotten the sport right, i.e. no Hollywoodized super slo-mo spinning head kicks, just body slams and blunt force.

Then, my hopes fell a little bit at the 1:07 mark of the trailer. “From the director of Miracle.” I hated Miracle. It was American propaganda on ice starring Snake Plissken himself, Kurt Russell, witha really horrible ’70s hair helmet and was entirely overrated. And having director Gavin O’Connor on board this film makes me shudder.

Just look at the second half of the trailer for proof: gone is the fighter’s struggling to make house payments and be a good father, replaced with some hard-to-swallow in-cage sibling rivalry, allusions of war heroism (soldiers cheering, etc) and the ridiculous idea that two brothers would square off in the championship bout of some low-rent garage promotion. It’s like The Fighter if Mark Wahlberg and Christian Bale fought each other. To top it all off, the cageside announcer even refers to their improbable showdown as a “miracle.” Ugh.

Still, it might still be a good movie and it certainly wouldn’t take much to be the best MMA movie ever when the nearest competition is that OC-meets-octagon romp Never Back Down, but at least that movie had no delusions of grandeur, of delivering deeper meaning or of reflecting reality in any way.

After crapping on the Georges St. Pierre doc The Striking Truth a couple of weeks back I began to wonder why no one has made a truly great documentary about mixed martial arts. Well, somebody just might have.

Fightville has premiered at the South by Southwest Film Festival in Austin, Texas, to strong reviews (it’s been compared to sports doc Bigger, Stronger, Faster) and the trailer certainly looks promising. Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that the filmmakers, Michael Tucker and Petra Epperlein, are true documentarians – they made Gunner Palace and How to Fold a Flag – and aren’t interested in Tapout commercial-level gloss and hagiography. They want the real story and the real story is guys like Dustin Poirier and Albert Stainback, fighters for whom the UFC is a distant dream (the doc was made before Poirier made his WEC debut at WEC 50 and he’s since fought at UFC 125).

From the Cinematical review:

Fightville is not particularly interested in psychoanalyzing its subjects; nor does the film attempt to mythologize MMA as some sort of return to the ideals of the Spartans. Tucker and Epperlein show, instead, that MMA is a sport that does a lot of work for a lot of people — providing a life purpose to some, spiritual fulfillment to others, a livelihood to many, and entertainment to many more. They do so by introducing us to four bright, interesting people who fit none of the stereotypes we associate with MMA, its participants, and its fans. Fightville is a subtle but powerful rebuke to the shallow thinking that pigeonholes this sort of sport as subhuman brutality. In the process, it casts into doubt the prevailing attitudes toward violence in general.

Fightville is a clinic in documentary craft. With a propulsive, percussive soundtrack, a fast pace, and terrific fight photography, the movie is rousing and suspenseful. In many ways, it tells an old-fashioned story — one about the value of hard work, the importance of dreams, and the challenge of finding meaning and purpose in adversity. That Fightville tells this story in the context of a controversial and widely disdained subculture makes it one of the best films of the year.

More than a few fighters have called Georges St. Pierre a robot and the perpetuation of that image of the UFC welterweight champ as an automaton continues in The Striking Truth, the highly glossy promo reel disguised as gritty documentary about GSP and pal David Loiseau that had it’s world premiere at Toronto’s Sony Centre on Friday.

In the green room prior to the screening, GSP was surrounded by over-glammed and overly fawning female reporters and hangers-on in push-up bras and fuck-me pumps while Loiseau sat quietly and texted on his phone. It’s a scene that foreshadowed The Striking Truth beautifully – GSP gets all the attention, while Loiseau, who’s up-and-down career in the UFC is as compelling as any, spends a lot of time watching from the sidelines.

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Here’s Georges St. Pierre wearing perhaps the least offensive Affliction shirt in the history of the brand, with douche bag magician Criss Angel, who I admit does some pretty freaky tricks, like that time he levitated over a parking lot.

Have to admit I’m very psyched for The Expendables, Sylvester Stallone’s R-rated ’80s-style men-on-a-mission movie that only sees Chuck Norris and Jean-Claude Van Damme missing in action. It opens August 13.

While Cristiane “Cyborg” Santos gets set to face Jan Finney at June 26’s Strikeforce: Fedor vs. Werdum, the woman she beat to earn the women’s featherweight belt, Gina Carano, has been conspicuously absent from the cage.

Well, her Hollywood dalliance, the Steve Soderberg-directed action thriller Haywire (formerly the too-on-the-nose Knockout), has begun preview screenings. And the advance word is good. Very good:

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Todd Brown, the wizard behind the awesome offbeat movie site Twitch, passed along a message about a film he’s involved with called Breaking Point, which will star Cung Le in his first significant starring role. Here’s the official plot description:

In this action-packed thriller, former DEA agent and recent ex-con Vu Ton (Cung Le) travels to Vietnam to bury his father. Once there, Vu meets business mogul Daniel Park and learns that Daniel is married to Vu’s ex-wife, Lily. Daniel offers Vu a position as bodyguard to Lily and her daughter, Nina, but Vu refuses until Lily tells him that he is Nina’s father. When a business rival with criminal ties firebombs Daniel’s house and kidnaps Lily and Nina, Vu is forced into action.

Sound pretty generic in a straight-to-DVD kind of way, the kind of thing that Wesley Snipes would be involved with (except he’s not Asian), and I’d dismiss it entirely except for a couple of things.

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