Since we're on the subject of crazy, I thought I'd point out David Denby's review of Tyson, James Toback's documentary about Mike Tyson, the former heavyweight champion of the world and one-time "baddest man on the planet," who, after losing his crown, ended up on the wrong end of a number of financial, emotional and, yes, mental-health battles that left him weak-kneed and wobbly. Denby gets to the heart of Toback's film, and what's left of Tyson the fighter and, more poignantly, the man. He writes:
Those who were furious at Tyson will be made even angrier by Toback’s film, for here is a fresh provocation—an attempt to restore to Tyson the human dimensions that have been taken from him (by himself, of course, as well as by others). The movie makes it clear that, for all his snarls and outbursts, he is intelligent, candid, and easily wounded; that he is by turns inordinately proud and inordinately ashamed and, above all, intensely curious about himself, as if his own nature were a mystery that had not yet been solved. Out of shape, his face bizarrely marked by the tentacle-like tattoos of a Maori warrior, Tyson was forty when the movie was shot, two years ago, mostly in the luxurious white living room of a house in Los Angeles that was rented for the occasion. In between footage of his fights, he looks directly into the camera, in tight closeup, or is photographed from the side, also very close, a Cubist approach to portraiture that suggests a complicated man trying to express warring impulses. Some of these contradictions are funny, as when Tyson says that he now wants a strong woman, very strong, a C.E.O. type—“and then I want to dominate her sexually.” Even at bay, he must conquer in all things.Sounds like a good one. Here's the trailer.
