Too much excitement! Too many movies! Too much Mike Tyson! No, really — the guy is like eight feet wide. Dumptrucks look upon him with envy.
The most riveting moment on Friday came when the former heavyweight champion of the world arrived onstage at the premiere of Tyson, a new documentary by his longtime pal, the only slightly smaller James Toback. Sporting his trademark Maori facial tattoos (the picture of Che Guevara on his abdomen, alas, was hidden underneath his suit), the ex-champ was visibly moved as he described the circumstances of how Toback came to him when he was in rehab in 2005 and asked him to participate in a warts-and-all (though still very sympathetic) film portrait, which is sure to be one of the most hotly pursued titles by distributors and instantly became the most notable new American movie at Cannes.
As Tyson noted, it took some convincing from Toback to make it happen, but “I decided we would make the best picture we could possibly make so I was sincerely honest with him.” Standing before the jubilant crowd afterward — it’s not every convicted rapist that gets a standing ovation — he admitted that he too was shocked by how frank he was on camera.
Hell, he even admits to suffering a bout of gonorrhea – contracted from a prostitute or “a very dirty young woman” – at the time he won his first championship belt from Trevor Berbick in 1986. As for what drove him to treat Evander Holyfield’s ear like a crudite, he describes himself as insane in that moment: “I wanted to inflict as much pain as possible on that man.” In his assessment, ex-manager Don King is a “slimy, reptilian motherfucker” who “would kill his mother for his dollar.” As for the victim of the crime for which he was convicted (or as he still sees it, “falsely accused”) of raping, she is referred to as “that wretched swine of a woman.”
Some of the most memorable lines in Toback’s film – which deftly cuts between recent interviews with a penitent and still pretty terrifying Tyson and archival footage of the greatest and lowest moments in his career – are already part of history. “I’ll fuck you till you love me, faggot,” he shouts at a reporter during a raucous '90s press conference. Then then there’s his famous line in a pre-bout rant about opponent Lennox Lewis: “I want to eat his children! Praise be to Allah!” But surely the most surreal moment in the film is when Tyson substitutes his words for those of Oscar Wilde. (Was it his idea or Toback’s to have him recite lines from “Ballad of Reading Gaol” as he looks out over a beach at sunset? I don’t have the guts to ask either man — c’mon, they’re frigging huge.)
It’s no wonder that Tyson the movie seemed like the main event at the MGM Grand. Even so, the quality of the films in the early days has been atypically strong. The Un Certain Regard section scored a first-round knockout with its opening film, Hunger. The first feature by British video artist Steve McQueen (who was surely fated to have a film career given… y’know), the film is a harrowing depiction of the circumstances leading up to the 1981 hunger strike of IRA martyr Bobby Sands. With its unflinching look at institutionalized barbarism and formal, high-art austerity, it most resembles an Alan Clarke movie re-shot by Matthew Barney. It’s also shitty enough (I mean that literally – Sands and his fellow Irish prisoners cover the walls of their cells with excrement) to make Blindness look like a Japanese bathroom.
It’s also raw enough to make even the fest’s sole Romanian entry seem upbeat. Screening in the Directors Fortnight, Boogie is still another very strong film to emerge from the former Soviet backwater. More on that later, as well as news of Woody Allen’s Vicky Cristina Barcelona, which is notable for reasons other than the scene in which Penelope Cruz and Scarlett Johansson make out in a bathroom — too much excitement!