sports

The Last Gladiators

by Drew Kerr on November 2, 2011

in Documentaries,Film Festivals,TIFF

The Last Gladiators

The Last Gladiators (Director: Alex Gibney): Filmmaker Alex Gibney is clearly a very busy man. The Last Gladiators, in which he exam­ines the world of National Hockey League pugil­ists, focus­sing in on the story of former Montreal Canadiens enforcer Chris “Knuckles” Nilan, is his tenth fea­ture film since 2005, an unusu­ally pro­lific output for a doc­u­ment­arian. And you can add in a couple of shorter seg­ments he con­trib­uted to some other col­lab­or­ative doc­u­mentary pro­jects during that period. Gibney has a track record for matching the quantity with quality, as his latest film proves, even if it’s a depar­ture from the kind of politically-charged topics he’s best known for, such as the down­fall of politi­cians (Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer and Casino Jack and the United States of Money), cor­porate mal­feas­ance (Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room), and American mil­itary tor­ture (Taxi to the Dark Side, which won an Oscar in 2008 for best doc­u­mentary fea­ture). But as a lifelong hockey fan, Gibney, an American, saw rich source material in examining the sub­cul­ture of one of the most con­tro­ver­sial aspect of Canada’s game, with Nilan’s own intriguing story providing about 75% of the film’s content.

Retiring in 1992 after being plagued by injuries (he’s under­gone 26 sur­geries), Nilan’s most not­able achieve­ments from his 13 year NHL career are more than 3,000 pen­alty minutes, a Stanley Cup win with the Canadiens in 1986, and a selec­tion to Team USA for the 1987 Canada Cup series. After being drafted by Montreal, he played nine sea­sons for them before being traded to the New York Rangers and even­tu­ally his hometown Boston Bruins, before ending his career back with Montreal. Nilan’s pride and love for the Canadiens still runs deep and it seems as if he never got over the dev­ast­a­tion of being traded away from them. His troubled post-NHL his­tory, which proves to be the most sub­stantive part of the film, could make Nilan the poster child for pro ath­letes who struggle with their post-playing lives. A toxic com­bin­a­tion of sub­stance abuse (alcohol, pre­scrip­tion paink­illers, and heroin), employ­ment prob­lems (Nilan hated the insur­ance job he worked at), and legal troubles (including a 2009 arrest for shoplifting) des­troyed his rela­tion­ship with his wife and child and nearly killed him. Nilan, who has a very dark and intense side, may be a rough-around-the-edges char­acter, but he’s still a like­able one. Part of his appeal is his blunt hon­esty, open­ness, and a will­ing­ness to take full respons­ib­ility for his fail­ings. Interviews with his father who, like his son, pro­jects a hard-ass demeanour and speaks with that always-fascinating thick Boston accent, add real emo­tional depth to the film, as the senior Nilan holds little back in con­veying the pro­found heartache and shame he felt (and still feels) over his son’s struggles.

The non-Nilan por­tions of the film find Gibney tra­cing the evol­u­tion of the enforcer’s role in the game from its mid-70s heyday with the Philadelphia Flyers’ “Broad Street Bullies” through to its greatly dimin­ished need in the cur­rent game. Numerous inter­views with the most prom­inent fighters over the past couple of dec­ades provide insight into the enforcer mindset, with players like Marty McSorley, Tony Twist, Donald Brashear, and the late Bob Probert weighing in (Probert’s inter­views, con­ducted shortly before his death, are sad to watch). The scenes with Brashear are sad for a dif­ferent reason, as we see the former fan favourite playing in D-list hockey league games and still itching to drop his gloves.

The Last Gladiators is a timely piece in light of the recent deaths of three NHL enfor­cers that called into ques­tion the pos­sible link between their occu­pa­tions and its neg­ative residual effects on their lives. Nilan, who I heard give an inter­view on Toronto’s Prime Time Sports radio show the week before The Last Gladiators’ TIFF premiere, dis­counted the con­nec­tion. Nilan’s stance appar­ently escaped the atten­tion of TV’s Hockey Night in Canada neander­thal Don Cherry, who cri­ti­cized him and two other former fighters (also without basis) on the tele­cast for sup­porting the sup­posed theory.

Gibney, who began filming a gen­eral por­trait of hockey fighters, chose wisely in deciding to make Nilan the central sub­ject. The Last Gladiators is con­sist­ently grip­ping and only mis­fires when the dir­ector chooses some dis­ap­point­ingly obvious music on the soundtrack (Steppenwolf’s “Born To Be Wild”) or engages in unne­ces­sary scene re-enactments to advance his nar­rative, drag­ging the doc­u­mentary into cheesy E! True Hollywood Story ter­ritory. Being a hockey fan isn’t even a neces­sary com­ponent in appre­ci­ating the film, as I haven’t given a toss about the NHL since the inept Toronto Maple Leafs killed my love for the game in the mid-90s.

Tagged as: #tiff11, hockey, sports

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Autumn Gold (Herbstgold)

by James McNally on May 13, 2010

in Documentaries,Film Festivals,Hot Docs

Autumn Gold (Herbstgold)

Autumn Gold (Herbstgold) (Director: Jan Tenhaven): The very defin­i­tion of a crowd-pleaser, Autumn Gold was greeted with a standing ova­tion and thun­derous applause at its world premiere screening. It’s a can’t-miss for­mula. Follow five ath­letes, all over 80 years of age, as they pre­pare for the World Masters Athletics Championships, held in 2009 in Lahti, Finland. Though it com­bines two very shop­worn doc­u­mentary ele­ments (eld­erly sub­jects, a big com­pet­i­tion), the film man­ages to tran­scend the for­mula by keeping its focus very much on the par­ti­cipants in the present and not delving too deeply into their past lives.

Our first intro­duc­tion to each of the five ath­letes is to join them as they train. The first thing we realize is that these are all ser­ious ath­letes, and that these games are not just about par­ti­cip­a­tion. There is real com­pet­i­tion, and our sub­jects are seeking not only gold medals but world records. And most of these folks have been ath­letes for a very long time.

Youngest is Jiri Soukup, an 82-year-old high jumper from the Czech Republic. His ambi­tion is to clear a height of 1 metre. Watching the scenes with his wife was charming. The best part of Jiri’s workouts is when he comes home after­wards to a soothing mas­sage from his sweet­heart. Though she wor­ries about him injuring him­self, she knows that he’s an ath­lete and that he won’t stop competing.

85-year-old Ilse Pleuger, from Germany, is a world-class shot putter, hoping to break the 6 metre bar­rier and win gold. The death of her beloved hus­band motiv­ated her to train and com­pete even harder.

The age­less Italian Gabre Gabric, still glam­ourous and flex­ible, refuses to reveal her age. “What’s an old woman? Who’s sup­posed to be an old woman? Not me!” she says. She’s a vet­eran of the discus, and hoping to break 13 metres.

With a twinkle in his eye, 93-year-old sprinter Herbert Liedtke tells you he still has an eye for the ladies. And more than just an eye. Although the Stockholm native is training hard for the 100m dash, he’s still looking for a girl­friend, too.

Most mira­cu­lous of all is 100-year-old Austrian Alfred Proksch, still throwing the discus; that is, when he’s not painting nude women in his studio.

And though he’s not fea­tured in the film, you will be awed by the incred­ible Italian Ugo Sansonetti. His appear­ance at the com­pet­i­tion was nothing short of jaw-dropping for a variety of reasons.

Each of these char­ac­ters could have car­ried a film by them­selves. What they have in common is that they are all both lit­er­ally and fig­ur­at­ively com­fort­able in their skins. They recog­nize that they are slowing down, that their bodies are no longer as effi­cient as they used to be. But they also recog­nize that what’s most important is their drive to com­pete, and by com­peting with ath­letes their own age, they can still win medals and achieve world records. Recognizing that they may only have a few years left has helped these ath­letes focus more intently on their short-term goals. It’s both touching and inspiring to see how each of them has lived and con­tinues to live their life to the fullest.

Official site of the film

Here is the Q&A with dir­ector Jan Tenhaven from after the screening, con­ducted by Hot Docs pro­grammer Myrocia Watamaniuk:

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (ver­sion 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest ver­sion here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Duration: 12:45

8/10(8/10)

Tagged as: #hotdocs10, aging, athletes, athletics, sports

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Atletu (The Athlete)

by James McNally on September 10, 2009

in Film Festivals

Atletu (The Athlete)

Atletu (The Athlete) (Directors: Davey Frankel and Rasselas Lakew): Perhaps not everyone is as familiar with Abebe Bikila as I am. This remark­able man was the first African ath­lete to win an Olympic gold medal, and the first person to repeat as mara­thon cham­pion at con­sec­utive Olympic Games (Rome in 1960 and Tokyo in 1964). This lovingly-made film brings this great ath­lete some long-overdue atten­tion. Bikila’s life story is even more poignant because of the tra­gedies that befell him later in his life.

In fact, the bulk of the film takes place on the fateful day in 1969 when, returning to Addis Ababa from a trip to his home vil­lage, Bikila’s car went off the road, pin­ning him under­neath. As a result of the acci­dent, he never regained the use of his legs, des­pite spending months of rehab­il­it­a­tion at the then state-of-the-art facility at Stoke Mandeville, England. It was there that he chan­nelled his fiercely com­pet­itive nature into a new sport, archery. Despite having only lim­ited use of his arms, Bikila fin­ished a respect­able fourth in a tour­na­ment against world-class com­pet­i­tion. This tour­na­ment organ­ized by the hos­pital went on to form the basis of the Paralympic movement.

The film’s climax occurs in chilly Norway, where Bikila was invited by the King in 1971 to com­pete in a unique form of dogsled racing. Accompanied by a guide, Bikila had cross-country ski poles to sup­ple­ment his team of three sprint dogs. Despite tip­ping over midway through the race, he recovered enough to beat his opponent. Set to the music of Sigur Rós, this seg­ment is sure to lead to a few wet eyes.

Lakew does a fine job por­traying Bikila, des­pite the lack of phys­ical resemb­lance, and the lib­eral use of doc­u­mentary footage from Bikila’s Olympic vic­tories (as well as from Bud Greenspan’s hard-to-find doc The Ethiopian) make up for the fact that Lakew him­self is not a runner. Frankel and Lakew’s film achieves a lot with a very small budget, and I think if this film is mar­keted to the run­ning com­munity, in the way that Spirit of the Marathon was, it could achieve some modest suc­cess. Hopefully more people will dis­cover the courage and remark­able spirit of this man, who faced tragedy as serenely as victory.

I’ve found a short inter­view with co-director Davey Frankel from the Montreal World Film Festival (where I saw the film), embedded below:

8/10(8/10)

Tagged as: #mwff09, ethiopia, marathon, olympics, sports

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Big River Man

by James McNally on April 14, 2009 · 2 comments

in Documentaries,Film Festivals,Hot Docs

Big River Man
Editor’s Note: I’ve decided to begin posting some reviews of films screening at Hot Docs 2009 early, hope­fully helping anyone attending make some decisions about what to see. Big River Man is screening on Thursday May 7 at 7:00pm at the Isabel Bader Theatre and Saturday May 9 at 6:30pm at the Bloor Cinema.

Big River Man (Director: John Maringouin): Martin Strel is no Michael Phelps. The Slovenian endur­ance swimmer is 53 years old, for starters. He’s also fat and drinks two bottles of wine a day. But remark­ably, over the past ten years he’s swum some of the longest rivers in the world, including the Mississippi, the Danube, and the Yangtze. At the begin­ning of Big River Man, he’s pre­paring for his biggest chal­lenge yet, to swim the entire length of the mighty Amazon river; he’ll be taking time off from his day job as, believe it or not, a fla­menco guitar teacher and bringing along his friend and ama­teur river guide, a pro­fes­sional gam­bler from Wisconsin.

Though the Amazon swim is ostens­ibly under­taken as a charity pro­ject “to pro­tect the rain forest,” it soon becomes clear that there is no real sub­stance behind this jus­ti­fic­a­tion. Instead, the simple fact is that endur­ance swim­ming is both an obses­sion and a kind of therapy for Strel. Well, Strel never really says that. In fact, he rarely says much of any­thing. The entire film is nar­rated by his son Borut, his assistant, pub­li­cist and man­ager all rolled into one. Borut seems like a com­pletely normal fellow, except for his strange habit of speaking not only for his father, but in inter­views with the media, as Martin. He jus­ti­fies it by saying that he knows what kind of stories the media want. By the end of the film, though, I sus­pected that Borut nar­rates Martin’s story even when there are no cam­eras or micro­phones around. For such a mild-mannered lad, he has an incred­ible ability to spin myth­o­logy out of his father’s rather simple pursuit.

He tells us, for instance, that as a child, his father was beaten mer­ci­lessly by his own father and that his first long-distance swim in a river was actu­ally an attempt to escape a beating. For Martin Strel, it seems, swim­ming the world’s great rivers is a way to exor­cise his demons. Except that in the course of a 66-day swim, he seems to stir up more demons than he ban­ishes. As if dealing with dan­gerous cur­rents, piranhas, para­sites and the blis­tering sun weren’t enough, Martin begins losing his mind, even as his doctor begs him to abandon the swim before his heart gives out or he has a stroke. Strel presses on and the film enters sur­real ter­ritory. I was reminded of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo and a whole host of other explor­a­tions of mad­ness and the jungle. Director Maringouin uses music, sound and editing to great effect to convey Strel’s mental state. On sev­eral occa­sions, Strel swims away from the boat without noti­fying anyone, and on one occa­sion, Borut has to sweep the night­time horizon with flood­lights looking for his father. As we watch this very private man go ever deeper into him­self, we wonder not just if he’ll finish the swim, but whether he’ll recover his sanity. By Day 63, even Borut is refer­ring to him as a mon­ster and com­paring him to the Elephant Man.

Strel is a man of tre­mendous appet­ites and drive and is a fas­cin­ating char­acter no matter how you look at him. However, the fact that the whole story is told by his son Borut imme­di­ately made me uneasy. When it’s com­bined with Maringouin’s manip­u­lative (though highly accom­plished) film­making, I’m left with a strange feeling of being slightly had. It’s almost as if the phys­ical accom­plish­ment of the Amazon swim is pushed into the back­ground by both Borut and the dir­ector so that we can focus on the mad­ness instead. While the myth­o­logy makes for a better film, I almost feel like it dis­respects the man a little bit. Make no mis­take, though: this is a must-see.

P.S. To add even more to the sur­reality, the film was exec­utive pro­duced by Olivia Newton John. Yes, really.

Official web site of the film


Interview from Sundance 2009

8/10(8/10)

Tagged as: #hotdocs09, amazon, endurance, slovenia, sports, swimming

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Groundhoppers

by James McNally on June 21, 2007

in Documentaries,DVD

Groundhoppers

Groundhoppers (Director: Eivind Tolås, Norway, 2005): Thank good­ness for the internet. While reading about obsessive foot­ball (soccer) fans who attempt to visit as many foot­ball grounds as pos­sible, I came across the title of this Norwegian doc­u­mentary. I was able to get in touch with the film­maker and con­vince him to send me a copy to review. As far as I know, this film was broad­cast on Norwegian tele­vi­sion, and played a few film fest­ivals in Europe, but has never been seen in North America. But that’s ok, for the phe­nomenon of “ground­hop­ping” prob­ably wouldn’t make as much sense here.

Kjell Morten and Bjarte are two middle-aged brothers who spend all of their vaca­tions in England, attending foot­ball matches. Their goal is to visit all 92 grounds of the teams that com­prise the Football League. This includes the Premiership (20 teams), the Championship (24 teams) and Leagues One and Two (24 teams each), which together com­prise the top four tiers of English foot­ball. As you can ima­gine, “ground­hop­pers” are usu­ally men, usu­ally single, and have a cer­tain amount of time and dis­pos­able income at their command.

The two Norwegians have been at it for more than ten years, and are up to sixty-odd stadia vis­ited. Perhaps stadia is too grand a term, for some of the lower league clubs play in some very modest cir­cum­stances indeed. Basing them­selves in Rotherham, “one of Britain’s poorest cities” according to the film, they’ve adopted the local team, Rotherham United, nick­named the Millers as their home team away from home.

At home in Bergen, though, it’s all about SK Brann, and one of the film’s most charming moments comes watching the brothers as they wit­ness their team’s tri­umph in Norway’s own Cup Final.

All in all, this is a light-hearted look at a harm­less (if inex­plic­able to most) obses­sion. I think if I had the advant­ages of living in Europe (gen­erous vaca­tion allow­ances, short dis­tances, cheap trans­port­a­tion, and a wealth of foot­ball clubs), I’d be joining the boys in the stands.

I have attended foot­ball matches in three dif­ferent coun­tries, though: Canada, Uruguay, and Slovenia. Just a few hun­dred more to go…

More on Rotherham United FC (the Millers)
More on SK Brann
Groundtastic, a magazine devoted to foot­ball grounds
Football Grounds In Focus, The No.1 Groundhopping web­site ‘made for trav­el­lers by trav­el­lers’
Done The Lot — Fans who have vis­ited all 92 English Football League grounds

7/10(7/10)

Tagged as: Documentaries, DVD, football, norway, soccer, sports, uk

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