Without a doubt, you'd have to be punched in the head and have incurred brain damage not to notice how Mike T. misuses words. My favorite example in the film was when he described being at a party, following a woman into a bathroom, and "giving her fellatio." Hello! But he does use about 50% of all words correctly, so this still adds up to way more than the average prizefighter. He's much more creative than say, George Foreman, whose imagination is so limited (or ego so huge) that he named each of his five sons "George." I also like the way Mike may misuse a word, but do so deliberately to give it a new meaning, much like poetic license. Am I being overly charitable? Maybe. I flinch at bad grammar, but I found Tyson's way of speaking compelling.
He does cast his share of aspersions, but then he also engages in a great deal of criticism of how own behavior. I found his self-critiques to be brutally frank. It was interesting whom he held grudges against, whom he forgave, and when and for which situations he held himself responsible. Don't you wonder what really did happen with Robin Givens? Why did he just sit there as she talked about how living him with was such a nightmare? What did you make of that? Naturally, Barbara Walters, the lamest "journalist" in history, never asked Mike any questions (we're talking about the first American journo to score an interview with Fidel Castro, and all she could come with was, "Fidel, do you have a girlfwiend?". Ugh...don't get me started.) In any event, Givens kept calling Tyson bi-polar, and I wonder if he might be...those incidents in the ring where he "blacked out"...the extremely courteous side of him, the gentle, nurturing father vs. the side of him that spent about 20 minutes cursing out that guy in the crowd who yelled out something stupid.
As for the P.O.V.--it wasn't a conventional doc. Tyson has lived in eye of the media for so long, that I think Toback wanted us to just hear him explain his own life in his own, albeit often nutty, words. E.g., I remember the Desiree Washington trial. I followed it closely. And I think Tyson was framed.
I also got backstory from just seeing those scary photos of Bed-Stuy & Brownsville. I remember when those hoods looked like that. Hearing him talk re. his mother, I got a very vivid image of this woman and of the disenfranchised--both materially and spiritually--environment Tyson grew up in.
Speaking of material matters, when he was talking re. Don King and said, "I hardly had any $ left, maybe just $20 or 30 million.", it was funny, but poignant. I guess if you've gone through $300 mill, that's not so much, right? But I got the sense he went through those millions buying gifts, spending money on other people, buying them drugs, picking up all the tabs, just to get others to like him.
What I found most astonishing was how vulnerable he is, how emotionally open, how fragile. Did you notice how many times he said that he was afraid? He'll always be that little bullied boy. It made me think yet again of that 11 yr old kid, Jaheem Herrera who committed suicide a few wks ago in GA just to escape the incessant bullying from the other kids at his school.
"There's a lot of money in flowers."
Teddy Huffstodt
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