‘Ali’ to return to theaters to celebrate boxing legend – Director Mann talks on greatest, the man behind movie
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LOS ANGELES, June 9, (RTRS): Sony’s “Ali,” the Muhammad Ali biopic starring Will Smith, will return to theaters this weekend in limited release as an homage and celebration of the life of the American icon.
Sony said the film, directed by Michael Mann, will be shown in a few hundred locations nationwide. Ali passed away on June 3.
It was recently reported that Smith, who received an Oscar nomination for his portrayal of the legendary boxer, would be a pallbearer at Ali’s funeral this Friday, June 10, in Louisville, Kentucky.
“With the passing of Muhammad Ali, we have received many requests for this film to return to theaters, in celebration of his life,” said Rory Bruer, president of worldwide distribution.
“The film truly honors everything that made Ali one of the central figures of our time, a man who commanded his sport but whose personal faith and principles made him mean so much more,” Bruer added. “Muhammad Ali truly was The Greatest, and this tribute is a great way to honor him.”
Struggles
One of Muhammad Ali’s biggest struggles culminated in 1974’s Rumble in the Jungle, where it seemed that the spirit of the progressive forces in the world was about to battle the spirit of the repressive status quo.
Early on, Cassius Clay related to the wider world. His father was interested in Marcus Garvey and pan-Africanism. Cassius started reading “Muhammad Speaks” in 1959. In the early ‘60s, the front page may have featured the opening of a Nation of Islam haberdashery on 64th Street in Chicago, but buried in the middle pages were national liberation struggles in the third world, Patrice Lumumba in the Congo, gleaming new public housing in Nkrumah’s Ghana.
Then, when he became world champion and changed his religion and declared himself free of every Jim Crow assumption and expectation including his slave name (“I had to prove you could be a new kind of black man. I had to show that to the world.”) and began the biggest fight of his life, he outraged everyone from white racists, white moderates and mainstream media to Roy Wilkins of the NAACP and Joe Louis.
Ali knew he bore the burden of symbolic representation to Black America. He embraced it. He would build a motivational figure made out of life, itself. His life. And, it cost him. Denouncing the war and refusing the draft cost Ali – in addition to “millions and millionses of dollars” — the revocation of his boxing licenses and a fighter’s prime years. In a way we may never have seen the very best of Ali. It would have occurred between ages 25 to 29. In 1974 both of his struggles reached their zenith in Kinshasa.
The Rumble in the Jungle polarized the world. Ali, the angry jokester, the genius athlete who spoke truth to power, inspired everyone from John Carlos and Tommie Smith through the anti-war movement to Nelson Mandela. He was the spirit king, the inspiration for “black, brown and poor people” rising up from below in Latin America, Africa, Asia and the US Foreman personified (involuntarily) the status quo, the moderate establishment devoted to order, not to justice, “who paternalistically feel that they can set the timetable for another man’s freedom” (MLK, Jr.), that they can determine when people held down are allowed to arise from the abyss.
In Mozambique in Mavalane, a favela outside Maputo, we were shooting a scene in “Ali” in which Will was running through alleyways and dusty streets with packs of local kids. After I cut, the crowd didn’t. They picked up Will and carried him away on their shoulders, shouting “Ali booma ye” (“Ali kill him!”). To them they weren’t carrying Will Smith, they were carrying Ali. They had nearly no idea who Will Smith was. There were almost no movie theaters in Mozambique. They had never seen “Men in Black” or “Independence Day.” But, they knew the hero, Muhammad Ali. Everybody on the planet knew Muhammad Ali.
In his prime, he fought with the speed and agility of a welterweight but hit as a heavyweight. He threw punches 25% faster than Sugar Ray Robinson but weighed 50 lbs. more and they landed with 1,000 foot lbs. of force. In the ring with him, the shuffle bewildered you. You couldn’t tell if the left or right would come at you first. Combined with a flurry of head and shoulder feints, snapped lightning jabs to confuse your vision, the result was disorienting, and then came the right hand. Give up. Lie down. Genius is genius, whether it’s Einstein or Ayrton Senna or Michael Jordan. It’s conceiving what’s never been done before.
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