Tim Allen tops Mamet's 'Redbelt'

Martial Media, Culture and Other Arts Martial Media and Popular Culture
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at the SF International Film Fest

I read in the paper today that Mamet will be at tonight’s showing at SFIFF. Too bad I’m busy tonight. :frowning:

Mamet’s new film, Redbelt, showing at the SF International Film Fest
By J. Hoberman
Published: April 30, 2008

Details:
Rated R. Tue., May 6, at the Sundance Kabuki, as part of the S.F. International Film Festival; from Fri., May 9, at the Embarcadero.
Subject(s): J. Hoberman on Redbelt

David Mamet’s Redbelt is a tricky bar brawl — call it Roundhouse of Games. The writer-director has scarcely abandoned his sense of the movies as an innately duplicitous medium, one best suited to stories that play out as conspiratorial chess matches. But with his 10th feature — an entertaining tale of high-stakes martial arts — Mamet has infused the sleight of hand with a measure of two-fisted action.

Understatement is not part of the mix. The rhythm of the rain mixes with the rhythm of the drill as honorable instructor Mike Terry (Chiwetel Ejiofor), an exponent of Brazilian jujitsu, teaches his prize pupil, a cop named Joe (Max Martini), how to fight with one hand bound: “There is no situation from which you cannot escape.” This assertive credo makes Mike a promising Mamet-movie protagonist; that the instructor’s pedagogical style is a nonstop torrent of hectoring advice mixed with color commentary suggests the filmmaker’s own faith in the power of language. (One of the most truculent literary figures to strut the American stage, Mamet may lack Norman Mailer’s intellectual brawn, but he suffers no deficiency of bluster.)

Still, as played by Ejiofor, Mike is open, straightforward, and almost sweet — a natural victim. His business is going broke, but he’s the calmest guy in the room, if not the most honest person on the entire planet. His modest storefront academy, which also houses a fabric business belonging to wife Sondra (Alice Braga), is an outpost of Zen clarity illuminating a bleak stretch of asphalt somewhere in West Los Angeles. Reality intrudes when an apparent junkie, Laura (Emily Mortimer) — driving through a monsoon menace looking for a drugstore to fill her dubious prescription — dents Mike’s parked car. Hysterically bursting into his dojo to apologize, she further freaks upon seeing the cop and, through some arcane form of movie magic, manages to fire his gun through the academy’s plate-glass window.

As illogically as this incident plays, it encapsulates the bizarre laws of cause and effect or action and reaction that govern the movie’s universe — everyone is at seeming cross-purposes until the final score-settling. Another bait-and-switch caper occurs when Mike visits his brother-in-law’s bar to get a bouncer pal some owed back pay and finds himself intervening in a fight to protect a big-time movie star (Tim Allen) out for a night of carousing … perhaps.

Mike and Sondra are subsequently invited to dine at the star’s mansion. You need only a rudimentary familiarity with Mametian paranoia to sense that these suspiciously grateful swells are fitting them for some sort of noose. The Hollywood conspiracy is clinched the next day when Mike visits the set of the star’s new movie, nothing less than a re-creation of Operation Desert Storm produced by the sinister Jerry Weiss (Mamet axiom Joe Mantegna). Somehow, they’re thinking of bringing on Mike as an executive producer. But is it all a plot to force the honest samurai — who has hitherto been too pure to fight competitively — into the ring?

Cinema is a technology of deceit: No good deed goes unpunished; no bright idea remains unripped-off; no one can be trusted. The movie, however, wears its honesty on its sleeve. As a director, Mamet favors unambiguous close-ups and uncluttered interiors; baddies frequent sleek offices, and chaos comes from rainy nights. Neither oppressive nor subtle in its symmetries, Redbelt is a cleanly constructed piece of work. The climactic fight scenes are notable less for their competent orchestration and stolidly ritualized weirdness than for their principled opposition to the Hong Kong high-jinks of the past two decades.

In press notes so long, detailed, and repetitive they could only have been supervised by Mamet himself, the filmmaker is identified as a longtime student of, and purple belt in, jujitsu. Thus, Redbelt is a personal statement, as well as a sort of naturalized kung fu Western and revisionist Popular Front boxing drama. There’s a hint of Golden Boy (the fighter’s innate sensitivity), a few allusions to The Set-Up (his desperation, the tawdriness of his final bout), and a line (“Everybody dies”) ostentatiously swiped from the quintessential John Garfield flick, Body and Soul — if here contemptuously given to the evil producer.

Like the left-wing, largely Jewish writers of the 1930s and '40s, Mamet identifies with the situation of a solitary fighter trapped by a corrupt system. In his case, however, the system isn’t capitalism so much as show business. Therein lies a paradox — Mamet attacks showbiz while surrendering to it. The tenets of Brazilian jujitsu may argue that there’s no trap that cannot be escaped, but the rules of American entertainment insist on it.

62

a local review

I generally like von Busack’s reviews. They run in our Si Valley weekly. He has a certain acerbic quality I enjoy. I want to say that he’s generally harsh on martial arts films, but I can’t back up that statement with any evidence.

Fight Club
David Mamet makes like Chuck Norris in ‘Redbelt’
By Richard von Busack

THERE ARE some thwarted expectations in Redbelt, David Mamet’s middling, slightly baffling drama of Men With Codes. Richard (David Paymer), a loan shark, learns that he’s out $30,000. Instead of raging about it, he clutches his stomach in panic. It must be a variation of the proverb about how if you owe a large enough amount of money, you own the bank, the bank doesn’t own you. With a defaulting customer, Richard is now in trouble with his higher-ups. This clutching of the belly may be the most sensible reaction by a, er, microfinancier onscreen since Travolta’s Chili in Get Shorty noted that if you break your debtor’s legs, how is he going to pay you off?Similar common sense prevails in a moment where a traumatized rape victim (Emily Mortimer) is given her first lesson in self-defense. We also note some craft in the hard-bitten lines for Ricky “Satan’s Librarian” Jay, here playing a fight promoter. The key incident in Redbelt, the story of a valuable watch, sounds like a true anecdote. (It may be something Mamet spun off from Maupassant, but it sounds plausible, like a piece of Hollywood gossip you just ache to believe.) In Redbelt, Mamet appears to be reaching out to an action-movie crowd. The foreign-language-training-tape quality of some of his dialogue doesn’t seem to echo off the plywood of the sets, as it does in some of his other films. The gears mesh; it’s just that the machine as a whole doesn’t work.

A thoroughly honorable West L.A. jujitsu teacher named Mike Terry is played by one of the very best actors around, Chiwetel Ejiofor. As in seeing Philip Marlowe, we can tell at a glance that Terry is honest: he lives in L.A. and yet he has no money. Through a chain of events, Terry encounters a powerful Hollywood star (Tim Allen). The star hires him as a consultant on an Iraq war movie he’s shooting in the nearby desert. On the strength of this new job, Mike’s wife, Sondra (Alice Braga), gets into debt. All of this pushes Mike in the one direction he doesn’t want to go. This black-belt, whose motto is “There is always an escape,” is being forced into a free-style prizefighting match he wants nothing to do with. The sinister gimmick: fighters have to draw lots, a black or a white marble, to see whether or not a limb will be immobilized before the fight.It seems that Mamet trained in martial arts for five years, and he has all due reverence for his teachers. He insists on the selflessness and the good hearts of such teachers. Fair enough. Even so, Redbelt is a Chuck Norris plot, no matter how much an intelligent director/writer refines it. Mamet would have thrived in the days when movies were 60 minutes long. Shorter running times would have let him glide by the weak spots, like the baffling behavior of a dumb but decent policeman who has fewer cops looking out for him when he’s in trouble than any cop you’ve ever seen in a movie. A shorter running time might also make up for the almost translucent thinness of the female characters. As always in Mamet, the women here are men, second-class. They might be promoted to men someday if they keep up the good work.

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Redbelt

This flick looks like it has potential. Although, I hope Couture isn’t spending too much time lookin pretty cuz when he meets Fedor..it’s gunna be for real, yo. Hope it goes down as an Xmas 08 Xtravaganza~

http://www.apple.com/trailers/sony/redbelt/

nospam
:cool:

64

“As always in Mamet, the women here are men, second-class. They might be promoted to men someday if they keep up the good work.”

:eek:

65

see this thread…:wink:

66

..lol.

Oh well..from the trailer..it seemed s’ok to me.

It’s all good.

nospam
:cool:

67

i hear redbelt is decent. dude scotty ferrel from sirius satelite radio is in it. :thumbup:

68

Finally it’s in the right forum! I hope to see it soon. I heard if you only watch it for the fights you will be disappointed, but it’s a good movie.

69

I saw it today and it’s a well-made movie, IMO. I did not expect the fights to be great, so I was not disappointed. The acting is very good, however. I did notice at least a couple of characters in the film had an odd habit of saying something, then repeating it another 1 to 2 times quickly in a robotic manner, besides the guy giving pre-fight info to the fighters.

70

baffling

I still haven’t seen Redbelt. I really must. I never got a screener. :frowning:

I haven’t seen Never Back Down either. I was going to skip it, but to hear it described as ‘an MMA version of “High School Musical”’ kind of makes me want to see it.

I was expecting this review to go into Fighting. That’s the next one on the horizon.

When Mixed Martial Arts Meet the Movies
By R. Emmet Sweeney

Mixed martial arts (MMA) have come a bloody long way since John McCain legendarily dubbed the sport “human ****fighting” in 1996. Its flagship organization, the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC), aired eight of the top 15 pay-per-view programs in 2007 (boxing had four), while two smaller outfits (Strikeforce and EliteXC) have recently inked deals to air events on NBC and CBS. With major media outlets slowly offering more coverage and the sport’s popularity continuing to crest, it was only a matter of time before Hollywood got its opportunistic hands on those tantalizing cauliflower ears… right?

Uncharacteristic of the movie business, producers are showing restraint in capitalizing on the fad, perhaps still haunted by McCain’s “****” slam. David Mamet encountered fierce resistance to his new MMA influenced film, “Redbelt,” as he tells Sam Alipour of ESPN.com: “Everybody in Hollywood passed on it. One of the things I talked about (in the pitch) was the demographics of UFC. Look at who goes to these fights. Look at how many follow on TV. It’s huge among young males, exactly the demographic studios are trying to reach. You’re wondering how you can get these people to see a film? Well, this is your answer. The reaction was baffling.”

Much of the reason still lies in the sport’s “barbaric” reputation, a holdover from the early days of the UFC, when they advertised, “There are no rules!” and trumpeted supposed mismatches between heavyweights and lightweights. Editorials are regularly churned out about the “bestial” nature of the sport (shockingly, Don King and Bill O’Reilly have joined the chorus), despite the UFC’s relatively clean bill of health (no life-threatening injuries to date), at least in comparison to pro boxing’s spotty history. After McCain virtually bankrupted the business by encouraging governors to outlaw the fights (which 36 states obliged), the UFC was bought out in 2001 by the marketing-savvy company Zuffa. Although the UFC had already instituted a series of new regulations (no blows to the back of the head, etc.) that cleared them to hold an event in New Jersey in 2000, the new owners claimed to be innovators of the sport, and started to convince regulatory commissions, state by state, that they were safe enough to be allowed into their fair cities. In other words, they were no longer barbarians, but could still get fans to pay at the gate. Now even McCain says that “the sport has grown up,” and most states have legalized it.

Another reason for Hollywood’s reluctant embrace of MMA is the question of whether these fighting styles can even translate effectively to the screen. Mamet brings this up in a 2006 Playboy piece he wrote about the sport — how do you film the jiu-jitsu fights themselves? He claims that the form never broke into national consciousness like kung fu or karate because it is inherently uncinematic: “A fight, to be dramatic, must allow the viewer to see the combatants now coming together, now separating… Jiu-jitsu involves tying up — that is, closing the distance and keeping it closed…It is not dramatic. It is just effective.” Fights that employ this style tend to look like especially sweaty make-out sessions that go on for three rounds. “Never Back Down,” an MMA version of “High School Musical” released earlier this year, dealt with this issue by literally skipping over the foreplay, utilizing MTV-style montage to jump to the submissions, eliding the minutes of groping and intricate body contortions it takes to get there. On “Redbelt,” Mamet and cinematographer Robert Elswit (hot off of “There Will Be Blood”) take a more intimate route, employing very tight handheld framing to capture the technical skill involved in these grappling battles. These fights are not about thrills, but as the main character Mike Terry says, “I train to prevail, not to fight.” They are merely the most efficient means to an end. The main visual interest in the film, as Mamet noted in the New York Times, are the faces, which Elswit tends to shoot in profile on extreme edges of the widescreen frame, their bruised faces as purple as Mamet’s prose is lean.

The film continues Mamet’s obsession with secretive male societies on the edge of the law (gamblers in “House of Games,” security officers in “Spartan,” thieves in “Heist”). “Redbelt” follows the moral path of Mike Terry (Chiwetel Ejiofor), an ascetic jiu-jitsu instructor who intones that “competition weakens the fighter.” Mamet, a jiu-jitsu student for over five years, treats the martial art more as a philosophy than a physical skill, a conduit for self-discipline and moral purity. Terry is like a masterless samurai planted into modern day L.A, his codes of honor ridiculous to the more practical-minded citizens (and viewers) around him. Terry’s refusal to compromise on the ethics of fighting leads him on a collision course with the market economy that’s dying to exploit both his mind and body. Mamet’s Manichean setup can be overwrought at times, but it’s the necessary backdrop for his passionate defense of martial values. It ends in an improbable PPV fantasy, an alternate floodlit universe where the old samurai ways triumph for a night and momentarily silence the bloodthirsty bleatings of the marketplace.

In other words, not good tie-in material for the UFC, which is still too busy trying to land a cable deal with HBO or Showtime to concern themselves with the movie business yet. But at this point it seems inevitable that an MMA movie genre will shortly work itself out, likely plotting a middle road between the populist street fights of “Never Back Down” and the angsty existential battles of “Redbelt.” The visual grammar of MMA is in its infancy, but I hope the Mamet film provides the template: an economic, unobtrusive style seems appropriate for such brutally efficient fighting — a science more salty than sweet.

71

Though there is an MMA contest in it, I wouldn’t necessarily consider Red Belt an MMA movie. It’s a BJJ movie, which isn’t necessarily the same thing.

IMO probably still the best onscreen representation of MMA is Donnie Yen in Flashpoint. It was incorporated into the story without the entire focus being on it, and best of all, it was NOT a ‘tournament movie’ like most American MA films tend to be.

72

I really wanted to like this film…

…and I’m not 100% sure why I didn’t. I’m a great supporter of any martial arts film that breaks the iron-clad stereotypes of martial arts. Redbelt just reinforced them.

It felt over-written. The plot was painfully complex and excessive in its duplicity. I hate ‘reluctant fighter’ films. I’ve met so many fighters - real fighters - both champions in the ring and bangers in the street - and reluctance is not one of their personality traits. It’s more of a weird defensiveness expressed by writers about fighters - writers who dream of being able to fight but lack that talent and determination for it - so they create this absurd device of a reluctant fighter that is somehow more noble than someone who just fights.

I’m also tired of the old ‘corrupt fight game’ plot. Sure, there’s corruption in any sport and probably more so in the fight game because of gambling, but come on. Show us something new here if your going to go there. There was such implausibility with some of the plot twists and some fundamental misinterpretations of the ‘warrior code’ that made the whole experience rather painful. Mamet claims to have studied BJJ but he’s a nibbler when it comes to understanding any warrior code. There were some major contradictions there. Ejiofor’s fortune cookie wisdom was trite and couldn’t hold a candle to Master Po or Yoda.

The acting performances were good. All the actors turned in decent work for what they were given. It’s Allen’s best performance since Santa Clause. And I’m a huge fan of Ricky Jay. His book Cards as Weapons was brilliant and held a prize position in my martial library until it was borrowed and never returned.

The fight scenes were mediocre, but we weren’t expecting much. There was a scene that sort of showed off some BJJ techniques, but the transitions were so forced and staged that it wasn’t in the least way exciting. The finale move, a Jackie Chan-esque escape from an RNC was absurd. It was an obvious tip of the cap to the fortune cookie wisdom that had been pounded into us from the very first scene. But to go Jackie for the end not only belittled the BJJ theme, anyone who knows the slightest thing about an RNC knows that it was a sure way to snap your own neck. If I’ve got my RNC locked in, there’s no way that would work, even if you were Randy Couture. Of course, Couture could peel me off like a banana skin in so many other ways. They should have gone with something like that. The highlight of that fight was that the villain was flying the colors of our newsstand competitor.

Ultimately I was very disappointed in Redbelt. On reflection, I think it was because I was really hoping it would transcend of the genre. It’s probably a decent film if you don’t have that expectation.

73

[QUOTE=GeneChing;919277]…and I’m not 100% sure why I didn’t. I’m a great supporter of any martial arts film that breaks the iron-clad stereotypes of martial arts. Redbelt just reinforced them.

It felt over-written. The plot was painfully complex and excessive in its duplicity. I hate ‘reluctant fighter’ films. I’ve met so many fighters - real fighters - both champions in the ring and bangers in the street - and reluctance is not one of their personality traits. It’s more of a weird defensiveness expressed by writers about fighters - writers who dream of being able to fight but lack that talent and determination for it - so they create this absurd device of a reluctant fighter that is somehow more noble than someone who just fights.

I’m also tired of the old ‘corrupt fight game’ plot. Sure, there’s corruption in any sport and probably more so in the fight game because of gambling, but come on. Show us something new here if your going to go there. There was such implausibility with some of the plot twists and some fundamental misinterpretations of the ‘warrior code’ that made the whole experience rather painful. Mamet claims to have studied BJJ but he’s a nibbler when it comes to understanding any warrior code. There were some major contradictions there. Ejiofor’s fortune cookie wisdom was trite and couldn’t hold a candle to Master Po or Yoda.

The acting performances were good. All the actors turned in decent work for what they were given. It’s Allen’s best performance since Santa Clause. And I’m a huge fan of Ricky Jay. His book Cards as Weapons was brilliant and held a prize position in my martial library until it was borrowed and never returned.

The fight scenes were mediocre, but we weren’t expecting much. There was a scene that sort of showed off some BJJ techniques, but the transitions were so forced and staged that it wasn’t in the least way exciting. The finale move, a Jackie Chan-esque escape from an RNC was absurd. It was an obvious tip of the cap to the fortune cookie wisdom that had been pounded into us from the very first scene. But to go Jackie for the end not only belittled the BJJ theme, anyone who knows the slightest thing about an RNC knows that it was a sure way to snap your own neck. If I’ve got my RNC locked in, there’s no way that would work, even if you were Randy Couture. Of course, Couture could peel me off like a banana skin in so many other ways. They should have gone with something like that. The highlight of that fight was that the villain was flying the colors of our newsstand competitor.

Ultimately I was very disappointed in Redbelt. On reflection, I think it was because I was really hoping it would transcend of the genre. It’s probably a decent film if you don’t have that expectation.[/QUOTE]

I haven’t seen redbelt yet, had mixed feelings about it because of most of the stuff you just mentioned.
I did order BlackBelt ( Kuro-Obi) and am looking forward to it.

74

[QUOTE=GeneChing;919277]…and I’m not 100% sure why I didn’t. I’m a great supporter of any martial arts film that breaks the iron-clad stereotypes of martial arts. Redbelt just reinforced them.

It felt over-written. The plot was painfully complex and excessive in its duplicity. I hate ‘reluctant fighter’ films. I’ve met so many fighters - real fighters - both champions in the ring and bangers in the street - and reluctance is not one of their personality traits. It’s more of a weird defensiveness expressed by writers about fighters - writers who dream of being able to fight but lack that talent and determination for it - so they create this absurd device of a reluctant fighter that is somehow more noble than someone who just fights.

I’m also tired of the old ‘corrupt fight game’ plot. Sure, there’s corruption in any sport and probably more so in the fight game because of gambling, but come on. Show us something new here if your going to go there. There was such implausibility with some of the plot twists and some fundamental misinterpretations of the ‘warrior code’ that made the whole experience rather painful. Mamet claims to have studied BJJ but he’s a nibbler when it comes to understanding any warrior code. There were some major contradictions there. Ejiofor’s fortune cookie wisdom was trite and couldn’t hold a candle to Master Po or Yoda.

The acting performances were good. All the actors turned in decent work for what they were given. It’s Allen’s best performance since Santa Clause. And I’m a huge fan of Ricky Jay. His book Cards as Weapons was brilliant and held a prize position in my martial library until it was borrowed and never returned.

The fight scenes were mediocre, but we weren’t expecting much. There was a scene that sort of showed off some BJJ techniques, but the transitions were so forced and staged that it wasn’t in the least way exciting. The finale move, a Jackie Chan-esque escape from an RNC was absurd. It was an obvious tip of the cap to the fortune cookie wisdom that had been pounded into us from the very first scene. But to go Jackie for the end not only belittled the BJJ theme, anyone who knows the slightest thing about an RNC knows that it was a sure way to snap your own neck. If I’ve got my RNC locked in, there’s no way that would work, even if you were Randy Couture. Of course, Couture could peel me off like a banana skin in so many other ways. They should have gone with something like that. The highlight of that fight was that the villain was flying the colors of our newsstand competitor.

Ultimately I was very disappointed in Redbelt. On reflection, I think it was because I was really hoping it would transcend of the genre. It’s probably a decent film if you don’t have that expectation.[/QUOTE]

Gene:
Though I liked the film, I agree with you on a number of points.

It felt a bit odd to me that the main guy, a BJJ master, was using an odd “samurai” philosophy and eschewed competition, when competitive matches and actual fights are what it developed on. Not to mention…I’m a bit dubious about a “samurai” or traditional philosophy about avoidance of contests. In most instances (there are exceptions of course), in fairly recent history (late 1800s to present), martial arts in Japan often place a heavy emphasis on competitive fighting. In fact, Maeda, whose jiu-jitsu became the characteristic “BJJ”, was obviously one who was cut from that cloth.

And I did feel that the walk-up backflip on the wall was out of place and dangerous. Then when everyone was holding him in awe because of it as if he were a god seemed out of place in the film.

75

Thank YOU Jimbo!

The samurai/jiu-jitsu/no competition thing is exactly what I’m talking about. Japanese martial arts hold the duel in high esteem. Whether that’s a duel on the field of battle or in a sumo ring or a baseball diamond, no where does it say that a samurai should not compete because it’s not honorable. Quite the opposite.

And the end was just plain weird. The Jackie-flip-RNC break and the whole belt thing. That was another thing that really bothered me. If Ejiofor’s character was so honorable, passing someone their black belt in a locker room was pretty lame.

What an odd role for Inosanto tho. I kept looking at him and thinking “that’s not Inosanto, is it? No. Wait. It IS him!”

76

My question is why did it last in the theaters for such a short time, borderline a direct to DVD movie.

I wonder why it didn’t connect with an audience? I mean surely, all the BJJ/MMA practitioners would have gone to see it, no?

77

[QUOTE=yutyeesam;919664]My question is why did it last in the theaters for such a short time, borderline a direct to DVD movie.

I wonder why it didn’t connect with an audience? I mean surely, all the BJJ/MMA practitioners would have gone to see it, no?[/QUOTE]

because it wasn’t looking for a bjj/mma audience, it was looking for all the people who watched karate kid.

It wasn’t really that good of a movie. really a stretch with the plausability in a few places.

fairly formulaic and kinda tired in it’s storytelling.

78

just got around to seeing this, via instant stream netflix, glad i didnt really pay for it.

the best this movie has to offer is decent acting.

the thing that irks me most, is why does he get the gold belt, then he also gets the red belt. wtf :confused::confused: the japanese fighter was going to give the belt to the gaijin if he could possibly defeat him, meaning he didnt think he could lose (whether he was in on the fix or not, im assuming not since he gave it up) then some other gaijin beats that gaijin he didnt think would beat him so he gives him his $250k family heirloom…makes no sense what so ever. i cant stand writers that dont look past their own nose.

so many holes in the plot its like a moth riddled closet full of 1970s corduroy and denim…

:frowning: