TALES OF THE GRIM SLEEPER (TIFF 2014 - TIFF DOCS) - Review By Greg Klymkiw

KILLER.
CRACK WHORE.
FILMMAKER.

Tales of the Grim Sleeper (2014)
Dir. Nick Broomfield

Review By Greg Klymkiw

It's quite possible Lonnie Franklin Jr. murdered over 100 women. Undetected for at least 25 years, he ran amuck through South Central Los Angeles as the Grim Sleeper serial killer and even now, under arrest, charged with 10 murders and still awaiting trial, the idiot police are trying to piece everything together, now, rather than during the heyday of this madman. The police knew they had a serial killer on their hands in the 80s. They even had a forensic sketch, but they did nothing. After all, why should the police have bothered to make a serial killer connection between so many unsolved murders? Hell, why bother to make anything resembling a concerted effort at all? Most of the victims were poor African-American women and many of them were prostitutes, drug addicts, homeless, abused and/or alcoholics. These weren't women anyone should care about, least of all, the Los Angeles Police Department. The LAPD have always had bigger fish to fry. You know, like being on the take and/or randomly beating and/or killing young Black men.

So who ya' gonna call when you need answers?

Well, you don't need to call maverick investigative documentarian Nick Broomfield. Chances are, he'll call you or as is his wont, the surly, dogged, sniping Brit will drop by all on his lonesome. All this crusading pit bull needs is a whiff of incompetence, laziness, ignorance, racial inequality and/or social injustice.

So was the aromatic stench from the Grim Sleeper a Broomfield alarm bell.

The director of Aileen Wuornos: The Selling of a Serial Killer, Heidi Fleiss: Hollywood Madam, Kurt & Courtney, Biggie and Tupac, Aileen: Life and Death of a Serial Killer and host of other penetrating documentaries, has never let anything stop him, though sometimes he's placed himself in harm's way to get answers.

Usually, Broomfield goes it alone. He operates his own sound and has one cameraman. His research is often done on the fly with cell phones. Here though, Broomfield secures a full-fledged partner, a former (and self-identified) "crack whore" by the name of Pam Brooks who first falls in his lap as a subject.

She quickly and simply joins him at the hip, drumming up clues, additional subjects for interviews and essentially becoming Watson to Broomfield's Holmes. She's a marvel and joy to behold and in spite of the utterly sickening backdrop, it's incredibly uplifting and yes, entertaining, to see this woman quickly gain a sense of her own pride, self-worth, talents, intelligence and doggedness to rival that of Broomfield.

This Dynamic Duo end up doing a far better job than the LAPD, digging up a whole whack of people who knew Franklin but who now, in retrospect are able to shed light on his suspicious behaviour from the past (he loved boastfully waving his handgun before neighbours, friends and acquaintances). Most importantly, the pair discover more women who might well have murdered or, extraordinarily escaped being murdered by Franklin's choice methods of snuffing out his victims - a point blank shot from a .25 calibre handgun or just good, old fashioned strangulation. Franklin, you see, was a hobbyist extraordinaire. He photographed hundreds of unclothed women in provocative poses who all appear to be dead, or asleep. Some of these photos might even be more victims.

What Broomfield's film ultimately sheds a huge light upon is how a killer openly went about his tireless, prodigious business - pretty much in plain view. The LAPD, not surprisingly, refused Broomfield's requests to be interviewed. We only see the cops on camera through news footage wherein they're extolling their "genius" at cracking the case through good, old-fashioned police work. As Broomfield's film more than ably proves, the police pretty much did nothing, save for bragging about how much they did. "Hypocrites", "liars" and "pigs" are words that come appropriately to mind.

The real story here is how nobody did much of anything while one woman, after another and another and another, ad nauseam, were brutally murdered.

THE FILM CORNER RATING: **** 4-Stars

Tales of the Grim Sleeper is in the TIFF Docs series at TIFF 2014. Financing and sales come from HBO Documentaries.

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THE NORMAL HEART - Review By Greg Klymkiw - Klymkiw Watches TV: Heartbreaking HBO Film of Larry Kramer's Modern Classic of Theatre a genuine masterwork.

The Normal Heart, the important and immortal play by Larry Kramer is now a movie which will make its broadcast launch on HBO Canada day-and-date with HBO in the USA on Sunday, May 25, 2014. It will also receive its Canadian Premiere at the Inside Out Toronto LGBT Film Festival on Friday, May 23, 2014 with co-star Matt Bomer in attendance. The fundraising screening is preceded by a cocktail reception and all proceeds will benefit both Inside Out and the Canadian Foundation for AIDS Research (CANFAR).

The Normal Heart (2014) *****
Writ. Larry Kramer, Dir. Ryan Murphy
Starring: Mark Ruffalo, Julia Roberts, Matt Bomer, Taylor Kitsch, Jim Parsons, Alfred Molina, Jonathan Groff, Joe Mantello

Review By Greg Klymkiw

The Normal Heart is as close a dramatic rendering as we're likely to get (at least for now) of how tragic and horrifying those early days of the AIDS epidemic were during the 1980s. Riveting and deeply moving, the picture is both a love story and a snapshot of how a sharply divided community fought amongst itself within its common goal to address the ignorance and prejudice of a society refusing to pay attention to the swift near-annihilation of an entire generation of young men.

While watching the film, there are times when anger, sadness and frustration will consume your spirit. With equal weight, however, your soul is alternately fed with love, compassion and joy. This extraordinary picture, shocking in terms of what it details to be sure, also evokes more than a little stupefaction that the journey of this important story to the silver screen took as long as it did. Larry Kramer's play first opened in New York in 1985 and has subsequently been performed all over the world.

In the 90s, Barbra Streisand acquired the motion picture rights, then spent over two decades unsuccessfully attempting to raise the financing. The roadblocks included the controversial material, but also, writer Kramer's eventual and seeming bid to sabotage Streisand with outrageous demands for a production fee for the underlying rights to his screenplay. In reality, it seems clear he felt Streisand had unfairly brought another writer on board to render the property more cinematic, as frankly, would have been her right, but might also have made more sense if she, in fact, did want to direct it to the best of her considerable power as a filmmaker.

Finally, it took the unlikeliest champion of the material to get The Normal Heart made into a film. Ryan Murphy, the creator of the ludicrous but compulsively watchable TV series Glee and the semi-abominable Julia Roberts vehicle Eat, Pray, Love, starkly directs this material with spartan skill, urgency and a simple but effective mise-en-scène which highlights character, narrative, historical high (and low) points in the war on AIDS and maybe, most importantly, the sheer ferocity of Kramer's writing which is levelled at all the ignorance, hatred and suspicion towards the gay community in those ever-so dark days. Given the current idiotic attempts of governments to welch on various human rights issues relating to the LGBT nation, recently with respect to gay marriage, one is grateful to Murphy for weaving a critical stance into his dramatic approach.

Many critics easily, lazily and bone-headedly slapped the word "pamphleteering" to Kramer's writing when the play first hit the stage. I suspect we might see more than a few idiot film (and TV) "critics" do the same with Murphy's film of Kramer's screenplay adaptation, but for me, there's absolutely nothing wrong when a drama wears a heart of didacticism on its sleeve. What's wrong is when the potential for holier-than-thou speechifying becomes the be-all, end-all of the piece to the point where the work suffers narratively. This is simply NOT the case in Murphy's rendering of Kramer's material.

Given the fact that the story relates the political backdrop of both the gay and straight sides of the coin (though clearly and always through Kramer's POV), it seems ludicrous to even try avoiding the sermonic characteristics of the time, place, situation and personae of the film's content and approach. If anything, it makes sense to co-opt the modes of communication rooted in non-secular practice to preach beyond (though also including) the converted, especially given how much of the prejudice levelled at gay culture, lifestyle and society has been so bastardized and exploited by virtually all organized religion to the point where it's seeped insidiously into the secular aspects of existence and thought.

The main character of The Normal Heart is Ned Weeks, a thinly disguised version of Kramer himself, beautifully played by Mark Ruffalo. As the film progresses we see that what fuels him, at least on the surface, is his steadfast belief in fighting fire with fire. At first though (and speaking of fire), we're introduced to Ned during a magnificently rendered depiction of a glorious, fun, disco-music-infused, dick-waggingly, ass-cheek-promenadingly and thoroughly delirious sex-drenched weekend on Fire Island, the traditional gay playground away from the concrete jungle of Manhattan.

Ned seems shy and out of place. He observes the bacchanalian revelry, but can't seem to be part of it himself. If he has a problem with his "skin", it turns out to have nothing to do with prudery or confusion, but when he meets the New York Times "gay" fashion/party columnist Felix Turner (Matt Bomer), Ned realizes that what he's craved as a gay man has little to do with indulging in a sexual revolution that's wildly, inclusively scattershot, but that rather, what he's sought is a revolution that allows gay men to find love.

Love, is indeed what he finds, but it comes during a time when gay men are dropping like flies from a mysterious "gay illness". Ned dives into the issue with the ferocity of a pit bull. He forms a group devoted to exposing, educating and lobbying for research into the disease which, of course becomes known as the HIV-virus which causes AIDS. Given Ed's histrionics, he agrees to be the silent leader and instead lets Bruce Niles (Taylor Kitsch), a gorgeous closeted muffin to be the public president of the organization. He befriends Dr. Emma Brookner (Julia Roberts) who appears to be the only medical practitioner taking the disease seriously on the Isle o' Manhattan and then Ned launches an all-out attack upon media, the medical profession, several levels of government (included that of the closeted New York Mayor Ed Koch), the straight community and yes, even the gay community (many of who equate their newfound freedom with rampant sexual expression).

Driving the narrative is Ned's commitment to the cause and his deepening love for Felix, but along the way, the film increasingly adds several exclamatory elements touching upon the disease itself: the suffering, the death, the outright rejection of AIDS patients by the medical community (everyone from hospital maintenance guys up to doctors and administrators), the continued efforts of politicians to ignore - mostly via prejudice - what is seen to be a disease that "only" attacks homosexuals.

We even experience dramatically the horrendous number of months and/or years that so many gay men of this generation genuinely believed there was something wrong with them and how they agreed to unhelpful and often ruinous psychotherapy. Ned admits he subjected himself to analysis and desperately looks to his rich older brother (Alfred Molina) to not only help "the cause", but to finally accept that Ned has eschewed the notion of being "sick". He wants what anyone would want - for his closest blood relative to look upon him as a "normal" brother.

There are times in the picture when we're outright jangled with the horror of this disease. Murphy never pulls punches here and there are several set pieces that are infused with the kind of urgency and outright fear, panic and sheer monstrosity of the disease. True to the material's theatrical roots, though employed here organically to the medium of film, are additional exclamatory elements when many of the major characters (and a perfectly pitched cast), launch into monologues that are as stirring and dramatically harrowing as anyone is likely to experience on-screen. These might even become the moments where some scribes take aim at the material's seeming didacticism, but they will be wrong - dead wrong (as per usual).

The Normal Heart is a film that must be seen as widely as possible. My own thirteen-year-old daughter was devastated and awakened to the reality that faced so many family friends in their youth and that face new generations even now. She was raised to believe homosexuality was "normal", has loved her "uncles" as much as they loved her, but upon seeing the extremity of prejudicial events detailed in the film, she was unequivocally shocked. She understood that "some" were ignorant about homosexuality, but not until seeing Murphy and Kramer's film did the severity of it, historically and contemporaneously, hit her like a ton of bricks. She laughed and wept all through the picture, as did her parents, but the next day she went to school with additional resolve to fight even harder for the rights of kids her own age STILL suffering from hatred, prejudice and ignorance.

Yes, gay or straight, this is a film for all who hold humanity dear, but what I really, really hope is that kids see The Normal Heart. I don't care what their age is so long as they're mature enough to grasp adult drama pure and simple. It's the kids who are our future and who might benefit the most from seeing this great film. They're the future that was denied the millions of brave victims of this horrible disease, but most of all, they're the real future of love and acceptance in a world still fraught with prejudice. See it for them. See it with them. See it for hope, for a future where hatred will never replace and/or deny care, compassion, devotion and respect for all.

The Normal Heart receives it Canadian Premiere at the Inside Out Toronto LGBT Film Festival on Friday, May 23, 2014 with co-star Matt Bomer in attendance. The film makes its broadcast launch across North America on HBO Canada day-and-date with HBO in the USA on Sunday, May 25, 2014. In Eastern Canada, the film will be available on TMN GO and HBO Canada OnDemand. In Western Canada, episodes are available on HBO Canada OnDemandHBO Canada HD, on the go with Shaw Go Movie Central app, Bell TV app, Telus Optik on the go, and HBO Canada On Demand.

MIKE TYSON: UNDISPUTED TRUTH - Review By Greg Klymkiw - Spike Lee serves up a brilliant document of boxer Mike Tyson's astounding one-man-show.

HBO Films presents Spike Lee's latest Joint, a biographical portrait of boxer "Iron Mike" Tyson via his hit one-man stage production which wends its way through the triumph and turmoil of his storied life.



Mike Tyson: Undisputed Truth (2013) ****
Dir. Spike Lee
Starring: Mike Tyson

Review By Greg Klymkiw

Most boxers are genuinely great natural story-tellers. So many of them, it seems, spring from tough, colourful, Runyonesque mean streets of various squalid, crime-ridden urban jungles and no matter how punch-drunk they've become, no matter how many decades have passed, they all seem to remember every single detail worth recounting about their rich lives in and out of the ring.

In fact, I've personally never met a boxer who couldn't spin compelling autobiographical yarns. That said, one doesn't need to actually be sitting face-to-face with one of these grand old guys in a booth at some greasy diner to enjoy their tales of glory since there's a wealth of interview material out there with any number of pugilists.

These guys seem to have the hard-wired DNA to recount stirring narrative accounts that are as humorous as they are heartbreaking, as hiply cool as they are harrowing. Mike Tyson: Undisputed Truth is a magical thing all unto itself - at least when it comes to documentary portraits of boxing and bluntly, it's impossible to imagine anyone other than the scrappy stylist Spike Lee to so perfectly capture the essence of one of the world's greatest boxing legends.

One of the aspects of Lee's film that was most apparent to me was the notion that its scope and style of presentation was not just the work of a genuine filmmaker (as opposed to the typical camera jockey that captures such events for television), but that it indeed, did not feel like a television special at all, but rather, a bonafide feature film. Like a previous HBO Film, Steven Soderbergh's astonishing Liberace biopic Behind the Candelabra, my immediate response to Mike Tyson: Undisputed Truth was just how much I would have loved to see the movie theatrically - in a real movie theatre, with a real audience.

With this film in particular, I was reminded of the terrific tradition in theatrical exhibition of presenting work that can collectively be typified as "concert/live performance films." Unlike classic rock concert films, however, like Gimme Shelter from the Maysles Brothers and Charlotte Zwerin or Monterey Pop by D. A. Pennebaker, Spike Lee's film is more in the tradition of stand-up style concert films like the immortal Richard Pryor: Live in Concert, Eddie Murphy Delirious, but crossed with Jonathan Demme's groundbreaking Spalding Gray monologue masterwork Swimming To Cambodia.

All of these films shared a number of elements with Lee's film. First of all, they were shot before live audiences. Secondly, the stage presentations were conceived with being captured on film. Thirdly, as theatrical feature films, they shared the unique viewing experience wherein the movie audience watched a cinematically rich approach to filming an event that included on-screen audiences responding to the material. Sitting in a huge movie theatre with hundreds of people laughing in unison with audiences reacting to the show on-screen was an experience unique to cinema and one that was so special, so indelible that watching Mike Tyson: Undisputed Truth at home, on television with a very small (albeit delightful) audience that included my wife and twelve-year-old daughter made me immediately yearn to have seen this terrific movie (with said wife and child) in a real movie theatre, with real people and a larger-than-life screen.

Lee's mise-en-scene is certainly larger-than-life and this, given the subject, is as it should be and could only be. Mike Tyson was the undisputed heavyweight boxing champion of the world and the youngest man to ever win several coveted titles. Most of his fights were won by completely knocking out his opponents and usually in the first or second round. For many years, he seemed unstoppable, but a series of turbulent personal travails wreaked enough havoc upon him that he did, indeed, start to lose. During one losing bout, Tyson savagely bit off part of his opponent's ear - not once, but twice. Add to this the blight of various domestic disputes, bankruptcy and a rape conviction leading to three years in prison and Tyson has a story as huge as that of any immortal God of Ancient Greece.

Using a series of simple, but evocative lighting effects, still images, film footage and a great music track, Lee shoots Tyson as he sits and struts upon the huge stage like a lion in a cage - his very life forming the bars and the appreciative audience providing the eventual redemption within the tale he weaves. We learn about Tyson's rough childhood - a beloved mother who was a substance abuser and sometime street hooker, an abusive step-father, an irascibly flamboyant pimp as his birth father and a huge juvenile criminal record. Tyson seems thankful for these early years of crime and incarceration, as his time in juvenile detention led to a relationship with a trainer and mentor who promised Tyson that he would indeed groom the lad into becoming the youngest world boxing champ.

Tyson comes across as a plain-spoken orator - an entertainer from the streets of life and the school of hard knocks. He's pretty damn riveting and Lee clearly knows how and where to place the camera - the lens of which that truly, madly and deeply loves the ex-champ. Unfortunately, it's impossible to be completely sold on his redemption - the physically brutality he exacted upon his young wife Robin Givens is avoided in favour of exposing her "gold digging" ways and the manner in which Tyson represents his rape conviction is full of denial and mean-spiritedness towards his victim. Instead, we get a parade of all the celebrities who came to visit him in prison. (Shame on all of them!) These are big hurdles to get over and I'm not sure if most audiences will be able to do so. I suspect, however, that Lee's dazzling direction will indeed keep them watching at the very least.

Ultimately, what the film achieves is not so much myth-making since Lee knows that this ground's already been tread upon (via James Toback's excellent, though surprisingly straightforward feature doc Tyson). Instead, we get "Iron Mike" up close, personal and almost oxymoronically, bigger than life. As the camera scrutinizes the big man, there's no denying that there will be plenty of room for audiences to see what they need or want to see. Most will see a young man from a hellhole, his rise to the top and his rock-bottom crash. We'll see a man in denial and yet, this is what we'll clearly see and believe. Finally, we'll see a man, a human being - one who looks ahead to new beginnings and new challenges.

And for all the achievements and all his fame, he'll still be a thug - a thug who parlayed his gifts as a thug into becoming a much-beloved hero and celebrity - an American Icon.

Only in America. No wonder the country is collapsing.

"Mike Tyson: Undisputed Truth" can be seen on HBO Canada. For info, visit the website HERE.
Playdates in Canada are as follows:
Saturday Nov.16 8:01PM ET / MT
Sunday Nov.17 2:16AM ET / MT
Saturday Nov.30 11:45PM ET / MT
Sunday Dec.8 9:40AM ET / MT
Sunday Dec.8 6:30PM ET / MT

For info on U.S. dates and times, visit HERE.