Southpaw

There's a new movie coming out about boxing, "Southpaw". It is a nice coincidence. Coming across a Muhammad Ali quotation and watching some YouTube videos, I developed a little appetite for the sport. And now there's this movie. Apparently it is not going to be a "Rocky" type of show. The director, Antoine Fuqua, wants to be more realistic and gritty. He said, “I was trying to capture the same energy and excitement of a fight, but also I wanted people to see the brutality of the sport. It’s the pain game.”

In a fascinating note, Eminem was expected to take the lead role. Officially, he bowed out to finish an album. I would bet money that he realized, perhaps with the director's prompting, that he is not really up for such a demanding role. The actor that did take the leading role, Jake Gyllenhaal prepared and trained as a professional fighter as much as an actor.

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Gyllenhaal knew going in that Fuqua wanted to shoot the fight scenes in “Southpaw” like an HBO or Showtime bout, which would mean shots where he would have to display boxing skills and footwork.

“You can’t fake it anymore,” says Gyllenhaal, 34. “So, short of hiring a boxer who can act, I had to become an actor who could box.”

-- Rob Lowman for The Los Angeles Daily News

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Eminem did provide songs for the soundtrack. However, it looks like his actor's laurels are going to have to rest on "8 Mile". It is not a bad career for the Elvis of rap music.

[Source: Jeremy Egner for The New York Times]

Saul Bellow

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INTERVIEWER

It's been said that contemporary fiction sees man as a victim. You gave this title to one of your early novels, yet there seems to be very strong opposition in your fiction to seeing man as simply determined or futile. Do you see any truth to this claim about contemporary fiction?

BELLOW

Oh, I think that realistic literature from the first has been a victim literature. Pit any ordinary individual—and realistic literature concerns itself with ordinary individuals—against the external world, and the external world will conquer him, of course. Everything that people believed in the nineteenth century about determinism, about man's place in nature, about the power of productive forces in society, made it inevitable that the hero of the realistic novel should not be a hero but a sufferer who is eventually overcome.

-- Saul Bellow at The Paris Review (1966)

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Man has always been a sufferer, and it is no wonder that this is how he came to see himself since he first became self-aware. You can think of it as our original sin. At the very least, we age and die - everyone loses. If you are lucky, maybe you win a little battle once in while.

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