berniewentboom

This HBO documentary is a no holds barred hatchet job on Muhammad Ali, the Nation of Islam, and the Black Nationalist movement. The film's historic narrative is juvenile at best and its portrayal of Joe Frazier is delusional.

The film is not a chronicle of the third and brutal fight between Ali and Frazier but more an embarrassing valentine to Joe Frazier. And then piling it on, Director John Tower includes an out-of-nowhere cameo by a fat and arrogant Larry Holmes who dismisses Ali as an overrated fighter.

"God marks it down," says Frazier of Ali's taunting him over the years... Frazier sees Ali's Parkinson's as divine retribution and likes to think of himself as the Lord's soldier who carried out the retribution: "I'm the guy who closed down the butterfly lips."

A sick thought from a sad man recounted in a piece of revisionist propaganda.

Some amazing stock footage from the period is used to paint an ugly and grossly unfair picture of the so-called hippie movement. This commercial for establishment orthodoxy exposes the filmmakers astonishingly poor grasp of the history that fueled and molded the counterculture movements from 1965-72. Typical for History Channel pabulum, the narrative tries desperately to define the movements with drug use, more drug use, sexual perversion, more drug use, and then (in an act of brash and comical audacity) crowning Charles Manson as the prince of the hippies.

This is a story for people who believe Iraq was involved in 9/11 and that Fox News is a serious journalistic entity. And quite honestly, narrator Peter Coyote should know better than to lend his venerable voice to this exercise aimed at the "Leni Riefenstahl Fan Club."