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-----------------------SPOILERS RUN RAMPANT!--------------------------
Against the Ropes 8/10
Ill give it an 8 of 10. Im not really a big Meg Ryan fan, and generally Im bashing her one way or the other, but I did like this film, surprisingly enough. It got me to thinking. It wasn’t so much the film itself, because the story was “inspired” by Jackie Kallen’s experiences, which translates to “loosely based on,” in the final analysis. It was the idea of it that got me to thinking. The DVD comes complete with interviews with the cast and the REAL Jackie Kallen, and she shares some of the differences b/t the film version of her and the real life version of her. The film, coupled with the real life story, was quite enjoyable.
Ryan plays Kallen, who in the film was a daughter of a boxing manager, neice of a boxer, and grew up to be the secretary of the owner of Cleveland’s Coliseum. In other words, she knows the ropes (no pun intended!
). It’s a gritty tale of how she goes from job to jobless, nothing to something, nobody to stardom, and it is meant to be compelling. But it wasn’t that part of the story that drew me in.
It was more the manager/managed relationship that I pondered on. Kallen in real life was married with children when this went down. Kallen in the movie was a single, childless 30-something woman. Movie Kallen basically found Omar Epps (Shaw in the movie) when she went to get her other boxer from the slum/ghetto in Cleveland. That guy had squandered his earnings away on drugs, having snorted it up his nose. When Kallen (and the receptionist from her office, who was also her friend) went to get him at his apartment, he and one of his trainers were so high they thought the women were drug runners. To make a long story short, just about the time they were taking their purses, Shaw bursts in and mops the floor with both of them, saving them from further harm. Kallen is impressed with his amateur boxing and talks him into signing a contract with her as his manager. She gets Dutton (Felix in the movie) to sign on as a trainer, and they are off to the races.
Shaw and Hernandez
To make a long story short, the relationship between Kallen and Shaw sours and is ultimately patched. But at what cost? Sometimes it amazes me the funny little tricks that emotions can play on you. Watching it, it wasn’t like I didn’t see this one coming from a mile away. Seriously. But I suppose when you are that person, or those people, you cant see the forest for the trees.
I chalk it all up to jealousy. The receptionist began a relationship with Shaw, and Kallen was jealous. Wait, you may say. Mack, youre so wrong, because she wasn’t interested in him in that way. And to some degree I agree with you. At first, I thought it was because she liked Shaw in that way, and wanted him for herself. And on some level, that may be the case. But lets look at it from a broader angle.
You have here a woman that is taking the largest gamble in her life, and her entire future hangs on it for various reasons. Her future hangs on the success of her boxer. You have here a young man who is taking one of the largest gambles in his life, for various reasons, and his future hangs on her agreement to manage him, and his success in the ring. So what you have is two people thrown together by circumstance, out on a limb risking it all with (and that is a key word here) each other. Forget sexual/romantic attraction, the risk alone creates a camaraderie, a brother/sisterhood of sorts, a company of miserables. No one wants to face their greatest challenge alone, and these two had each other, and it was them against the world. I can imagine the sheer adrenaline of it, the isolation from the outside world. No one was out on that limb the way the manager and the managed were out on that limb, and they were totally dependent upon each other. He needed her to do her managing thing. She needed him to win in the ring. They were a team, a dynamic duo, two sides of the same coin.
And then suddenly, they weren’t anymore. At one point previously, Shaw had even told Kallen that she would be a good mother, because she did an excellent job at making sure he was ok. (She should have done, he was her big investment!) And he was a needy guy in some ways. She got him out of the ghetto into a plusher apartment, helped learn to read and do his taxes, etc. She and Felix basically refined him so that he could cope in society. And she didn’t mind--hey, she was jobless, and he was her full-time job. Ok, fine.
Suddenly, there were three! He starts hooking up romantically with the receptionist/friend, and now he is not as “available” nor does he have as much “free time” in his free time to hang out and talk shop. I saw this one coming a mile away. The reason why I thought she might be romantically interested in Shaw herself (at first) was because she told him that he should cool off his relationship with the receptionist (her friend), so they wouldn’t affect each other‘s careers. I had thought that the writers were going to attempt to play on Kallen’s single hood/career track, and juxtapose her single hood/career track life mindframe (i.e. “no time for relationships”) with Shaw’s attempt at a relationship. So you can imagine that I thought he was going to ask her “what? And be like you? Single and alone?” and that they would go into that phase. Well, that idea died a short death, because he wasn’t buying into that theory.
Several things happened in short order:
1. Kallen then attempted to tell her friend to back off of Shaw. That didn’t work.
2. Kallen’s nemesis tells Shaw that Kallen doesn’t care about him, and Shaw stands up for her.
3. Kallen publicly insulted Shaw’s intelligence at a press conference.
4. Kallen ignores Shaw and the training while going on her own PR stints.
5. The receptionist attempts to tell Kallen at lunch that Shaw still feels insulted, and Kallen rebuffs that while the friend may “know” him in the biblical sense, she doesn’t know him in the intimate sense. (The assumption being that Kallen did.)
THAT ended that friendship lickity-split.
6. Kallen basically leaves Shaw on his own, and he tells her he cant handle the pressure w/o her being there to manage him, but she never comes back to really “manage” him.
7. Their professional relationship ends in a fight.
But Im rambling on. Aside from the obvious conclusion of “romantic” jealousy, I wonder about the issue surrounding paternal jealousy. Managerial jealousy. And I think, perhaps, this is what happened in their case.
You cant “be” with a person like that (non-sexual, stay with me here) and not notice their emotional absence when they are gone. I think that Kallen’s behavior signaled a backlash from her feeling of bereftness. Shaw left her when he ceased to be a part of their dynamic duo and found a girlfriend with whom to spend his free time. And Kallen just wasn’t ready for the break yet. She was still wrapped up in the “us against the world” cocoon, still mothering him along, coddling him (and he needed, let me tell you). I wonder if managing a person is like managing a thing----you know how they call “ideas” your “brainchild?” What do you call a person who is your creation---your brainchild? ( I will, for lack of a better word!)
I think there has to be an emotional umbilical cord there depending on the nature of the managerial/agent relationship, and it may get hard sometimes as an agent trying to figure out where to draw the line. Where to stop. Where and when your influence over this person ends, and how to be ok with that when you wielded so much influence over them in the past. It reminds me starkly of a parent-child relationship, when it is time for the parents to let the child go--to release him/her to find their own way, w/o abandoning them. Im no parent, but I figure it must be a hard thing to do. But Ive no doubt that some parents probably initially get jealous over their children.
And so I think that Kallen’s negative jealous reaction was really more of an instinctive protective reaction to losing the exclusive influence over her brainchild. He was never trying to “leave” her in that sense, only self-actualizing w/o her. And we have seen sports movies where the client is attempting to leave the agent/manager, but this was not the case. In this movie, somehow the protective circle of team was broken when Shaw got himself a life (read: a girlfriend, another person upon which to emotionally depend), and Kallen was left alone to dope with the pressure of being out there. I cant believe it was that hard for her with all the publicity and praise she was getting. Besides, she was a gritty woman before him, and most likely would be after him. In RL, she has manage 6 champions.
I guess the moral of that part of the story might be: be prepared as an agent for The End, or at least a phase out of the intensity of that first climb to the top. Be prepared to let that brainchild go, and to support them in going. Be prepared to sustain yourself by other means when the emotional phase out does come.
One way to do it might be to take on other clients when the need for you to handhold becomes less demanding.
Against the Ropes 8/10
Ill give it an 8 of 10. Im not really a big Meg Ryan fan, and generally Im bashing her one way or the other, but I did like this film, surprisingly enough. It got me to thinking. It wasn’t so much the film itself, because the story was “inspired” by Jackie Kallen’s experiences, which translates to “loosely based on,” in the final analysis. It was the idea of it that got me to thinking. The DVD comes complete with interviews with the cast and the REAL Jackie Kallen, and she shares some of the differences b/t the film version of her and the real life version of her. The film, coupled with the real life story, was quite enjoyable.
Ryan plays Kallen, who in the film was a daughter of a boxing manager, neice of a boxer, and grew up to be the secretary of the owner of Cleveland’s Coliseum. In other words, she knows the ropes (no pun intended!
). It’s a gritty tale of how she goes from job to jobless, nothing to something, nobody to stardom, and it is meant to be compelling. But it wasn’t that part of the story that drew me in. It was more the manager/managed relationship that I pondered on. Kallen in real life was married with children when this went down. Kallen in the movie was a single, childless 30-something woman. Movie Kallen basically found Omar Epps (Shaw in the movie) when she went to get her other boxer from the slum/ghetto in Cleveland. That guy had squandered his earnings away on drugs, having snorted it up his nose. When Kallen (and the receptionist from her office, who was also her friend) went to get him at his apartment, he and one of his trainers were so high they thought the women were drug runners. To make a long story short, just about the time they were taking their purses, Shaw bursts in and mops the floor with both of them, saving them from further harm. Kallen is impressed with his amateur boxing and talks him into signing a contract with her as his manager. She gets Dutton (Felix in the movie) to sign on as a trainer, and they are off to the races.
Shaw and Hernandez
To make a long story short, the relationship between Kallen and Shaw sours and is ultimately patched. But at what cost? Sometimes it amazes me the funny little tricks that emotions can play on you. Watching it, it wasn’t like I didn’t see this one coming from a mile away. Seriously. But I suppose when you are that person, or those people, you cant see the forest for the trees.
I chalk it all up to jealousy. The receptionist began a relationship with Shaw, and Kallen was jealous. Wait, you may say. Mack, youre so wrong, because she wasn’t interested in him in that way. And to some degree I agree with you. At first, I thought it was because she liked Shaw in that way, and wanted him for herself. And on some level, that may be the case. But lets look at it from a broader angle.
You have here a woman that is taking the largest gamble in her life, and her entire future hangs on it for various reasons. Her future hangs on the success of her boxer. You have here a young man who is taking one of the largest gambles in his life, for various reasons, and his future hangs on her agreement to manage him, and his success in the ring. So what you have is two people thrown together by circumstance, out on a limb risking it all with (and that is a key word here) each other. Forget sexual/romantic attraction, the risk alone creates a camaraderie, a brother/sisterhood of sorts, a company of miserables. No one wants to face their greatest challenge alone, and these two had each other, and it was them against the world. I can imagine the sheer adrenaline of it, the isolation from the outside world. No one was out on that limb the way the manager and the managed were out on that limb, and they were totally dependent upon each other. He needed her to do her managing thing. She needed him to win in the ring. They were a team, a dynamic duo, two sides of the same coin.
And then suddenly, they weren’t anymore. At one point previously, Shaw had even told Kallen that she would be a good mother, because she did an excellent job at making sure he was ok. (She should have done, he was her big investment!) And he was a needy guy in some ways. She got him out of the ghetto into a plusher apartment, helped learn to read and do his taxes, etc. She and Felix basically refined him so that he could cope in society. And she didn’t mind--hey, she was jobless, and he was her full-time job. Ok, fine.
Suddenly, there were three! He starts hooking up romantically with the receptionist/friend, and now he is not as “available” nor does he have as much “free time” in his free time to hang out and talk shop. I saw this one coming a mile away. The reason why I thought she might be romantically interested in Shaw herself (at first) was because she told him that he should cool off his relationship with the receptionist (her friend), so they wouldn’t affect each other‘s careers. I had thought that the writers were going to attempt to play on Kallen’s single hood/career track, and juxtapose her single hood/career track life mindframe (i.e. “no time for relationships”) with Shaw’s attempt at a relationship. So you can imagine that I thought he was going to ask her “what? And be like you? Single and alone?” and that they would go into that phase. Well, that idea died a short death, because he wasn’t buying into that theory.
Several things happened in short order:
1. Kallen then attempted to tell her friend to back off of Shaw. That didn’t work.
2. Kallen’s nemesis tells Shaw that Kallen doesn’t care about him, and Shaw stands up for her.
3. Kallen publicly insulted Shaw’s intelligence at a press conference.
4. Kallen ignores Shaw and the training while going on her own PR stints.
5. The receptionist attempts to tell Kallen at lunch that Shaw still feels insulted, and Kallen rebuffs that while the friend may “know” him in the biblical sense, she doesn’t know him in the intimate sense. (The assumption being that Kallen did.)
THAT ended that friendship lickity-split.6. Kallen basically leaves Shaw on his own, and he tells her he cant handle the pressure w/o her being there to manage him, but she never comes back to really “manage” him.
7. Their professional relationship ends in a fight.
But Im rambling on. Aside from the obvious conclusion of “romantic” jealousy, I wonder about the issue surrounding paternal jealousy. Managerial jealousy. And I think, perhaps, this is what happened in their case.
You cant “be” with a person like that (non-sexual, stay with me here) and not notice their emotional absence when they are gone. I think that Kallen’s behavior signaled a backlash from her feeling of bereftness. Shaw left her when he ceased to be a part of their dynamic duo and found a girlfriend with whom to spend his free time. And Kallen just wasn’t ready for the break yet. She was still wrapped up in the “us against the world” cocoon, still mothering him along, coddling him (and he needed, let me tell you). I wonder if managing a person is like managing a thing----you know how they call “ideas” your “brainchild?” What do you call a person who is your creation---your brainchild? ( I will, for lack of a better word!
)I think there has to be an emotional umbilical cord there depending on the nature of the managerial/agent relationship, and it may get hard sometimes as an agent trying to figure out where to draw the line. Where to stop. Where and when your influence over this person ends, and how to be ok with that when you wielded so much influence over them in the past. It reminds me starkly of a parent-child relationship, when it is time for the parents to let the child go--to release him/her to find their own way, w/o abandoning them. Im no parent, but I figure it must be a hard thing to do. But Ive no doubt that some parents probably initially get jealous over their children.
And so I think that Kallen’s negative jealous reaction was really more of an instinctive protective reaction to losing the exclusive influence over her brainchild. He was never trying to “leave” her in that sense, only self-actualizing w/o her. And we have seen sports movies where the client is attempting to leave the agent/manager, but this was not the case. In this movie, somehow the protective circle of team was broken when Shaw got himself a life (read: a girlfriend, another person upon which to emotionally depend), and Kallen was left alone to dope with the pressure of being out there. I cant believe it was that hard for her with all the publicity and praise she was getting. Besides, she was a gritty woman before him, and most likely would be after him. In RL, she has manage 6 champions.
I guess the moral of that part of the story might be: be prepared as an agent for The End, or at least a phase out of the intensity of that first climb to the top. Be prepared to let that brainchild go, and to support them in going. Be prepared to sustain yourself by other means when the emotional phase out does come.
One way to do it might be to take on other clients when the need for you to handhold becomes less demanding.
__________________
something witty goes here......
something witty goes here......
So I wouldnt know about Hernandez's "eligibility" one way or the other. I think they were middleweight though.
