Boxing films: "Southpaw", "Killer's Kiss"

Enemy Featurette - Denis Villeneuve: The Web Of His Mind (2014) - A man seeks out his exact look-alike after spotting him in a movie. After proving themselves to be one hell of a team with last year's Prisoners, Jake Gyllenhaal and director Denis Villeneuve re-team for Enemy, which is currently available exclusively on DirecTV.

While we wait for the March 14th theatrical release date, check out a brand new featurette for the flick, which features interviews with Gyllenhaal, Villeneuve, and co-star Melanie Laurent!
Source: www.dreadcentral.com

Antoine Fuqua Closes Deal To Direct Kurt Sutter-Penned ‘Southpaw’ - Jake Gyllenhaal Set To Star: Antoine Fuqua (Training Day, Olympus Has Fallen) will direct Southpaw, the drama written by Sons Of Anarchy creator Kurt Sutter set in the boxing world.

Jake Gyllenhaal is now set to star as a welterweight champion who rises in his profession while his personal life falls apart. The picture, financed by The Weinstein Company, will start before the cameras this summer. Fuqua was looking at a number of projects to helm but decided on Southpaw, and his deal closed last night. Still to cast is the other lead, Titus ‘Tick’ Willis, a former fighter who was forced to retire after losing an eye and was on his way to becoming a pro trainer but retreated after his son was killed. This is a movie that could include some breakthrough performances as the script plays to cultural diversity. Source: www.deadline.com

Killer's Kiss (1955) revolves around Davey Gordon (Jamie Smith), a 29-year-old welterweight New York boxer at the end of his career, and his relationship with his neighbor, taxi dancer Gloria Price (Irene Kane).

Kubrick’s perverse story about a triangle of sexual obsession between a gangster, a dance-hall girl, and a prizefighter was produced before the art-theater marketplace had fully emerged, and it was filmed so cheaply that it has almost no direct sound recording or dialogue. The opening sequence borrows a few images from Kubrick’s earlier nonfiction short, Day of the Fight (1951), and later scenes are photographed with a hidden camera as the players mingle with the nighttime crowds on Times Square.

Throughout, Kubrick uses 1940s-style narration as a substitute for speech, and he often composes over-the-shoulder shots in order to hide lip movements. (He also stages conversations on telephones, which makes the work of dubbing much easier.) His cost cutting sometimes results in an abstract or symbolic effect, reminiscent of the avant-garde. Midway through the film, a flashback-within-a-flashback allows the dime-a-dance girl to take over the narration from the prizefighter: her elaborate story is illustrated by nothing more than the image of a ballerina dancing against a black limbo. The most impressive sequences of Killer’s Kiss employ the style of artful, New York–school street photography—especially in a protracted sequence in Times Square, where Kubrick digresses from the main action. -"More than Night: Film Noir in Its Contexts" (2008) by James Naremore