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" Every Wednesday we show you a great scene from film history you may remember, you may not \u2014 and then we break it down for you.      A musical number from Matt Stone and Trey Parker&amp;#039;s marionette action-comedy Team America: World Police lays out the purpose of the cinematic montage thusly: &amp;quot;Show a lot of things happenin&amp;#039; at once, Remind everyone what&amp;#039;s goin&amp;#039; on / And with every shot you show a little improvement, To show it all would take so long.&amp;quot; In movies, and especially the kind of movies Team America is sending up, montage is used to compress time, often to show a protagonist training for some climactic fight. Think of Sylvester Stallone&amp;#039;s Rocky IV and its memorable montage of Rocky (Stallone) lifting oxcarts and hoofing up snowy Russian hillsides while his opponent (Dolph Lundgren) takes his own body to the limit in a hi-tech \u00DCbermensch factory. The sequence both depicts the incremental improvement of Stallone and Lundgren&amp;#039;s characters, and provides context for their showdown, basically: au natural All-American heavyweight vs. supplement-jacked Soviet Superman.  The nine-minute sequence that opens Michael Mann&amp;#039;s 2001 biopic Ali is an exemplary montage worth revisiting as Ali pops up in new movies, fully expressing the tool&amp;#039;s possibilities (the &amp;quot;show a lot of things happenin&amp;#039; at once&amp;quot; stuff) while simultaneously subverting them \u2014 in much the same way that Ali subverts the variously stuffy conventions of the calculatedly prestigious, Oscar-baiting biopic. Set against a medley of Sam Cooke songs (a sort of montage within a montage), the sequence shows Cassius Clay (Will Smith) training for his title fight against Sonny Liston (Michael Bentt). But unlike Stallone&amp;#039;s Rocky IV incremental-improvement montage, Mann provides context not just for the Clay/Liston tussle, but for the America into which it, and the character of Muhammad Ali, emerged. Mann flashes back to a young Clay shuffling toward the &amp;quot;Coloreds Only&amp;quot; section of a bus, where a man jams a newspaper headline about Emmett Till, the 14-year-old black American murdered in Mississippi for flirting with a white woman. He also flashes sideways, to Clay being hassled by white cops while jogging at night (&amp;quot;What you runnin&amp;#039; from, son?&amp;quot;) and awakened by the impassioned pleas of Malcolm X (Mario Van Peebles), anticipating Clay&amp;#039;s involvement in the Nation of Islam and his rebirth as Muhammad Ali. Finally, Mann flashes forward, cutting in footage from the fight with Liston itself.  This is remarkable, breathlessly exciting filmmaking. It does more narrative/emotional/historical table-setting than any similarly structured sequence that comes to mind, so much so that when Smith-as-Clay busts into the arena to goad his opponent (&amp;quot;Sonny Liston! You ain&amp;#039;t no champ! You&amp;#039;re a chump!&amp;quot;), his character arrives fully formed. Follow The Culture Blog on RSS and on Twitter at @ESQCulture. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/entertainment/movies/a25862/ali-opening-montage/>