Undefeated (***)

“Football doesn’t build character; football reveals character.” So says Bill Courtney, the volunteer coach for the Manassas Tigers. The Tigers attend a high school with metal detectors at the entrance and live in a depressing, run-down section of North Memphis. This Oscar-winning documentary follows Courtney, in his sixth year as coach, during the course of a season he hopes will lead to the Tigers’ first-ever playoff win. They start off with a loss, so the title is clearly metaphorical, referring to to Courtney’s idea that reacting well to a setback will yield rewards. Three players—roughly, the star, the ex-con, and the smart kid—are used as exemplars of Courtney’s philosophy. The most effective and moving scenes are the ones in which the coach talks to each of them one on one. Courtney doesn’t seem to have any secret to his success on the field—we don’t actually see much in the way of game strategy—except to care about his players. Unfortunately, the players themselves are not interviewed.

The topic mentioned just a few times but pervading the film is race (and class). Coach Courtney and his assistant are white. All of the players are black. It’s inspiring to see them connecting, yet the gulf in the lifestyles of the coach and his family, who live in a nicer house in a nicer neighborhood, and the players, is vast. In one scene, all or nearly all of the players raise their hands when asked if they had someone close to them who was shot. Only indirectly does the film suggest what it’s like to live with the daily threat of violence and the family dysfunction also hinted at. It’s a good, honest, sports documentary, but not a groundbreaking one.

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viewed 3/20/12 7:05 at Ritz Bourse and reviewed 3/20/12

More Than a Game (***1/4)

Once upon a time, in Akron, Ohio, four kids befriended each other in elementary school and became the core of one of the greatest teams in high school basketball history. That’s the story told in Kristopher Belman’s debut documentary. That Belman came from Ohio too is what led him to talk to their coach about filming their story. That one of the players was future NBA star LeBron James is certainly the reason the film is showing up on large screens, but it has more to offer than the rags-to-riches tale of a famous athlete.

James was already attracting media attention when Belman began his project, but he focuses equally on the other players who made up the core of the team. Dru Joyce, whose football-playing dad learned to coach basketball just to further the boy’s interest in the game, and who became an excellent shooter while still under five feet tall, is an appealing underdog. The movie is neither geared to a sports junkie—i.e., there is no detail about playing tactics—nor able to completely transcend the sports genre. Big Games—a nearly won amateur championship for preteens, and the 2003 national high school championship game—bookend the film, as might be expected. What’s surprising, of course, is that these same players stuck together so long, and this became the basis for their collective success.

Hoop Dreams remains the benchmark of high school basketball documentaries. The profiles in that movie run deeper, and a sense of desperation runs through those stories that you don’t feel here, even when James recalls having to move from city to city with a struggling single mother. Still, the film is pleasant to watch throughout, and abundant game footage shows that James was capable of some amazing shooting well before he became a household name.

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viewed 10/7/09 at Ritz 5 [Philadelphia Film Society screening] and reviewed 10/16/09

Sugar (***1/4)

It’s a rare sports film that doesn’t culminate in a big game. This baseball tale doesn’t even have a big game. For a player trying to make it to the major leagues, just getting to play the next game is the point. For a pitcher Miguel “Sugar” Santos (real ballplayer Algenis Perez Soto), playing the next game means being able to send money to his family in the Dominican Republic, and not having to find work in a poor country.

Writing/directing team Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck (Half Nelson) follow Sugar’s attempt to beat the odds. For a Dominican it means first “graduating” from a local baseball academy before even getting a shot at the lowest minor league in the United States. Rudimentary English lessons (“home run,” “I got it,” and so on) are part of the package. But the heart of the movie is Sugar’s season in a low minor league team in rural Iowa, where Sugar becomes merely one of several promising newcomers. His character is particular, but is also meant to represent the thousands of Dominicans hoping to make it to the big leagues, most of whom will not succeed. This is also an immigrant story. Boden and Fleck handle the culture clash aspect with subtlety. The language barrier, for example, results in Sugar repeatedly ordering French toast at breakfast because he can’t read the menu. Eventually, he figures things out, but not in the way you expect.

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viewed on DVD [Netflix] and reviewed 4/2/10

Gracie (***)

Back in the early 1970s, actress Elisabeth Shue was a rarity, a female soccer player who had to become one of the boys to play, because there was no girls team. Shue plays the mother of a character inspired by her experience as well as a family tragedy she shared with brother Andrew, who plays a teacher and collaborated on the story with director Davis Guggenheim, who’s married to Elisabeth. Got that? Actual teenager Carly Shroeder plays the title character, a Jersey girl who gets serious about wanting to play after her brother dies in an auto accident. (Unfortunately, the male actors she plays with are in their 20s and thus unrealistically large.) While it pretty much follows the formula for an inspirational underdog movie, it avoids some of the worst excesses. Dermot Mulroney manages to pave over some of the inconsistencies in his working-class dad role, and Shroeder’s a delight.

Soccer players will relish the emphasis on the training regiment and drills Gracie subjects herself to. Moms and dads will be pleased with the PG-13 (but close to PG) view of teen life as well as the vintage soundtrack, and teens and younger kids alike will respond to the heroine’s drive and independence. Yes, it probably wasn’t necessary to have half a dozen different characters speak variations of the “girls can’t do that” theme. We get it—there was discrimination. But, judging by the cheers I heard at my preview screening, the girls and boys in the audience probably won’t care about the cliché elements. Unlike the world of high school sports, family films are one area where girls are still struggling to achieve parity, so this may even things out a bit.

PS: Could someone please edit the scene with the mailbox saying “The Bowen’s” out of the DVD version? Ugh.

[reviewed 5/31/07]

IMDB link

Blades of Glory (**3/4)

? Rival male figure skaters (Will Ferrell, Jon Heder), banned from singles competition, team up as the first male duo to compete in pairs skating.
+ This sort of comedy makes no pretensions to depth, and just a little to character development, so it has to succeed or fail solely on the laugh quotient. Given the high-concept premise, it would have been easy to simply fill 90 minutes with pratfalls, visual humor, and jokes about homosexual panic. While those aren’t missing, there’s some variety. Ferrell, as Chazz Michael Michaels, plays a variation of the swaggering types he essayed in Anchorman and Talladega Nights, his other comedies set in particular subcultures. Much of the humor comes from the contrast with Heder’s timid Jimmy. When the reluctant partners argue about who will be “the girl” when they skate, Chazz says that it should be Jimmy because “I don’t have a vagina.” (Shying away from the obvious implications of that, the producers have been sure to provide Jimmy with a love interest, played by Jenna Fischer of The Office.) Other aspects of the story play on the old Tanya Harding saga. (Harding’s victim, Nancy Kerrigan, is among the real-life skaters who appear briefly as themselves.)
- Perhaps because, unlike Anchorman and Talladega, this isn’t a collaboration between Ferrell and writing partner Adam McKay, the story is just a little more perfunctory here. The rival skating duo (Will Arnett, Amy Poehler) and the coach (Craig T. Nelson) have their moments, but overall they’re stock characters following a predictable plot. You also get the feeling that nobody among the credited five writers and two directors knows much about competitive skating. In one sequence, Chazz and Jimmy manage to get all perfect and near-perfect scores despite a nasty fall.
= **3/4 Forgettably pleasant comic comfort food.

IMDB link

reviewed 4/6/07

Pride (**1/4)

-->? The place is Philadelphia in the age of plaid, when the O’Jays (1974) and Philly soul ruled the charts. Unable to land a job as a math teacher, former college swimmer Jim Ellis (Terrence Howard) takes a job at the run-down Marcus Foster Recreation Center, which is about to be shut down by the city. There, he starts a team that proves that black kids really can swim.

+ The best things here are Howard and the character he plays. While the storyline is heavily fictionalized, it’s true to Ellis’s modest, unassuming way. As a profile of Ellis in February 14’s Philadelphia City Paper put it, “When there was racism, he taught his swimmers to recognize it, then rise above it.” Bernie Mac lends some gentle humor as the rec center’s other employee. The pacing is good.

- Pride strains so hard to be inspirational, as the title suggests, that it feels false. The plotting seems convenient rather than believable. Take, for example, how Ellis supposedly gets his team. One day, a city worker takes down the basketball net outside Foster where five friends like to play. Lo and behold, all five agree to transform themselves into a swim team. Gee, not one of them says, no thanks, I’m not that into swimming? Tom Arnold is the cartoon racist who won’t hire Ellis to work at the preppy “Main Line Academy.” Lo and behold, not only is he the head of the school, but he also coaches the swim team, which just so happens to be the best in the Northeast corridor, thus the eventual rival to Ellis’s team. There’s a cartoon criminal too, singlehandedly representing the element Coach Ellis is trying to help the kids resist. He’s so generic you can barely tell if he’s a drug dealer (as I assumed) or a moonshiner, and the scene where the coach faces him down is way corny. The students themselves are underwritten characters, and there’s hardly anything about swimming or Ellis’s actual coaching techniques.

= **1/4 I’ll admit that the preview audience seemed to like this from the comments I overheard, and it certainly left me in a pleasant mood, but since about a dozen of these “inspirational” BOATS (based on a true story) movies come out every year, there are better ones to watch. Recently preceding this were Invincible, another Philly sports story that was actually partly filmed there, and Freedom Writers, which isn’t a sports movie but covers the raising-up-urban-youth angle. You want both? Watch The Gridiron Gang.

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Rocky Balboa (**3/4)

? Sylvester Stallone’s unabashedly nostalgic sequel finds the boxer mourning his late wife and running a South Philly restaurant named after her. But the lure of the ring beckons in the form of surly heavyweight champion Mason “The Line” Dixon, in need of an image boost.

+ For better or worse, this is Stallone’s attempt to re-create the feeling of the first film, and he’s fairly successful. Rocky spends the first hour visiting his wife’s grave, checking out old haunts, adopting a mangy dog, hanging with his mopey old brother-in-law Paulie (Burt Young), and telling old war stories to his customers, the better to remind us that Rocky’s a regular guy. It’s no coincidence that you only hear him talking about Apollo, who defeated him in the first film, or that the sixth film in the series has no number. Stallone would like us to forget the other, mediocre sequels, so the story closely follows the outline of the first and best film. Rocky has decided to return to boxing, but gets an unexpected shot at the big time. There’s even a sort of substitute (younger) Adrian, sweetly played by Geraldine Hughes. Bill Conti’s original theme music is there, too. I think Stallone would have dug Burgess Meredith up if he could have. In films II through V, Stallone worked hard at coming up with ways to keep Rocky seeming like an underdog, even though he kept winning, making for some heavy melodrama. Mason Dixon, played by the light heavyweight Antonio Tarver, doesn’t seem as menacing as Clubber Lang or Ivan Drago (from III and IV), but pushing 60 will make any boxer seem like an underdog. Still, Stallone looks better than almost any other 60-year-old guy. (For the record, Archie Moore, at 48, was the oldest man to ever hold a real world title.)

- If all of the above sounds pretty dull, you’ll want to avoid this. There is only one boxing match, and there’s not a lot of plot. The other characters are there more to show you that Rocky is still the same guy from the streets of Philadelphia, rather than move the story along. I’m not sure why Dixon’s handlers think beating up an old guy will boost his image; he’s one of Rocky’s duller opponents in any case.

= **3/4 I enjoyed this for what it was, a walk down memory lane, which it clearly was for Stallone, the actor and writer, too. If you’ve wondered, hey, what would Rocky be doing in late middle age, and would he still train by drinking raw eggs and punching meat, this is your film.

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The World’s Fastest Indian (***1/4)

--> -->

Anthony Hopkins perfectly plays Burt Munro, a New Zealand eccentric who dreamed of racing his jury-rigged 1920 motorbike on the salt flats of Utah.

The title refers to the forty-year-old motorbike New Zealand crank Burt Munro tinkers with in his garage, not to the crank himself, who’s played by Anthony Hopkins. Munro was a real guy who, four decades ago, lived out his dream of going to the Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah to attempt a speed record on his fragile-looking vehicle. This is another underdog sports story, but the movie puts the brakes on the cliché moments and concentrates on the journey to possible victory. Along the way we get to see some now-faded bits of Americana, like the old Burma Shave signs. Hopkins plays the appealingly eccentric Munro perfectly. Already in his sixties when he attempted his records, Munro/Hopkins looks as frail as his jury-rigged little bike. I knew the story and I still kept worrying he’d crash the bloody thing. Written and directed by Roger Donaldson (The Recruit), The World’s Fastest Indian is a sometimes-funny visual memoir as charming as its subject seems to have been.

IMDb link

posted 9/17/13

Hoosiers (***)

The Hoosiers in this movie are high school students in Hickory, IN, a place so small that its 1951 basketball team must recruit from only 64 boys. Norman Dale (Gene Hackman) is hired to coach the team (as well as teach classes), and is immediately confronted with a walkout by two players (out of seven), a lukewarm reception by the small-town folk, who are suspicious of outsiders, a star player who won’t play, and a hostile acting principal (Barbara Hershey). He endears himself to neither his players (at first) nor the local residents, who never shy away from meddling when necessary, with his insistence on things like passing and man-to-man defenses, not to mention enlisting the aid of a local drunk (Dennis Hopper, nominated for an Oscar in this role) as assistant coach.

The first half of the movie is a character study of the stubborn coach, who is also trying not to repeat mistakes he made “last time,” as well as an exploration of small-town consciousness 35 years ago. But Dale wins the battle with them only by default, and the second half of the movie is a typical Rocky-like tale that might have been made in the 1940s as The Hickory Story. (A basketball team in a small town struggles valiantly against larger teams in bigger places.) By now most of the interest for the viewer center’s around Hopper’s character, who doesn’t quite believe his boss’s contention that he can be redeemed. Hoosiers doesn’t exactly fall apart, but Director David Anspaugh seems to be going through the motions.

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written in early 1987; posted 10/3/13