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

The Final Season (***)

Another sports story that mixes the true tale of a small-town team in Iowa with the fictional stories of some of its players, notably the bad boy from Chicago sent by his dad (Tom Arnold) to learn some small-town values.

Sean Astin (Lord of the Rings) plays the real character of Kent Stock, who unexpectedly takes over the baseball coaching job at tiny Norway High School when the former coach (Powers Booth) is forced to retire despite helping the team win a dozen state championships. State officials want the school to close as a cost-cutting measure, hence the title. With an inexperienced coach and the feel of impending doom, the kings of the hill become underdogs of sorts.

This is a nice family movie that isn’t nearly as sappy as it could have been. The laid-back vibe gives it a slight edge over similar films like Remember the Titans.



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reviewed 10/12 and 10/16/07

The Heart of the Game (***)

This documentary about a coach, a team, and a star player will appeal to enthusiasts of both basketball and of sports films like Glory Road.

This is one of those inspirational sports stories built around an underdog team, an unlikely coach, and a star player. Well, the team weren’t complete underdogs. Their school was Roosevelt High in Seattle, which had a long record of sports success. But only when erstwhile tax professor Bill Resler came along did the girls’ basketball team see much of it. Director Ward Serrill started filming the team a few months later, when it was already clear that Resler’s coaching had turned the Rough Riders into a powerhouse. The movie is a third about the coach and his techniques, a third about the team as a whole, and a third about Darnellia Russell, the team’s potential superstar. Russell, unlike her mostly upper-middle class teammates, is from a poor neighborhood, and was sent to Roosevelt, says her mother, to avoid the negative elements associated with her neighborhood school. Of course, the standard-bearer for basketball documentaries is the acclaimed Hoop Dreams. This is very enjoyable to watch, but nowhere near as penetrating as that 1994 classic, even though, in Russell, it tells a similar story. It looks like Serrill took awhile to figure out that his movie would focus on Russell. The narration (by Ludacris) does a good job of telling the basic facts of her story, but more of her own voice would have been helpful in showing her personality, her reaction to her new school (where she was one of very few black students), and how she felt about the obstacles she later encounters. What Serrill does get is a photo finish that makes as exciting an end to his story as he might have hoped for.

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posted 8/15/13

Glory Road (**3/4)

A drama about Texas Western men's basketball coach Dona Haskins (Josh Lucas), the first to play five black starters in an NCAA title game. Entertaining, though rarely rising above the formula it employs.

These films about underdog sports teams seem to come out at regular intervals. Sometimes they’re comedies; 2005 alone brought us Kicking & Screaming and the remakes The Longest Yard and The Bad News Bears. Sometimes they’re dramas, like Miracle (2004) and Remember the Titans (2000). In the comedies, the coaches and players are usually both inept to start with but somehow figure out how to win (usually aided by a ringer or two). The dramas tend to focus on a godlike coach. The sport here is basketball. Josh Lucas plays Don Haskins, the real-life coach of the Texas Western Miners. Recruiting black players when other southern schools had none gave him an edge that helped send the team to the NCAA championship game in 1966. Like Titans, set just a few years later (and likewise produced by slick-meister Jerry Bruckheimer), Glory Road means to give you a warm-and-fuzzy feeling about the triumph of the underdog and how far racial relations have advanced.

Except for one brief scene that name-checks Malcolm X, there’s little attempt to tie the events of the movie into the larger social changes happening in the 1960s. I’d have also liked to see the flashback scene, cut from the film, that might have helped explain Haskins’s willingness to challenge white racists. Lucas is very good in a role not unlike Kurt Russell’s Herb Brooks in Miracle, but, as written, a shade less three dimensional. On the plus side, there were only a couple things that had me thinking, no way did it happen like that. (One is that it appears as though Haskins is a first-year coach whose black players are all freshmen; in fact, he’d taken the job in 1961 and inherited an already-integrated team.) These underdog films go down like slices of pizza, filled with tasty cheese like, “They can’t take your desire away from you.” Even when they’re nothing special, they’re still perfectly enjoyable, as the cheers from the crowd I saw this with suggest.

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viewed 1/13/06 at Moorestown

Varsity Blues (***)

This is a lot like Friday Night Lights, which came a few years later. That is to say, it focuses on high school football in a small Texas town. This is less of a downer, though. The coach, played by Jon Voight, is as mean as anyone in the later movie, willingly sacrificing the health of his players, tolerating no challenges to his authority. The hero (James Van Der Beek) is the second-string quarterback, who seems to have talent but irritates the coach because he does things like read books and suggest different plays. His girlfriend (Amy Smart) doesn’t care for football players.

There is some attention paid to the role the game plays in an otherwise dull small town, and to the outsize privileges and attention afforded to its young stars. (The movie’s best-known scene involves Ali Larter’s cheerleader character’s innovative use of whipped cream as a tool for seducing them.) But compared to Friday Night Lights the story is more about the hero’s clashes with the coach and his own morality, less about seeing the town or the coach (an easy villain) as a microcosm of something larger. Still, it’s easy to watch and enjoyable, with Ron Lester’s Billy Bob probably the most compelling supporting character, a 300-pound behemoth who proves the most fragile of the players.

IMDB link

viewed 1/99 at Moorestown; re-viewed 01/30/10 on television; reviewed 1/31/10

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