Semi-Pro (**1/2)

Will Ferrell scores again, but misses just as often, with this semi-good basketball comedy set in the era of disco, giant afros, and Shasta cola. He plays a one-hit-wonder soul man who becomes the 0wner-coach-player of the Florida Tropics, a fictional team in the old American Basketball Association. As presented here, the Tropics are a low-rent team in a low-rent league, one that after the 1976 season merged with the NBA, but leaving some teams behind.

The story here has the Tropics having to compete to be one of the four teams that will be incorporated into the NBA, setting up the traditional underdog sports story. The team’s savior, a washed-up NBA refugee, is played by Woody Harrelson, who’s the most appealing actor in the movie. Ferrell plays the now-familiar man-child that overpopulates his filmography, and quite probably Hollywood comedies generally. If you liked him in Talledega Nights and Blades of Glory, you’ll like him as a kinder version of those characters. It’s less well written than Talledega, though, and even though it’s not as silly as Blades of Glory, the goofy parts here fall flat.

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

The Pursuit of Happyness (***3/4)

 ? Will Smith plays Christopher Gardner, a salesman trying to stay afloat and take advantage of opportunity, in the early 1980s. Italian director Gabriele Muccino (whose Last Kiss was remade this year) makes his English-language debut with a script by Steve Conrad (The Weather Man).

+ I figured I’d like this movie when Gardner tells a janitor that the inspiring slogan on the wall outside his son’s day-care facility is misspelled (hence this film’s title). Only then does he mention the four-letter graffito someone added. Thanks to such details, this is a true story that actually feels like one. With a minimum of melodrama, it gives a picture of how tough it is to dig yourself out from a financial hole without a support system, and without shortcuts. Yeah, the movie’s a feel-good story, but if you look at how hard Gardner had to work to get ahead, and how smart he had to be, you can understand why so many people who are not lazy and not stupid can’t do what he did. The bone-density scanners Gardner carries around for much of the film provide both a running sight gag and a metaphor for the weight of the past mistakes he’s trying to overcome. The movie this reminded me of was the underrated Cinderella Man. Although that was about Depression-era boxer Jim Braddock, it was the other fairly recent movie that made me feel something of what it must be like to have to worry about every dollar, and the indignity of not being able to shield your family from the effects of that day-to-day struggle. Smith, in what might be his first regular-guy film role since Made in America, tones down but maintains his on-screen affability. Smith’s son Jaden plays the same role in the movie; he’s a natural.

- I guess if I wanted to criticize this I could say that whereas Cinderella Man used Braddock’s story as a window into Depression-era America, this doesn’t use do anything but show one man’s unlikely path to success. I could say that the movie falsely implies that anyone can make it by hard work and fortitude, whereas in reality Gardner also had a great deal of innate intelligence that also made that possible. I could say that it’s a movie about a poor black guy trying to make it in corporate America that nonetheless has nothing to say about the intersection of race and poverty. But if this isn’t a movie of great social import, it is well-paced, moving, and consistently entertaining.

= ***3/4 I found this Pursuit absorbing from beginning to end.

IMDb link

Unaccompanied Minors (**1/2)

? Almost assuredly this is the first kids’ flick based (really loosely) on a piece from National Public Radio’s This American Life. Back in 1988, a snowstorm held up all air traffic at Chicago’s O’Hare airport around Christmas. Some kids got put up in hotels; some had to spend the night in the big “UM” room. The fictional part here has the latter group reduced to a quintet of misfits who try to escape, chased by an off-kilter security chief played by Lewis Black. In other words, it’s a junior version of The Breakfast Club, aimed toward those way too young to remember that 1980s touchstone.

+ As directed by Paul Feig, creator of the short-lived TV series Freaks & Geeks, the movie champions the underdogs just like that series. The kids manage to make an airport look more fun than Tom Hanks did in The Terminal as they discover the joys of spare flotation devices and unclaimed luggage.

- On the other hand, the script (not by Feig) has little of the pathos of Freaks & Geeks, although the kids are supposed to be bonding because their mostly divorced parents have neglected them. Nothing here rises above the level of a Saturday-morning cartoon. The kids can all be summed up with an adjective or two. There’s the brainy nerd, the tomboy, the dumb fat kid, the snobby girl, and the normal kid who, for some reason, all the others agree to follow in his quest to pretend to be Santa for his little sister back at the hotel. The required sappy ending is no more believable than anything else. One also fears for the public’s safety if the airport security is as lax as portrayed here. No wonder the airport is fictionally called “Hoover” here.

= **1/2 I’m pretty sure my 13-year-old self would’ve found this to be fast-paced fun; my 42-year-old self found it pretty juvenile, but that’s what it’s trying to be.

IMDb link

Happy Feet (***)

? It’s the November of the penguins in this computer-animated feature about a young emperor penguin who becomes something of an outcast because, unlike the rest of his colony, he can’t carry a tune. He can, however, tap dance, and finds some acceptance with some folks in a neighboring colony where everyone sounds Hispanic. George Miller (The Road Warrior) directed the Aussie-made movie, which features the voices of Elijah Wood, Brittany Murphy, Hugh Jackman, Nicole Kidman and, doing his best Isaac Hayes impression, Robin Williams as a comical guru who also narrates the story.

+  Antarctica and the penguins are rendered with an almost photographic accuracy. (The penguins actually look pretty much alike, so size is mostly used to distinguish one from the other.) The musical numbers, even the medleys, are mostly well produced. Since they’re hits of the last 50 years, they’re guaranteed to push the buttons of anyone from 6 to 66. Amusingly, a major plot point involves whether “aliens” exist. A flying bird that almost eats the hero insists that he was the victim of an alien abduction that resulted in the tag he sports on his leg. For a story that appears headed for a familiar destination, the route is surprising. If this weren’t a family-oriented cartoon, I might even call the last segment existential. Like some kind of mini-Penguin of the Rings, it was definitely the most interesting segment for me, even if it might confuse the youngest viewers. The movie also carries a pro-conservation message.

- Perhaps reflecting the four credited writers, this is a somewhat disjointed movie. The first 2/3 has about 12 minutes of plot and a lot of visual and musical riffs that collectively made the movie seem a little long. (For an animated movie, it is.) At times the plight of the hero seems to be a metaphor for gay rights, at others a shot at cultural reactionaries. But then the last part of the movie is chock full of plot, and, as noted, possibly confusing for little kids. (A sequence where whales nearly have penguin tartare might frighten them too.) The fact that nearly all the penguins look alike might prevent the characters from leaving as indelible a mark as some other cartoon heroes.

= *** I’m not sure what kids will think of this. It’s warm and fuzzy in parts, not in others, but they’ll like the singing penguins. The ending is magical for all ages.

IMDb link

Invincible (***)

? Think of this as a football version of Rocky, only true. Well, sort of, in Disney’s heavily fictionalized story of how Vince Papale (Mark Wahlberg), a down-on-his luck pickup-team player, unexpectedly wound up a 30-year old rookie on his local team, the hapless Philadelphia Eagles of the mid-1970s. Greg Kinnear plays the team’s new coach, Dick Vermeil, and Elizabeth Banks is a romantic interest.

+ Even if Papale’s NFL career was less unlikely than the film makes it seem (the real Papale had played two years in the flop World Football League), the only part of the movie that seemed probably false to me was how his marriage’s end and new romance is timed so coincidentally to his burgeoning football career. The best thing about the movie, though, is the way it evokes the spirit of 1970s Philadelphia at the time, for better or worse. The Veterans Stadium boo birds make multiple appearances, and scrappy working-class South Philly seems just about right, right down to the trash on the street and the nearby picket line. The idea is that the success of the underdog and local boy Papale gave some down-on-their luck people something to rally around. Yet it doesn’t push this theme too hard like, say, Remember the Titans, which I thought laid its “inspirational” message on pretty thick. Banks’s largely made-up role as the down-to-earth girlfriend is appealing and should propel her to greater fame. And BTO’s “Let It Ride” is one of the excellent choices as soundtrack music, a propulsive jock-rock hit that’s been forgotten enough that hearing it really brings back the period.

- Even given that the story is no mystery, the ending is pretty anti-climatic. Although Kinnear is a good Vermeil, the parts with the coach’s family don’t add much to the story. No doubt Vermeil’s life could make a good movie on its own, but what’s here is too insubstantial to amount to much.

= *** Another feel-good sports movie in the vein of The Rookie. Both movies are about modest sports heroes who learn confidence as they meet success. For non-sports fans, there are relatively few play scenes. A lot less corny that than it could have been, it’s inconsequential but entertaining.

IMDb link

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.

IMDb link

posted 8/15/13

Nacho Libre (**3/4)

Jared and Jerusha Hess recapture some of the feel of their first film, Napoleon Dynamite, straddling the line between humor and oddness as they tell the tale of a Mexican monastery cook (Jack Black) who desires to wrestle and wrestles with his desire for a cute nun.

A vehicle for its curvaceous star, Jack Black, this odd comedy is also the husband-wife duo Jared and Jerusha Hess’s follow-up to the left-field hit Napoleon Dynamite. (Their writing collaborator, Mike White, also co-wrote Black’s hit School of Rock.) Without a doubt the best wrestling movie ever set at a Mexican Catholic orphanage, it features Black as a put-upon cook who yens for the ring. (The story was perhaps inspired by a Mexican wrestling priest, Fray Tormenta.) The feel of the movie is not unlike Napoleon Dynamite, and similarly straddles the line between funny and merely strange, just as the underdog Nacho character walks the line between heroic and pathetic. (He’s not exactly an instant success in the ring.) Much humor is supposed to come from Black’s accented pronunciation of phrases like “stretchy pants.” (Funny.) Then there are scenes like the one where Nacho and his wrestling partner train by, among other things, tossing a beehive. (Strange.) Did I mention that the potential romantic interest (Ana de la Reguera, who looks like Penélope Cruz’s prettier sister) is a nun? I don’t know who suggested the apparently obscure “Hombre Religioso,” recorded in 1975 by Mr. Loco, as a recurring motif in the movie, but the goofy/charming song fits right in with the Spanglish feel. Nacho Libre is like that. It’s not the best movie (and not as good as Napoleon), and if the whole scenario sounds dumb, I doubt watching it will convince you otherwise. But even its oddest moments feel organic, not studied, and it hangs together right to the end.

IMDb link

posted and rating revised 8/15/13

The Benchwarmers (*1/2)

--> --> This root-for-the-underdog baseball film is a lazily plotted compendium of physical humor geared toward 12-year-old boys, starring David Spade, Rob Schneider, and Jon Heder.

From the writing and acting talent that has already produced one other not-screened-for-critics comedy in 2006, Grandma’s Boy, comes this baseball story. To say that it strikes out would be trite, yet in keeping with the unoriginal spirit shown here. The plot is, one day a guy (Rob Schneider) decides to pick up his old mitt and gets his misfit pals (David Spade and Napoleon Dynamite’s Jon Heder) to challenge some pre-teen bullies in a tournament. Heder’s character is basically Napoleon with a lower IQ and a better haircut. Spade is basically himself with a worse haircut. Schneider is the normal one, as well as the only one who knows how to play baseball. As for the jokes, here’s a sample. Heder: “What’s steroids?” Spade: “Something that makes your peepee smaller.” To be fair, though, The Benchwarmers is more of a visual comedy, and it’s a nose-picking, bug-eating, face-farting, face-spitting, head-banging, crotch-smacking, pants-pulling, projectile vomit lover’s dream. I’m awarding this half a star extra purely on the basis that the ending was mildly surprising. I never actually laughed. As this movie taught me, it’s not nice to laugh at a loser.

IMDb link

posted 9/3/13

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

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.

IMDb link

viewed 1/13/06 at Moorestown

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.

IMDb link

written in early 1987; posted 10/3/13