BEFORE: Sticking with basketball, moving down to the high-school level. This sports chain has been like a little warm-up for my upcoming "trip around the world" through movies - I've seen films about baseball in Oakland, San Francisco and Detroit, taken a tour of California horse tracks, NASCAR in Daytona, and football in Miami and Dallas. It's sort of appropriate, since athletes travel around all the time, right? Tonight I'm back in the heartland of Indiana. Linking from "Blue Chips", Nick Nolte was in a film called "Under Fire" with Gene Hackman (last seen in "Superman IV: The Quest For Peace") and also in "Breakfast of Champions" with Barbara Hershey.
THE PLOT: A coach with a checkered past and a local drunk train a small town high school basketball team to become a top contender for the championship.
AFTER: Well, I wanted basketball mechanics, and I sure got them in this film. Shot after shot of practice drills, which seems tedious, but I suppose they really are, so that's appropriate. The audience needs to feel the redundancy of the workouts, so the games will seem exciting by comparison. Nice trick.
I didn't realize we were going back in time tonight, to the early 1950's - back when white people played basketball. There's not a minority in sight, at least not until the state championship against the team from Indianapolis (?) which is bigger, stronger and more culturally diverse.
Most sports movies deal with cliches also, and this one doesn't disappoint there either - from the distant loner who's a superstar on the court but needs to be convinced to play, to the short but plucky point guard thrust into a potential game-winning situation. For good measure there's a bunch of small-town stereotypes like the town drunk, who happens to be the father of one of the players, given an assistant coaching job to help motivate him to stay sober.
Yeah, it's a cookie-cutter story, but it still works. And people weren't really designed to watch so many sports films in a row that follow the same formula, so I have to factor in my jadedness as a result of the last 2 weeks. I set out to discern if all sports films are essentially the same, and I kind of have my answer.
Also starring Dennis Hopper (last seen in "Cool Hand Luke"), Barbara Hershey (last seen in "Falling Down"), Sheb Wooley (last seen in "High Noon"), Fern Persons, Chelcie Ross.
RATING: 6 out of 10 layups
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