BEFORE: Spike Lee carries over again from "Venus and Serena" and this is the reason why I had to break up the tennis-based docs, because today's film is almost three hours long, so I had to move it to a night when I had a bit more time (not working at the theater) and more time to sleep in the next morning. So it kind of had to be moved from a Tuesday night to a Wednesday night. This also moves another long documentary coming up from a Thursday night to a Friday night - same deal, it moves to a night I'm not working, followed by a morning where I can sleep in. Spike Lee appeared VERY briefly in "Venus and Serena", he was just captured in archive footage, talking to Richard Williams at one of their matches. But that counts.
FOLLOW-UP TO: "Hustle" (Movie #4,307)
THE PLOT: A film following the lives of two inner-city Chicago boys who struggle to become college basketball players on the road to going professional.
AFTER: What I'll probably be saying a lot this is week is "Eh, not really my thing..." because I'm not that into the sports scene. I followed the Mets for a while, and the Red Sox for a while longer after that, but tennis and basketball, not so much. I'm about two weeks late for March Madness, I know, but the bracket competition WE watched this March was on the Food Network, which was Tournament of Champions IV. (32 chefs compete, the next round is 16, then 8, and so on down to 1)
To say that "Hoop Dreams" has been on my list for a while would be an understatement - since it's also on that list of "1,001 Movies to Watch Before You Die", and I'm always looking to cross another film off that list (I've seen 439 of them now) so when I see a chance to watch another one, I kind of have to take it. The problem I have now is that so many of the films left that I have NOT seen are either from the black & white era (and I can't dub films from TCM to DVD any more) or they're foreign films, or in some cases, both. So it's slow progress for me, I cross off MAYBE one or two films a year from that list these days. But I'd enjoy newer Hollywood fare over old boring silent films anyway, so there's that.
BUT, when I saw that TCM was going to be running "Hoop Dreams" this year as part of their "31 Days of Oscar" programming, I had to record it. I think it's also on HBO Max, but it's more convenient for me to watch something from my DVR instead of my computer, because then I can sit in the recliner and fall asleep right after - and with a running time of nearly three hours, I figured, quite correctly, that would work with my weird-ass schedule. The lucky part came when I already had a framework for what docs I wanted to watch this year, and "Hoop Dreams" just slid right in between other sports films with Spike Lee in them.
The film follows two high-school students, William Gates and Arthur Agee, both basketball players from inner-city Chicago who get recruited to attend St. Joseph High School, in Westchester, Illinois, which is a mostly white suburb. However, it's also the school that NBA star Isiah Thomas played for, and the school's coach, Gene Pingatore, was credited for coaching Thomas and running an outstanding competitive basketball program. I'm not sure how the filmmakers chose just two students to follow, perhaps they felt that the two recruits from the city, the ones who had to commute to school 90 minutes each way would make for the best story, as they were both following in Thomas' footsteps.
Never meet your heroes, they say, though Agee clearly lit up when Thomas came to speak at the school, in many ways it was downhill from there. The film follows the ups and downs of Agee and Gates' academic and athletic pursuits. While Agee moved up four reading levels after starting at St. Joseph, before long he was writing very basic reports for class and then his family fell behind in paying the tuition, perhaps because of his father's drug problem. Gates, meanwhile, found a sponsor in an alumnus of the school who paid his tuition, but then he struggled to get an acceptable score on the ACT exams. Gates made the St. Joseph varsity team in his freshman year, while Agee was forced to transfer to another school and played basketball there in his sophomore year.
Their troubles continued in junior year as Gates suffered a knee injury, and Agee's father left the family, forcing them to go on welfare - but he later returned and Agee's mother earned her nursing degree. Gates also got courted by several prominent colleges, and signed with Marquette, which offered him free tuition, even if his knee didn't get better. Then in senior year Gates was basically benched, while Agee took his public high school team to the semi-finals of the state championship. You kind of get the feeling that maybe one of these teens will be successful, but their fates are so in flux that it's impossible to predict which one it will be. (I'll admit I just checked Wiki to see if either one ever made it into the NBA. No spoilers here.)
The big controversy back in the day was that both Siskel and Ebert LOVED this film, but it didn't get nominated for Best Documentary at the Academy Awards. An investigation into the process revealed that the nominating committee for that category did not consist of documentary filmmakers, and on the day when all the films were screened for the committee, time was so tight that they could not POSSIBLY watch all the eligible films together in the time allotted - so the voters were given flashlights, and if a majority of the committee found a film boring and waved their flashlights, the screening was stopped and they all moved on to the next film. The scandal resulted in changes being made to the nomination process, future voting was done by Academy members who had more experience in the documentary field, and also, members watched as many of the films as possible, but on their own time, not in one big screening room where films could be vetoed if the first few minutes were deemed boring.
And hey, if you think a nearly three-hour film is too long, bear in mind the filmmakers here had about 250 hours of footage after five years of filmming, and the first cut of the film was 10 hours long, which then got trimmed down to six hours - but the editing itself took about three years. The effort paid off after "Hoop Dreams" won the Sundance Festival's Audience Award for Best Documentary in 1994, which led to a distribution deal with New Line. And in addition to being on that list of 1,001 Movies to See Before You Die, it's also on the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress. All that kind of makes me feel guilty for saying, "Eh, it's not really my thing..." but that's still where we find ourselves.
Also starring William Gates, Arthur Agee, Emma Gates, Curtis Gates, Sheila Agee, Arthur "Bo" Agee, Earl Smith, Gene Pingatore, Isiah Thomas, Marlyn Hopewell, Bill Gleason, Marjorie Heard, Luther Bedford, Aretha Mitchell, Catherine Mines, Alvin Bibbs, Willie Gates, Kevin O'Neill, Bobby Knight, Joey Meyer, Frank DuBois, Bo Ellis, Bob Gibbons, Stan Wilson, Mike Krzyzewski (last seen in "Blue Chips"), Rick Pitino (ditto), Dick Vitale (ditto), Jalen Rose, John Thompson, Chris Webber, narrated by Steve James (last seen in "Life Itself").
RATING: 4 out of 10 letters of intent
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