Posts Tagged ‘sport’

Invictus

Invictus

Tuesday, January 19th, 2010

Hmm… I’ve been holding onto this and a couple of other movies to write about for a week now until I had something that gave me a larger body of words to bury them under, lol, because I just really didn’t have a lot to say about them. There was no reason I would necessarily have my attention seized by a story about football uniting people over race in apartheid Africa, but I had more hope for this one than I might have otherwise because Clint Eastwood is frankly on a roll lately. I mightn’t have been personally wowed by Flags of Our Fathers and Iwo Jima but the achievement was immeasurable, and last year’s Changeling and Gran Torino both remain among my top 10 of the year.

This is as solidly built as anything Eastwood has done in the last 10 years, for sure. I just was never going to be interested in this story. I was excited for Morgan Freeman’s performance as Mandela, but if I’m absolutely honest, I even found disappointment here. Freeman is an amazing actor but he really felt lost to me here. He can do a lot of things but this movie shows he is not up to portraying real people of such magnitude. The fact that I was more impressed by Matt Damon’s performance (which is the best he’s been since The Talented Mr. Ripley) really says it all.



Field of Dreams

Field of Dreams

Tuesday, June 3rd, 2008

Yeh, I hadn’t seen this yet, so sue me :-P And I really have no excuse – never mind that it’s one of those movies that “everyone“ has seen … I’d forgotten that it also marked the debut of Gaby Hoffmann, in what would prove ultimately to be one of her biggest parts. Even the fact that this is technically a sports movie shouldn’t have deterred me from watching it so long.

Anyway, as to the sports part – I seem to recall a lot of those “what’s the best sports movie?” type polls listing this high if not at the top, in some cases exactly because it’s not all about the sport (Jerry Maguire is the same). There’s a weird moment where the screenwriter seems to make a case for it being so, when Liotta I think talks about it being all about the game, that baseball is America etc (ah, thank you IMDb: it’s James Earl Jones who says, “The one constant through all the years, Ray, has been baseball. America has rolled by like an army of steamrollers. It has been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt and erased again. But baseball has marked the time.”); but it doesn’t really work and the movie is best as a metaphor for a lot of things rather than specifically America “learning to think for itself again”.

Mostly, though, to my pleasant surprise, I found it one of the funniest movies I’ve seen – I laugh too little sometimes in movies but this one really tickled my funny bone the right way. I love Amy Madigan’s reaction to her husband basically going crazy, lol, it’s so atypical of this kind of story. There’s a corny scene where she basically tells him, “go with it if it’s what you really feel you need to do,” etc, but after that, her face is just a wonder as she takes all the strange goings on with this, “sure that makes sense” bemusement. I love when she turns a whole community meeting around to being against censorship early on in the movie, rushing out into the hallway energised giggling, “It’s like the Sixties again!” which connects to a moment with the similarly exuberant James Earl Jones, when he first meets Costner and says with mock enthusiasm, “You’re from the Sixties!” then proceeds to chase him out the room with an ancient bug sprayer yelling, “Go back where you came from!” LOL.

If there’s one moment it really falls down it’s the moment where Hoffmann gets caught in a tussle between Costner and his brother-in-law and is literally dropped off the back of the bleachers, lol. It shouldn’t be funny, but frankly it is, and it’s such an awful set-up for the plot-point that follows that it threatens to magnify and highlight all the other contrivances of the screenplay that would otherwise be completely excusable.

Overall, however, it’s as wonderful as I’d heard; moreso, in fact, for the humour. It bears that rare wonder, a James Horner score that doesn’t sound like a James Horner score, Hoffmann is adorable, and James Earl Jones and Amy Madigan are simply priceless.



Blades of Glory [2007]

Blades of Glory [2007]

Saturday, May 10th, 2008

“Scott, I seem to have wet my pants.”

What can be said about one of the new strain of generic Will Ferrell comedies? I truly thought that this would be the one where I broke and finally found him not only unfunny but intolerably lazy, but in the end it just works and I was laughing my head off just about every time I chose to dip in (that’s right, it’s the kind of movie that makes perfect background to just about anything).

Both Jon Heder and Will Ferrell do just about the exact thing they’ve done before but somehow they get away with it yet again. I thought Heder was surprisingly good in School for Scoundrels and his Napoleon Dynamite voice was perfect for his character in Surf’s Up too – here, for the first half-hour I found it a little niggling but ultimately it’s the visual humour that takes over – I think when Heder slides across a room belly down on ice is where I finally caved in and stopped looking for problems. But I do hope he does something a little different after this, if he’s even able.

The ending (which I won’t even begin to describe except it bears a resemblance to that ending to Grease I’ve always hated) actually almost places it instantaneously into my special cheesy faves collection – it’s certainly a possible destiny for the movie if I watch it again. For now, even hours after watching it I can’t really remember exactly why I was laughing so much and so frequently – it’s a very disposable movie – but I do know I liked it.



The Bad News Bears Go to Japan

The Bad News Bears Go to Japan

Saturday, February 9th, 2008

Again, we should really count ourselves lucky these sequels were made in the Seventies ‘cos the Eighties would’ve left us with genuine horrors. And again … why no girls? How can writer Bill Lancaster have stayed true to the spirit of the original film two times over yet missed completely one of its most unique and memorable components? I’m sure I’m not just being my cutie-obsessed self on this, lol – I really think they would’ve been 10 times the sequels they are with another Amanda Whurlitzer type in the mix to keep the boys in check. Anyway, this one’s even more forgettable than the first sequel, more an oddity being as it stars Tony Curtis than anything else.



The Bad News Bears in Breaking Training

The Bad News Bears in Breaking Training

Saturday, February 9th, 2008

I know, let’s make a sequel to The Bad News Bears, without Tatum, without Matthau … heck, let’s take out most of the baseball for good measure too! lol. Okay, cynical alert. And of course the major emptiness on the girl front is my primary reason for disliking this sequel. But overall, they’ve gotta be given kudos for having the balls to try exactly what I just described. The fact is, this movie just doesn’t work – it simply lacks the spark of the original – but it’s not through lack of trying, and more a case of pure rotten luck. The kids still ring unbelievably true; the father-son story is nothing compared to Tatum and Matthau but it is surprisingly touching in its own way; And, I’ve gotta say: for a sports movie, it’s still pretty shockingly stirring for me, certainly still among the most watchable of sports movies anyway. I think we should probably just be thankful they didn’t wait till the Eighties and video to make these.



The Bad News Bears [1976]

The Bad News Bears [1976]

Thursday, February 7th, 2008

It’s a massive credit to this film that I didn’t spend the first half hour itching, “where’s Tatum?!?” lol … sure, there was some of that, but really this is one of the best sports movies I’ve seen even without her. It has such a great, real, consistent feel to it, reminding me of the very few occasions when I was little where there’d be a great outdoor, hot summer day sports event I was in some way involved with that I actually enjoyed.

That’s not to say the screen doesn’t spark alight the moment O’Neal makes an appearance. They really missed a trick not casting Annasophia Robb in this role in the remake, I was instantly reminded of the quirky confidence of Robb in Winn-Dixie, Terabithia etc, (that crinkly nose, O’Neal writes about in her autobiography I’m reading right now how her dad told her every time she smiled she looked like she smelled something funny; what he should’ve added was that though that’s sort of true, it’s an adorable look :) ) While I’m on the subject of cuties, it’s worth mentioning Jackie Earle Haley who was surprisingly quite beautiful way back when. Him and O’Neal make quite the onscreen couple without even interacting much at all, lol. I love the costumes on Tatum outside of the uniform too :) And that front and back shot of her walking away from Matthau in tears is an emotional high I never in a million years expected to find in this movie. It’s one of those scenes that actually means even more when you know something of the actor’s real life backstory – for her to put herself in a scene where a father figure slings beer in her face like that after her upbringing is really something. I know, stuff like that shouldn’t affect one’s judgment of a film … but sometimes, you just can’t help it.

It even made me want to check out the remake again – I think perhaps Richard Linklater was attempting something there I didn’t give him credit for ‘cos I hadn’t seen this yet … like simply showing how child protection*, health & safety and political correctness laws have poisoned the world so much you just can’t make a movie like this anymore. Which makes this one all the more special.

* Just in case that sounds to anyone like I don’t care about child protection – that’s not what I mean, but if your eyes are open you’ll know what I do mean by the fact that some parts of that thought train have gone way off the tracks.



Remember the Titans

Remember the Titans

Wednesday, January 23rd, 2008

As a sports movie, this was obviously gonna be a hard sell for me – its sole achievement threatening to be that it makes Friday Night Lights seem even more pointless. But when I love a movie as much as I love Uptown Girls, I don’t let the subject matter get in the way of catching up on the director’s other work.

The complete lack of any conflict or drama in the movie’s first half hour doesn’t help. This is a movie about a mixed race school football team, and the set-up is that they put this team together and everyone is pretty much fine about it. Luckily there’s an “ah-ha” moment around 35-40 minutes, though, where they enter “the real world” and things get tough – but it’s Disney, so, not that tough.

It’s watchable. But knowing me I’m probably only being nice ‘cos Hayden Panettiere (who it took me a while to recognise but I got there eventually – I guess I just always figured she was older than she is in Heroes lol) is cleverly planted in just about every other scene – her football crazy daughter of one of the coaches is about as funky as the rock ballerina girls in Uptown Girls and a little of a lot of cuteness like that (especially when it’s unexpected as it was to me here) goes a long way in a movie like this, lol. I’m sorry but I laughed my ass off at the “nanana, hey hey hey, goodbye” ending :P That tops Shrek the 3rd‘s use of “Live and Let Die” for most inappropriate funeral scene ever, lol.



Cool Runnings

Cool Runnings

Friday, December 14th, 2007

Well I can’t believe I just teared up while a Classic Eighties Movie Slow ClapTM was going on in the background :P

It somehow felt like it was finally time for me to watch this – a recent Channel 4 thing about the best family films brought it to the surface, and I’ve been noticing a lot of people on Facebook listing it as a fave – but within minutes I was questioning if that was a good idea. There’s an old me that would have been far from impressed with this movie for the exact same reason the me of now ultimately fell for it today. This is guilty of just about every cliché in the book of late-80s and early-90s cinema. It pulls every faux-pas that practically threatened to destroy the artform during that period. But, somehow, it works.

It didn’t make me laugh at loud much at all compared to some. But there’s just something else under it all – perhaps highlighted by the Dark Moment (let’s use the proper template terms here, it couldn’t be more by the book I swear) … which is actually really dark, I mean for a movie that seems so silly and light from the outside that crash is nasty – it’s perhaps the fact that it does follow the old screenplay paradigms and wot-not so to the letter. I don’t know. All I know is, I wasn’t bored, I laughed a little, and I was embarrassingly moved by those final moments.