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Gridiron Gang movie

  • Author: admin
  • Filed under: Drama, Sport
  • Date: Feb 21,2008

Wanna know why sports movies are criticized for being too cliché? Because sports, as a whole, are too cliché. We’ve been trained to root for the underdog, though it’s conventional when that come-from-behind victory is shown on screen. Teams are expected to win games on last-play drives. How is a filmmaker supposed to wring suspense from such a scenario when it happens every night on SportsCenter?

For a sports film to succeed on its own terms, audiences must be able to look beyond the requisite storytelling crutches that bolster this limited genre and find something else worth discussing. In Gridiron Gang, that extra something else is heart, which this flick has in spades.

Gang follows the biographical story of Sean Porter to the letter – footage of the real coach played alongside the end credits shows him barking actual lines we heard minutes before in the film. Charismatically intimidating Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson personifies Porter, a juvenile correctional facilities counselor who uses football as a means to unite his divided charges.

Gang plays as a junior varsity Longest Yard, with hardened teenage criminals learning to shelve their street-bred differences and play together as a team. It shows these kids at rock bottom so we can best appreciate how Porter and his program brings them back up.

Instead of one game against the guards, these kids shoulder a full season against polished private squads. Rock wears many hats both on the field and off – counselor, coach, bouncer, mentor, friend – and each one fits him like a glove. The wrestler continues to find projects that utilize his physical assets, as well as his rugged charm.

The underdog formula gets the better of director Phil Joanou (State of Grace), who pushes our buttons hard but manages to motivate without fully manipulating. He could stand to trust his audience more than he does. Most can figure when to stand and cheer without obvious cues from Trevor Rabin’s desperate score. Also, Joanou adores slow-motion photography for his in-game shots. Not one or two shots, but every single frame of football action. If these sequences were played at full speed, Gang would be 30 minutes shorter, and the reduction in running time would help.

As it stands, the gritty Gang delivers last-second heroics, surprising amounts of humor, and the beating heart of an unexpected champion. Let’s put it into football terms. This motivational cheerer isn’t a flashy wide receiver or a star quarterback. It’s the stocky, reliable running back who drops his shoulder, breaks a few tackles, and picks up tough yards on the way to a moral victory.

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Goal movie

  • Author: admin
  • Filed under: Drama, Sport
  • Date: Feb 20,2008

Somewhere in Hollywood there is a computer program, and within that program is the inspirational sports drama template. All of these movies are exactly the same, and their numbers are legion: Rocky, Breaking Away, The Rookie, Miracle, Glory Road, The Greatest Game Ever Played, and on and on and on, up until the latest, Goal! The Dream Begins. The sports change, but they all chart the same trajectory through the trials and triumphs of an underdog who gets a shot at realizing a seemingly unattainable dream, and they are all designed to leave the audience simultaneously cheering and moved to tears. The clichйs piled upon clichйs would be disgusting if it wasn’t for one thing: More often than not, these films are effective. They may be paradigms of audience manipulation, but they get the job done, pulling on the heartstrings of even those who normally loathe sports. In this aspect, Goal! is no exception, utterly predictable from the first frame, but nevertheless, a real crowd pleaser.

Santiago Munez (Kuno Becker) is an undocumented alien living in Los Angeles, brought into the States from Mexico by his family when he was 10. Now 20, he works two jobs, in the kitchen of a Chinese restaurant and on his father Hernan’s (Tony Plana) gardening crew. But he is only really alive when he is on the soccer field. If he has a dream, it is to play the game he loves, but he only plays in a local league, so that is unrealistic. Aspiring to a better life, in any event, puts him at odds with his defeatist father who believes there are two kinds of people: those who live in big house and those who tend to the people in the big houses. In Hernan’s view, the Munezes firmly belong in the second category, and it’s foolish to expect more.

Hernan may be a realist, but when Glen Foy (Stephen Dillane), a former English footballer visiting L.A., happens to catch Santiago in action, he recognizes superior talent when he sees it. Foy used to be player, and then a scout, but now he’s a mechanic, so his connections with his old team, Newcastle United, are shaky at best. But Santiago puts his faith in his new friend and shows up on his doorstep. Eventually, he does get his tryout with the team, and from their the usual ensues: triumph, failure, triumph, failure, falling in with the wrong crowd (represented by Alessandro Nivola’s Gavin Harris, the team’s star player and resident bleached blond bad boy), meeting a girl (Anna Friel as down-to-earth nurse Roz), more failure, more triumph, and so on. And, of course, the kid who is used to being the star has to learn how to be a team player and pass the ball.

One thing that is interesting is the way the role of parents seems to be evolving in these sports dramas. Hernan is a real wet blanket, but then so was Arthur Ouimet (Elias Koteas), another immigrant dad trying to stifle his son in The Greatest Game Ever Played, and so is Tanya (Angela Bassett), the mother who discourages her daughter in the current spelling-bee drama, Akeelah and the Bee (which may not technically be a sports movie, but is structured like one). A heavy is always a useful foil, of course, but does Mom or Dad have to be the one to be such a jerk? It is curious, too, in that the movies that employ this angle all seem to be the ones aimed most squarely at the family audience. What message exactly are these films trying to impart?

But that’s the only real semi-variation on the genre that Goal! employs. Luckily, Danny Cannon, whose normal beat is television’s CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, is a capable director, striking a fine balance between melodrama and the adrenalin-pumped antics on the field. And it certainly doesn’t hurt that Santiago is so completely decent, and that relative newcomer Becker, the actor who plays him, is so dreamy. Add to this Nivola’s considerable charm as the scoundrel with the huge heart, and all in all you have a fine, if undemanding, time at the movies. Let’s hope so: Goal! 2: Living the Dream has already been shot, and Goal! 3 is in pre-production. Goal!, it’s not just an appealing sports clichй, it’s a franchise.

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Goal II- Living the Dream movie

  • Author: admin
  • Filed under: Drama, Sport
  • Date: Feb 20,2008

The truth about footie is that young lads get paid silly money in the top European leagues and are expected to obey their authoritarian leaders, who wear expensive suits, scowl a lot and call themselves Head Coach, or Manager. Also, they must behave in a responsible manner, as regards drugs, drink and dames – or else. Or else, what? There isn’t a story.

Goal! 2 sets an excellent example to all those exploitative movies that use taut tummies, testosterone and the killer instinct to indulge in designer sex and acts of gratuitous violence, fuelled by vodka and cocaine. For the teenage Mexican striker, bought from Newcastle United by Real Madrid, doing a George Best and partying till the break of dawn is so Sixties as to be irrelevant.
Copy picture

Jaume Collet-Serra’s film avoids obvious emotional hooks, although in football that is difficult, because critical championship games are, by their very nature, passionate – someone has to kick the winning goal. Is it going to be your boy, brought on from the bench for the last five minutes, or David Beckham?

Santiago (Santi) Munez (Kuno Becker) cares about his game, his fiancée Roz (Anna Friel) and making the Spanish transfer a success. He even retains his Geordie agent (Stephen Dillane), whose day job is fixing cars at the garage. For Santi, Madrid is not so much out of this world as off the planet. The press coverage, the media interest, the invitations, the fascination from fans and females alike is intoxicating, not that he drinks, not yet.

Certain things are inevitable. Roz, a nurse, is not going to fit in with the après match crowd. She finds herself rattling around the minimalist mansion Santi bought outside Madrid, while he spends days away training. That’s just the start. There is a sub plot, waiting to break the surface, concerning his mother (Elizabeth Pena), who abandoned the family when Santi was a child and now runs a bar with her Spanish husband in a working-class area of the city.

The football is well handled, although every locker room scene has to have Beckham with his top off – to admire the tattoos? The treatment of Santi by the manager (Rutger Hauer) is realistic and his friendship with Gavin Harris (Alessandro Nivola), an English striker, who is older and desperately in need of goals to keep his place on the team, feels right, if a little too considerate.

As sequels go, this stands proud, aided by an intelligent script and a mature, sensitive performance from Becker.

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Glory Road movie

  • Author: admin
  • Filed under: Drama, Sport
  • Date: Feb 20,2008

Saccharine sporting films are as typical as a tantrum from Terrell Owens. And viewers have sat in these bleachers before: The uplifting “true” tale about underdog athletes who beat overwhelming odds to earn applause and accolades (”Coach Carter,” “Remember the Titans,” “Hoosiers” and so on). Usually there’s a strict but sincere coach involved, and a handful of inspirational players with family problems, health problems, financial problems or some combination thereof.

“Glory Road” trips over all the same hurdles. Still, in a day and age that has violent torture flicks such as “Hostel” and “Wolf Creek” gobbling up movie-goers’ box-office bucks, it’s refreshing to see a film that stresses cooperation, effort and racial equality over shock value.

In 1966, Texas Western University hired high-school girls’ basketball coach Don Haskins (Josh Lucas) to take over its floundering NCAA program. Haskins defied boosters and bigotry by recruiting seven black players, five of whom would eventually carry Texas Western to a historic defeat of the all-white Kentucky team in the NCAA tournament.

The players — Bobby Joe Hill (Derek Luke), David Lattin (Schin A. S. Kerr), Willie Worsley (Sam Jones III), Harry Flournoy Jr. (Mechad Brooks), Orsten Artis (Alphonso McAuley), Willie Cager (Damaine Radcliff) and Nevil Shed (Al Shearer) — are all depicted as affable and passionate young men who suffered through epithets, vandalism and even assault to reach the “Glory Road.”

The screenplay feels like an exercise for beginning writers, rehashing familiar scenarios rather than breaking new ground. Dialogue is stale and the on-court action is well choreographed but conventional. The characters, though, are nicely fleshed-out, thanks in part to the performances of Lucas and the primary cast. Luke and Radcliff, in particular, set themselves apart with sympathetic and heartfelt portrayals.

Character development is terrific. Hill, Cager and the rest arrive in Texas wide-eyed and eager, like naпve kindergartners on the first day of school. They crack jokes and engage the locals with a joie de vivre that’s enviable. Their disillusion fades as prejudice and discrimination become a painful reality, leading to abuses that would sideline the average person permanently. But these seven were far from average.

The championship game drags on a bit, although exciting steals and slam dunks occasionally interrupt lull time. And some of the most interesting moments take place during the final credits when the real-life players reflect on the past.

“Glory” won’t find a home in the cinematic hall of fame, but the importance of equality and the significance of history are always worth a $9 theater ticket.

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The Game Plan movie

As an actor, Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson may have limited range, but he oozes charm. Disney should thank its lucky stars for that, for without his appeal The Game Plan would be merely the latest in a decades-long line of amiable, but mediocre and predictable family movies that the studio churns out like so many sausages. The Rock’s sparkling presence elevates the indifferent material into a pleasant, occasionally even endearing comedy.

The actor plays Joe Kingman, star quarterback for the Boston Rebels football team, who has just led his teams into the play-offs. He is talented, but selfish, the type of player who runs with the ball instead of passing to an open wide receiver. He is affable, but arrogant, the kind of guy who habitually talks about himself in the third person and whose luxury apartment is basically a shrine to himself and this idol, Elvis Presley. And like Elvis, his nickname is “The King.” He’s a player whose taste runs to supermodels and he likes making fun of teammate Travis Sanders (Morris Chestnut), a happily married dad, joking that Travis has surrendered his “man card” to marriage and family life.

But all that is before eight-year-old Peyton (Madison Pettis) shows up on his doorstep with suitcases in tow, announcing that she is the daughter that his ex-wife neglected to tell him she was pregnant with when the couple divorced. Joe knows nothing about children, even less about little girls with a passion for ballet and rhinestones, although next to his agent Stella Peck (Kyra Sedgwick in the role normally assigned to the wicked stepmother), he looks like the world’s number one dad even if he does do things like leaving her behind in a bar.

The man who insists, “Football is my life,” begins his team’s run for the championship, his first ever if they get there and win. At the same time, he is learning how to be a father, a rocky proposition that requires him to learn how to share and don tights to perform with Peyton’s ballet class—the parental involvement demanded by dance teacher Monique Vasquez (Roselyn Sanchez), a woman singularly unimpressed by both his career and parenting skills (making her the obvious choice for a love interest in the Disney world view).

When they first meet, Peyton asks Joe a series of questions as a sort of crash course in getting to know her dad. One of the things she wants to know is what had been the happiest day of his life. They are interrupted before he can answer her, but the question lingers over the film, the answer obvious to everyone but Joe until the final scenes. This is not a movie designed to surprise, but as comfort food, it goes down pleasantly enough until the final credits roll. And director Andy Fickman gets credit for allowing The Rock to indulge his real-life Elvis fixation. Hunk-a, hunk-a, burning love, indeed.

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The Game of Their Lives movie

In the unabashed little fan-oriented film The Game of Their Lives (based, as such movies always are, on a real story), a motley group of athletes find common cause and team pride in representing the U.S. of A. against opponents from the smug country that dominates their sport. And against all odds, on unfamiliar soil, the Americans…well, guess. Only this time the sport is soccer, the setting is an immigrant enclave of St. Louis in 1950, the supercilious enemy is England (embodied by Gavin Rossdale), and many of the well-mannered young men are recent GIs who would never use the word ”miracle” loosely. (The ridiculously good-looking cast of footballers includes Wes Bentley, Gerard Butler, and Richard Jenik.)

Coaching from the same playbook with which they made Rudy and Hoosiers, director David Anspaugh and screenwriter Angelo Pizzo create a reverent fable of such soothing proportions that it would be churlish to ask if America ever really looked like that — or sounded like that, either: As an old sportswriter, Patrick Stewart tries out an accent left over by the Pepperidge Farm cookie man.

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Fighting Tommy Riley movie

  • Author: admin
  • Filed under: Drama, Sport
  • Date: Feb 15,2008

As you sit down to watch Fighting Tommy Riley, you may be thinking that the world doesn’t need another boxing drama, and the first few minutes of the film, which introduce us to a down-on-his-luck boxer and a down-on-his-luck trainer, won’t dissuade you of that notion. But then the movie starts to float like a butterfly and, more important, sting like a bee, and you realize that there’s more going on here than stale Rocky tropes.

Young Tommy (J.P. Davis) suffered a traumatic loss at the 1999 Olympic Trials, and he hasn’t been the same since. Now he fights for a few bucks here and there at seedy L.A. gyms. It’s at one such gym where he catches the eyes of the unlikely duo of Marty (Eddie Jones) and Diane (Diane Tayler). Marty, the gone-to-seed trainer, is a hugely obese high school teacher who suffers from near-crippling depression. Diane is a former student of his who has set up a boxing promotion business to give him something to live for. When they spot Tommy, they know they’ve found their next Great White Hope.

Tommy is eager to be taken under Marty’s wing — anything to escape from his seedy basement apartment and dead-end day job. They have some immediate success together, and plans are quickly made to stage a rematch with the boxer who beat Tommy back in 1999.

And then the cinematic rope-a-dope begins. Extremely subtle clues — glances, body language, quick comments — make you realize that Marty has a far more complicated history than he has explained to Tommy, and when Marty suggests that the best way to train for the fight is for him and Tommy to go — alone — up to his isolated mountain cabin for a month, you immediately think, “Uh, that may not be such a good idea, Tommy.”

Sure enough, Marty couldn’t be happier when he has Tommy all to himself (Tommy’s pesky girlfriend is now hundreds of miles away), and with each rubdown, the sexual tension builds until an explosion becomes inevitable.

There are more fight scenes, of course, because this is a boxing movie, but things are never quite the same between the tortured Marty and the terribly confused and hurt Tommy again. Still, Tommy doesn’t want to abandon Marty when a big-time promoter comes calling, and it’s that test of loyalty that propels the second half of the film along.

Fighting Tommy Riley was a labor of love for Davis, who wrote the script, found the money, and must have done about a million sit-ups and pull-ups to make the movie happen. His Tommy is both more articulate and sharp than, say, Rocky, but strangely naïve at the same time. He’s an interesting character. Jones has many great moments, too. His toughest challenge is to convey the torture of depression without going over the top, and he does it well.

You may come to Fighting Tommy Riley for the boxing, but you’ll find much more to ponder than left jabs and right hooks. Like most good boxing flicks, it’s a psychological study, too. After all, you gotta wonder why anyone ever steps into that ring.

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