With March Madness coming to a close, HBO’s release of its series Winning Time: The Rise of the Lakers Dynasty couldn’t be better timed or more anticipated. Most films about sports fail for the same reason: They turn athletics into Lifetime redemption stories drenched in sentimentality. Instead of blood and guts, audiences get melodrama. Rather than complexity, we’re served bland, archetypal heroism. The best ones claw their way out of this trap without falling into the opposite one of obsessive brutality, such as Martin Scorcese’s Raging Bull (1980). Ron Shelton’s pictures, for example, employ romantic comedy (Bull Durham, 1988), farce (The Best of Times, 1986), and black humor (Tin Cup, 1996) to win you over. In fact, Shelton succeeded where Scorcese flopped, making one of the darkest, most complex and neglected sports movies of all time with Cobb (1994) a biopic starring Tommy Lee Jones (in his greatest performance) as the hateful, haunted baseball legend.
Boston
Massachusetts
United-states
Hollywood
California
Auerbach-michael-chiklis
Michael-jordan
Claire-rothman-gaby-hoffmann
Jeannie-hadley-robinson
Jack-cooke-michael-okeefe
Kareem-abdul-jabbar
Paul-westhead