Former Lakers executive Jerry West has demanded a retraction and an apology for what he called "a baseless and malicious assault" on his character in the HBO series "Winning Time."
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.