Winning Time: The Rise of the Lakers Dynasty Season 2 Review: Still a Good Game collider.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from collider.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Contributing reviewer Jack Calabrese is back with his take on the latest episodes of HBO s "Winning Time." Although episodes seven and eight near a climax, there isn t a clear direction
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.
Magic Johnson is a rookie, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar the veteran and big-living owner Jerry Buss the ringleader with a glitzy 1979-80 Los Angeles as a backdrop.