The Mighty Macs

Posted on October 20, 2011 at 6:44 pm

B+

Lowest Recommended Age:	4th - 6th Grades
MPAA Rating:	G
Profanity:	None
Alcohol/ Drugs:	None
Violence/ Scariness:	Some mild marital tension and disagreements in the workplace, a girl is sad after a break-up
Diversity Issues:	A theme of the movie
Date Released to Theaters:	October 21, 2011
Amazon.com ASIN:	B004OBNMMO

Basketball coach Cathy Rush (Carla Gugino) arrived at tiny Immaculata College in 1972, at just the right moment for her, for the team, and for the game. Restrictive rules that had “protected” female players from a full-court game had just been revised. For the first time, there was going to be a national championship for the women’s teams. And while people were still asking back then, “If she is married, why is she working?” that question would soon be considered inappropriate and ultimately almost unfathomable.

That context and an excellent cast gives this more heft than the typical based-on-a-true-story saga of the underdog team that became national champions. The always-excellent Gugino, in a series of wonderful 1970’s outfits, shows us Rush’s sense of purpose, even when she faces challenges like a Mother Superior (Ellen Burstyn) who is horrified to think that her girls might be “athletes” and a husband who cannot understand why she is there. Her devotion to the girls as people as well as players is nicely shown. And is is good to see the nuns treated respectfully, not made into caricatures or made to seem stuffy, quaint, or cute. They are portrayed as people, too. We are reminded of their sense of purpose when Rush asks the Mother Superior for equipment and uniforms. The Mother Superior says she is welcome to anything she has and then shows the coach her small, spare, room with little more than a cot and a rosary.

Marley Shelton plays Sister Sunday, a young nun struggling with her calling who becomes the assistant coach. Her sweetness and sincerity are a good complement to the coach’s flinty determination. In a scene where they go to a bar in civilian clothes, Shelton shows us how the sister’s faith supports her strength and integrity.

Rush had no coaching experience. The team had just one ball and the gym had burned down. She was the only one who applied for the job and she was paid $450 for the entire season. She might have thought of it at first as “something to keep me busy” while her husband was on the road as an NBA referee, or “a perfect place for someone who was not ready to assume her role in society,” but she learned that her role in society was exactly where she was. Her most important contribution is shown by the updates at the end. She did not just coach a team of champions. She created a new generation of coaches who took what she taught them to the first women athletes to have the opportunities created by Title IX.

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Interview: Coach Cathy Rush of ‘The Mighty Macs’

Posted on October 19, 2011 at 8:00 am

Coach Cathy Rush arrived at tiny Immaculata College at a moment when there were big changes in women’s basketball. The rules were changed to allow women for the first time to play the all-out game by the same rules as the men. And for the first time there was a national championship. Coach Rush took her team to the national title for three of the first four years. And this week, a movie based on her story is opening. It is called “The Mighty Macs.”

I was delighted to get a chance to speak to Coach Rush about her experiences at Immaculata and what she is doing now.

You must be very excited about the movie!

The excitement is really building as we approach the premiere. I’ve been traveling around doing pre-release screenings and we’ve had standing ovations. We showed it in New York and they were ecstatic.

What was the rule change that was so important in the early 70’s?

This goes back to the 1930’s when my mother was playing basketball. They didn’t think women could run up and down the court more than once or twice so there were three players on one side and three on the other and you never went full court. You were not allowed to cross half-court. One group of three would shoot and the other side was just defense.

Because women were too frail?

Absolutely! The Olympics didn’t have a marathon for women until the 90’s. And then people realized women were capable of more. In the 60’s it had morphed into a huge scoring game where it was too easy to score. One player in Iowa was averaging 58 points a game. It was too easy to score when you were playing three on three?

Did you have a nun as an assistant coach as happens in the movie?

That is actually not true but part of the Immaculata story could never be repeated because of the community that was there and was so important. The Mother Superior was not really with us in the beginning so the assistant coach character was the embodiment of all the nuns who loved us and prayed for us and did extraordinary things to support us. Even after we started winning there was some controversy about whether Immaculata should be known as a jock school. Everyone had to wear skirts to class and the dining hall — it was a different era.

Wasn’t it a challenge that you did not have a chance to recruit talented high school players?

Whoever showed up on your college campus was who you used. Coincidentally — we’ve often thrown around the idea of Divine Intervention — Theresa Shank Grentz was intending to go to Mount St. Mary’s. Her family home burned down and the family basically got out with what they had on. She didn’t have money or clothes. So she ended up commuting to Immaculata and was one of our strongest players. Because there were no scholarships we had nothing to offer players except the chance to be a part of the program. I did start recruiting later on and found Mary Ann Crawford Stanley who was fabulous. So we decided not to leave in fate’s hand and recruit some players but all we could offer them was a good education and a good program.

I think it is a testament to your vision and leadership that so many of your players became coaches — even more than that they became champions. What inspired them to follow in your footsteps that way?

Their experience at Immaculata, certainly, but also Title IX had just come in and major universities realized they had to find coaches and provide a little equality, well, not a whole lot but a little. So these people went right into Division 1 jobs. Part of it was the opportunity that they had. Teresa was a biology-chem major and I asked how that prepared her to coach and she said she should have been a Psych major. We’ve also had a bunch of doctors and other amazing women. They came to Immaculata for an education first.

You had some unusual drills in the movie — were those things you really did?

We did a lot of stuff. I did bring in boys to compete against. We had 11 kids on the team and when we went from the first five to the second five the competition was not at good, so we brought in the boys. I was blessed to be in the Philadelphia area where there were great men’s coaches who knew the 5-member game and they were kind enough to let me see all of that and put it into our own system so I was very, very lucky.

What is important for a coach to know?

Coaching is really teaching. We’re all teachers of some kind — parents are teachers, too. The players who became coaches do not coach like me; they are all smart enough to coach within the framework of their personality. I was not a screamer. I didn’t have to yell to get across what we needed to do. Being so young, I had kind who were two and three years younger than me but there was no question of my authority. I was Mrs. Rush or Coach. People need to lead by example.

The movie makes it clear how much some things have changed since the 1970’s.

I was a 60’s woman and not the Berkeley 60’s. I was from a small town and went to a conservative college and then coached at an even more conservative college. It was a different time. My life plan at that time was to get married, teach for three years, and have a family and never work again. When I say that to kids today, they do not understand it. But in those days people had different expectations for their sons than their daughters.

What are you doing these days?

I have a girls’ basketball camp. This is our 41st year, our biggest year ever, over 9000 kids in camp. My youngest son runs the business and every now and then I come in and tell him what he’s doing wrong .

You’re still coaching!

That’s right!

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Behind the Scenes Sports The Real Story

Real Steel

Posted on October 6, 2011 at 6:57 pm

Lowest Recommended Age:	Middle School
MPAA Rating:	Rated PG-13 for some violence, intense action, and brief language
Profanity:	Brief strong language
Alcohol/ Drugs:	Drinking
Violence/ Scariness:	Human and robot violence, character badly beaten
Diversity Issues:	None
Date Released to Theaters:	October 7, 2011
Date Released to DVD:	January 24, 2012
Amazon.com ASIN:	B004A8ZWW4

The robot has the heart and the human has to learn to feel again in this unabashedly cheesy but irresistible fairy tale about a father, a son, and robots who bash the heck out of each other in a boxing ring.

Charlie (Hugh Jackman) was a boxer until human boxing was abandoned some time in the near future. Now enormous rock ’em sock ’em robots get in a ring and fight to total mechanical destruction. It is like something between trial by combat, a computer game, a cockfight, and a demolition derby. Now Charlie drives around from one skeezy venue to another, promoting whatever bucket of bolts he can get to stand up and throw a punch. When his robot loses a match because Charlie was distracted by a pretty blond, he loses everything. He actually loses more than everything because he bet more than he had.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ei5l3r1dV4I

He gets an opportunity to try again when a former girlfriend dies and he is left with their son Max (Dakota Goyo), with whom he has had no relationship. The boy’s wealthy aunt on his mother’s side (Hope Davis) wants to adopt him. Charlie agrees to sign over the boy in exchange for enough money to buy a new robot. It means keeping Max for the summer, so the aunt’s husband can take the child-free vacation trip he has been planning. Charlie planned to dump Max on another old girlfriend, Bailey (Evangeline Lilly of “Lost”), the daughter of the man who trained him as a boxer. But Max insists on going along and when the robot Charlie bought with the money he got is destroyed, Max finds an old sparring robot in the junkyard. He was never intended to be a boxer. He was not designed to throw punches, just to take them. But he has a “shadow” function that enables him to learn moves by imitating a human. And Charlie is the human who knows how to hook, jab, and uppercut.

Two things work surprisingly well in this movie. The first is the robots, magnificently designed and brilliantly executed. Real-life boxing champ Sugar Ray Leonard provided the boxing moves and gave each one of them a distinct style and personality in their approach to fighting. They are outrageously fun to watch. The second is the storyline. Part “The Champ” (made twice, both among the greatest sports weepies of all time) and part (of course) “Rocky,” the script is co-written by Dan Gilroy (the stunning fantasy “The Fall” and the uneven but intriguing and provocative “Freejack”). It may be cheesy but it embraces the cheese with enthusiasm and awareness. Jackman and Goyo bring a lot to their roles as well. We might lose interest in Charlie but Jackman makes us see that he is wounded, not selfish. And Goyo has just the right mix of determination and faith to show us that he has the best of Charlie in him and to show that to Charlie as well.

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Moneyball

Posted on September 22, 2011 at 6:02 pm

A-

Lowest Recommended Age:	Middle School
MPAA Rating:	Rated PG-13 for some strong language
Profanity:	Some strong language (much less than the book)
Alcohol/ Drugs:	Chewing tobacco, alcohol
Violence/ Scariness:	Tense family situations, sad references to injuries and letting players go
Diversity Issues:	Diverse characters
Date Released to Theaters:	September 23, 2011
Date Released to DVD:	January 9, 2012
Amazon.com ASIN:	B0060ZJ7BC

Brad Pitt is underrated as an actor. But he is the best there is when it comes to calibrating the deployment of his onscreen star power, which he uses as expertly as Meryl Streep does accents. Pitt can dial it down to one when he wants to play character actor and make it work. But here he dials it back up to eleven, giving the role of Oakland A’s manager Billy Beane a shot of pure movie magic in this real-life story about the man who turned baseball upside down by using computer formulas to select “undervalued” players.

The Oakland A’s feel like “a farm team for the New York Yankees.” They make players great and then lose them to the teams with budgets more than three times as large. All that money makes the playing field anything but level. “We’re a small market team and you’re a small market GM. I’m asking you to be okay spending the money we have,” the owner tells Beane. “There are rich teams and there are poor teams and then 50 feet of crap, and then there’s us,” is Beane’s frank appraisal.

The A’s cultivate and train players who leave for the teams that can pay the most. A game that is supposed to be about skill and drive seems to be just about money. And then Beane, in the midst of a negotiation with another team that is not going well, notices a nerdy-looking guy in the corner who seems to have some influence. After the meeting, that nerdy guy becomes Beane’s first draft pick.

He is Peter Brand (Jonah Hill), a shy wonk who comes to work for Beane and together they pursue a different direction. Instead of the century-old system of watching players hit, catch, throw, and run and try to figure out if that means they will be able to perform in the big leagues — a system that failed badly when Beane himself was recruited right out of high school — they will look at computer algorithms about what produces wins. Brand and Beane develop a roster like Warren Buffett puts together a stock portfolio. They look at fundamentals to figure out unrecognized value. Sort of a grown-up Bad News Bears. Or, as Brand puts it, an Island of Misfit Toys.

The script from two of the best screenwriters in history, Aaron Sorkin (“The Social Network”) and Steven Zallain (“Schindler’s List”) is well-structured and filled with smart talk. The scenes of Beane’s own pro career are too long and too distracting. But scenes with Beane visiting his ex-wife (Robin Wright) and her new husband and especially those with Beane and his daughter add warmth and urgency to the story. But it is Pitt who is in every way the heart of the movie, his natural confidence and grace a lovely balance to the formulas with Greek letters and the endless statistics. It is nice to see baseball, that most number-centric game, get upended by numbers. And yet it succeeds because it is that most cherished of traditions, the come-from-behind underdog story.

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Warrior

Posted on September 8, 2011 at 6:09 pm

Imagine if Rocky, instead of fighting Apollo Creed, got into the ring with another Rocky. And they were brothers.

I know, I know, but somehow it works in a surprisingly affecting story of the sons of an abusive alcoholic who have not seen each other since they were teenagers and end up fighting each other for a mixed martial arts championship title.

That’s the magic of movies. Somehow, they can take a story of a welder who does post-modern dance numbers in a Pittsburgh bar and dreams of being a ballerina or cartoon characters are live in old-time Hollywood and feel real-er than real life. As cheesy as this movie gets, it keeps raising the emotional stakes over and over again until we just tap out and go with it, largely because of full-hearted, powerhouse performances from Tom Hardy and Joel Edgerton.

Tommy (Hardy) comes home. He’s been away a long time. His father, Paddy (Nick Nolte) is glad to see him, but Tommy says he wants to deal with his father only as a trainer. He has no interest in catching up or mending their estrangement. He just has one goal, to win a $5 million mixed martial arts championship.

Brendan (Edgerton) has a good life as a high school science teacher with a family. His wife says, “I thought we agreed that we weren’t going to raise our children in a house were their father gets beat up for a living.” But paying for his daughter’s health care has put the family at risk of losing the house. He needs a lot of money fast and the only way he knows to get it is to win the mixed martial arts championship. He goes into training with an old friend. Cue the montages.

The script by writer/director Gavin O’Connor (“Miracle”) is as corny as an “up close and personal” Olympics athlete profiles, but as effective, too. Every time you think you’ve made up your mind who to root for, it switches around on you, and then switches around again. The fight scenes are powerful, but in large part due to the emotional weight given to Tommy and Brendan by Hardy and Edgerton. The final bout, well, its a knock-out.

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