Intense sports action and accidents, reference to serious injuries
Diversity Issues:
None
Date Released to Theaters:
August 21, 2009
Kids, don’t try this at home.
3D is X-treme film-making and thus well suited to the X Games, hyper-intense, hyper-dangerous, hyper-what are they thinking? sports that are closer to stunts. Young men compete on skateboard, snowboard, and on dirt bikes and motocross to defy the laws of physics. One of them says he feels about gravity the way some people feel about evolution: “It’s just a theory.”
Adolescent testosterone-friendly sponsors like Play Station, Taco Bell, Red Bull, and the Navy have helped make the X Games into an enormous and high-stakes event. Some of its most stunning images are of the homes these young men have purchased with the money they make breaking their bones to do these tricks.
And X can also stand for something else. At one point, a selection of one competitor’s past x-rays of injuries flash on the screen.
The stunts are astonishing and the 3D effects are so intense that you will feel like wiping the dirt kicked up by the motocross bike off your face. But there is more to the film. It has some important lessons about passion, commitment, being willing to ask “what if it is possible?” and being willing to fail in order to achieve ultimate success. The climax of the film comes in a three-way competition that includes one man coming back from a wipe-out the year before and one who is badly injured early on and insists on continuing to compete. The respect and affection between the competitors is genuinely touching and the way they ride their boards back and forth to the medical facility to check on the injured athlete is affecting. They are barely aware of how organic their attachment to the boards has become.
If this hadn’t really happened, Disney would have had to make it up. But a high school science teacher did tell the baseball team he coached that if they won the division title he would try out for the major leagues. And they did and he did and Jim Morris did become the oldest rookie in 40 years. And then, when he went in as relief pitcher in his first major league game, he struck out the first player at bat. Sometimes, life just is a Disney movie.
And this story turns out to make a very nice movie indeed, thanks to not one but two irresistible underdog-with-a-dream stories, dignified-but-heartwarming direction by John Lee Hancock, and a hit-it-out-of-the-ballpark performance by Dennis Quaid.
A leisurely prologue sets the scene. After a mystical fairy tale about some nuns and wishing and rose petals, we meet a boy who lives for baseball. It is the one constant in his life as his family moves from one Army base to another around the country. When they finally find a place to stay, it is Texas, where the only game anyone cares about is football.
Fade into the present, when Morris (Quaid) is happily married, with deep roots in that same dusty Texas town. He had his shot at the big leagues, but didn’t make it. We don’t learn the specifics, but we see a big scar twisting around his shoulder. And as he tells his son, “It’s never one thing” that derails you.
Morris is the high school baseball coach. But it is still a football town, and no one pays much attention to the team. One day, Morris throws a few balls to the catcher and the team is impressed with the power of his arm. When he challenges them to try harder, they challenge him back. If he wants them to dream big, he will have to show them the way. So he promises that if they win the division title, he will try out for the major leagues.
He never expects it to work. But the boys turn into a team and they start winning games. And so Morris ends up going to the try-outs, though he has to take his kids along. It turns out that despite what had always been thought to be the incontrovertible rule that pitches slow down as pitchers get older, Morris is throwing faster than ever, up to 98 miles an hour.
But dreams ask a lot of us. The success of the team has brought a coaching offer from a bigger school. Morris can take it and give his family a more comfortable life. Or he can accept the offer to play on a minor league team, with the slim hope that he might get picked up by the major leagues.
His dream asks a lot of him, but it asks a lot from his family, too, perhaps more than is fair to expect.
Well, we know what happens next. We probably even predict that at some point Morris will think about quitting but will rediscover the simple joys of baseball by watching some kids play. And we might not care too much about some dramatic embellishments, like the awkwardly inserted reconciliation with his father and the way the minor league coach tells Morris the big news, which would be unforgivably torturous if it happened in real life. But the dream is so pure and Quaid is so good that most audiences will be happy to go along.
Parents should know that although the movie is rated G, it will not be of much interest to younger kids. And some children might be upset by the scenes of Morris with his father, who is cold and unsympathetic, or by the financial problems faced by the family. There are references to divorce and remarriage.
Families who see this movie should talk about our responsibility to help those we care about try to make their dreams come true and to share the dreams of those we love. It was the way Morris believed in his team and the way they believed in him that made both their dreams come true. Morris’s father tells him that it is “okay to think about what you want to do until it is time to do what you were meant to do.” How do you know when it is time to put a dream aside?
Rated PG-13 for intense fight sequences, some sexuality and brief strong language
Profanity:
Brief stong language including a racial epithet
Alcohol/ Drugs:
Some drinking
Violence/ Scariness:
Very intense, brutal, and graphic street-fighting scenes with bare-knuckle, no-rules brawls
Diversity Issues:
Diverse characters
Date Released to Theaters:
April 27, 2009
Terrence Howard’s performance in “Fighting” is so bizarrely strange and awful that it occurred to me he might be hoping we didn’t realize it was him. Howard plays Harvey, a street hustler who discovers Shawn, a gifted young boxer (Channing Tatum) and sets up a series of underground, all-or-nothing, no-rules street fights. All Tatum has to do is punch, take punches, and mumble inarticulately whenever he sees the lovely Zulay (Zulay Valez). Howard has to pontificate, hide his money, confess to having been badly treated by his former partners, and ask Shawn to take a dive. Neither one manages to pull it off.
The film does have two things going for it. First is its conceit of multi-million dollar underground organizations that promote illegal street boxing (and the betting thereon) from behind hidden doors under the baseball hat racks in tiny little souvenir stores. That is the only logical explanation I have ever seen for the persistence of those shops, which never seem to have any customers. The second is the marvelous Altagracia Guzman as Zulay’s grandmother. As she did in the superb “Raising Victor Vargas,” Guzman is at once hilarious, endearing, and completely authentic. She provides moments of pure poetry. A small nod to the Foley artist, as well. The sound effects for all the whams and bashes may be cartoony — you almost expect Wile E. Coyote to show up with a package from Acme — but they are entertaining.
But the rest of the film is just dumb and dull. I think the screenplay is punchdrunk. Shawn needs money. He likes to fight. So, fight #1 he surprises everyone. Shawn is hiding something. Fight #2 is against a really big guy. He surprises everyone again, except for the audience. Then there are a few more fights, some old scores to settle, some revelations, some reactions to the revelations (I understand and sympathize! I am disappointed and betrayed! Both!) and everyone goes home. Kidding! The big, big fight is yet to come and as they like to say in movie tag lines, this time it’s personal.
It takes some serious effort to de-star and de-actor Howard and Tatum, but director-co-author Dito Montiel manages. This fight film needs to stay down for the count.
When a real-life story combines athletic excellence and civil rights breakthroughs, it has more than enough heart and drama to be good movie material. Ernie Davis was a combination of heart and pure talent who came along at just the right time to do what his predecessor on the Syracuse football team could not. Jim Brown could break records, but he could not win college football’s highest honor, the Heisman trophy. In that volatile era, a player needed to be more than talented to win that prize. He needed to qualify as “a credit to his race,” determined enough to break through color barriers but not angry enough to scare anyone. Ernie Davis was that player.
He had all the talent anyone could dream of. He could run so fast and dodge so gracefully that enormous angry linebackers seemed to dissolve into air as he ran by. He had one of those talents so rare that he could dissolve ignorance and bigotry as well. One force powerful enough to overcome prejudice is competition. Everyone wanted to have him on their side. Syracuse coach Ben Schwartzwalder (Dennis Quaid) is not eager to bring on a black player, not just because of discomfort with non-whites but because of bad experiences with Jim Brown (Darrin Dewitt Henson), an angry and impatient superstar. But Brown helps persuade Davis to come to Syracuse. And Schwartzwalder shows that when it comes to football, the only colors that matter are those on the uniforms.
Rob Brown of Finding Forrester shows us Davis’ essential decency and dedication. He wants to win for his team, but he also wants to win for his people. If he is a little too glowingly perfect, a little too heroic, it adds to the mythic feeling of the story. And it is balanced by Quaid’s cranky Schwartzwalder and the challenges of an era before the Civil Rights Act, when a member of the team could win the Most Valuable Player award but not be permitted to attend the dinner. It is also a welcome reminder of an era when athletes were role models because of the way they behaved off the field as well as on.
This sunny documentary about a sailboat race across the Pacific Ocean is a bit of a throwback to the days when a night at the movies included some cartoons, a newsreel, and a travelogue. It has a lot of postcard-pretty pictures of glorious sunsets and fresh-faced kids. But for a movie about a lot of hard work leading up to an attempt to beat the world champs, it is rather laid back.
Roy Disney, nephew of Walt Disney, is the man behind the documentary and its title ship and at times it feels like a reality-show version of “The Mickey Mouse Club Goes to Sea.” Fifteen young sailors are selected from a range of competitors and they are brought to Hawaii for sailing boot camp. Then eleven are selected for the team and they choose a captain and assign positions for the race from California to Hawaii.
The kids, all in late teens or early twenties, are all high-spirited and wholesome. But despite a few “up close and personal” tidbits, it is hard to keep them all straight, in part because while they have a range of accents, they don’t have much variety of vocabulary. If you eat a handful of popcorn every time one of them says “awesome” or “rad,” you’ll be at the bottom of the bucket long before they reach Hawaii. The training scenes do not tell us enough about what skills they will need onboard and the racing scenes lack momentum because we — like the crew — go for days without knowing where they are in relation to the competition. Like the ship, the movie gets becalmed.
