The Heart of the GameA slam dunk  June 14,
2006 6:14:07 PM
SLAM DUNK: Heart of the Game
|
In director Ward Serrill’s documentary, coach Bill Resler talks of the magic pixie dust his rocketing girls’ high-school basketball team possesses and worries about the preening parents who might taint matters by getting over-involved. Resler is an innovative leader who devises a predatory theme (lions, wolves, and piranhas, oh my) as a defensive psyche each year. He’s also a tax professor at the University of Washington. How and why a portly man in Birkenstocks, with no background in athletics, jumps in to turn around a failing program is never quite explained. Perhaps that’s because Heart, shot over seven years, changes gears when Darnellia Russell, one of the few African-Americans at the Seattle high, shows up at tryouts with WNBA skills. She later gets pregnant, and her promising future dissolves. The drama plays out earnestly even if some side stories fall by the way — Serrill’s hoop dream is a slam dunk from the heart.
|
 |
|
- A new army of atheists is taking no prisoners in its battle with God and his self-appointed faith dealers
- Romney’s war chest is overflowing with the contributions of his financial-world pals. But what is the price of their loyalty?
- Lauren Conrad on MTV's The Hills
- Things about the pop-culture writer that are true, things that might be true, and something that isn’t true at all
- Revisiting the lessons of Murdoch’s Herald
- Hard labor
- Equal rights
- Boston Ballet on tour
- 1912–2007
- What’s dooming John Edwards’s campaign to be the Democratic nominee? He never attended Harvard or Yale.
- Revisiting the lessons of Murdoch’s Herald
- Investigating the darkness with Tom Jones
|
-
A visually lush adaptation
-
Lacking the orginal bite
-
The gamut of taste
-
Hallelujah the hodgepodge
-
The side dishes make the feast
-
Mainstream gay-marriage endorsement
-
Giving Petey Greene his due
-
Dark, potent, gory
-
The Shining gets squeezed
-
A wonder of a bio-pic in lush, matted reds
|
- A visually lush adaptation
- Lacking the orginal bite
- The legendary playwright is better
- Predictability ensues
- Oh my god, this movie totally sucks
- Three years too late
- A film about an enigma
- Terror on repeat
- Cookie-cutter bombast
- The gamut of taste
|
|
|
|