HOOP DREAMS - steve james - 7.6 / 10

Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel's favorite film of 1994 (over Pulp Fiction!) and Ebert's favorite film of the 1990's turns out, not surprisingly, to be only marginally great. To be sure there's plenty to love in the film but the back cover of the DVD's claims to shocking twists and turns are greatly exaggerated. The only thing that would have been really shocking would have been seeing one of these kids in the NBA. The funny thing is that's how the Hollywood version of the film would have ended. And in that case, critics would have been lining up to decry the Hollywood ending as being too Pollyanna-ish.

What really interested me about the film were the suspenseful moments in which one of the boys had to make some clutch free throws or a key play late in the game with the clock running down and then failed to do so. It fascinated me that this is more often the ways things really play out. Conditioned as I am (as we all are) to the Hollywood version, it was almost startling to see these boys fail. Mainstream films have moved so far away from depicting reality that it would be neigh impossible to find funding for a film that had as its script the events in this film. Indeed, I myself would never even think to write a film in which the hero of the piece misses the free throw that could have won his team the championship. I know fiction films (and documentaries to a lesser extent), by their very nature, distort and contract reality to make it more interesting. But in truth, they very rarely reflect anyone's experience of reality at all.

This is not necessarily a condemnation of fiction films or even of Hollywood films but rather an observation about what sort of films most people are interested in seeing. Compare, for example, this film to Cinderella Man. Which do you suppose is more interesting to the average filmgoer? It's a thorny proposition, the idea that we shun reality with our popular culture; more of the same "everyone's a winner" crap that has overtaken our society. But when even I would rather see the hero victorious, who still carries the banner for realism and darkness in our popular entertainment?