Hoop Dreams

        Being in England during the NBA playoffs is hard for me. I was okay with not being able to watch the regular season, but as the Lakers and the Celtics are both being driven out I find myself desperate to watch these games. I’ve been a big basketball fan for a couple of years now, so to hold me over in these difficult times I watched two films about the sport. The first was Spike Lee’s He Got Game, starring Denzel Washington and, one of my favourite players, Ray Allen. The film is centers around a father son relationship between the two; Denzel’s character is imprisoned and is allowed out for a week to convince his estranged son to play for Big State University. Although the plot sounds a little iffy, the film is in regular Spike Lee top form. However, it was the second film I watched that I want to talk about now.

        In 1988 PBS sponsored a couple of filmmakers to make a half hour television special about two kids from Chicago who were being recruited by a private school for the basketball team. Six years and seven hundred thousand dollars later the filmmakers returned with a three-hour film that followed these kids all the way from eighth grade to college. It’s a very similar story as the commission of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, where Hunter S. Thompson was commissioned to write about the Mint400 race in Vegas and came back with his drug haze opus. Anyway, the basketball film was released in full into theatre’s, under the title Hoop Dreams, and became extremely successful. The reviews rated it higher than any other film that year, which is no mean feat; it beat out films like Forrest Gump, The Shawshank Redemption, and Pulp Fiction. Still, leave it to the Academy Awards to completely ignore it. The film was later put on Roger Ebert’s list at number one of films of the 1990’s and named the Best Documentary of all time by various committees that decide these things.

            So why is this film considered so great? Neither of the kids made it to the NBA, nor even won the state championship for their high school teams. Both kids suffer from overwhelming heartbreak multiple times over, and there’s little to no payoff in the end. This film, if scripted, would have scared away every Hollywood filmmaker; it is painstakingly slow paced, William, one of the boys, spends an entire year recovering from a knee injury, Arthur, the other boy, is so poor that his electricity is shut off halfway through the film, and both boys lost very close family members to murder soon after the film was made. This realism is exactly why this film is so beloved and was so successful, this is reality for many poor black folks in America. Basketball was the only possible escape for these two kids; with it, they could go to college for free and move on to a better future. But what if they got injured, or got bored of the game? These issues build a great arc for the film, and when they finally do go to college the audience realises that without basketball, they could have died on the streets; this is the only thing other people can see in these boys.

          I am a big fan of the documentary genre. Michael Moore’s Bowling for Columbine was previously my favourite documentary, and I would still highly recommend that to anyone. I also watch a lot about North Korea out of personal interest, or on filmmaking to further my knowledge of this medium. But I had never seen a documentary that told more of a story than ninety percent of the films I have seen. Hoop Dreams is truly sensational, and I would like as many people as possible to see it. For me, it almost makes up for not being able to watch the playoffs this year. Almost.