Word: hoop
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...film has no chance of making blockbuster waves or blockbuster profits (to be both a blockbuster and a documentary seems near impossible) but "Hoop Dreams" has carried itself through the United States and Europe more pervasively and successfully than expected--and it is important...
Perhaps basketball, the main subject of "Hoop Dreams," is the source of its popularity. But this film cannot just be deemed a "basketball movie". Grouping it in a lump with "White Men Can't Jump" would be as much of a travesty as categorizing the engrossing documentary "Paris Is Burning" with the much more shallow "Priscilla, Queen of the Desert." More than a basketball movie, "Hoop Dreams" asks questions about social conditions that require our immediate attention. By exploring one subject so intensively, the film manages to transcend itself and delves into issues ranging from domestic violence to drug dealing...
...Hoop Dreams" tells the charged and turbulent stories of two inner-city Chicago teenagers, William Gates and Arthur Agee. Both aspire to careers in professional basketball, and both spend their adolescent years on their respective neighborhood courts. Film makers Steve James, Frederick Marx and Peter Gilbert follow the pair for five full years, beginning with freshman year of high school and ending with freshman year of college, through family struggles, vibrant victories, and finally to the harsh realities that undercut the "dreams" of the film's title. William and Arthur's dreams are born, cultivated, encouraged, exploited and destroyed...
...movie's message is timely, given America's recent political swing to the Right. Any film about inner-city deprivation confronts head-on the issues that Clinton put to Congress in his Crime Bill. "Hoop Dreams" actually lends validity to some of the arguments that shot down Clinton's liberalism-gone-awry "midnight basketball league" idea. If the lottery of success is so unpromising for young boys who dream of being stars, why should they be encouraged to play basketball at midnight...
Perhaps the movie implies that we shouldn't be pouring money into programs that spawn hoop dreams, breed hopeful young basketball players, and then destroy their confidence to the point that they lose self-respect and likely become resentful of the system that encouraged them. Certainly any program that provides an alternative to the streets is better than nothing, but ideally an inner-city youth program wouldn't rely on the lore of the American basketball star for its appeal...