Word: hoop
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Even the most ardent fans of "Pulp Fiction" will concede that two and a half hours of Tarantino can become a bit tedious. So how is it that "Hoop Dreams", a low-budget, three-hour documentary by previously unknown directors, managed to break through the impatient, assault-me-with-blood-and-bad-jokes sensibility of today's moviegoers to earn praise from Loews audiences...
What's really needed is a revamped publicity campaign, something that says Radcliffe is a part of history, kind of like Fleetwood Mac, Yoko Ono, hoop skirts and the My Lai Massacre. Radcliffe also might huddle with Elvis's people, perhaps if you killed the school, more people would think it's alive...
...Their primary skill is putting a round ball through an orange hoop. If no one pays them to do this, they're out of luck (as many baseball players are finding out). Remember Jimmy Jackson's almost-full-season holdout from the Dallas Mavericks...
...soon forget him. You may be bored by basketball, and maybe you don't much care about black kids. But Hoop Dreams isn't mainly about sport, or even about life and death in the inner city. It's about families hanging tough on nerve and prayer. It's about what passes for the American dream to people whose daily lives are closer to nightmares...
...people will dream the implausible dream, especially if they are agile black boys in a neighborhood ravaged by crime, and their only other options are fast-food chef and drug runner. Hoop Dreams, the powerful new documentary by Steve James, Fred Marx and Peter Gilbert, follows two basketball players from the Chicago projects as they pursue their calling through full or partial scholarships to suburban St. Joseph High School, which is a three-hour round trip and social light years away from home...