Word: hooping
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...wonders and we wonder. The scene is from Steve James, Frederick Marx, and Peter Gilbert's brilliant documentary "Hoop Dreams," a lyrical meditation on basketball, ambition and the depravity of inner-city life. Gates is one of the film's truth-tellers. He is aware--if only at moments--of the terrible burden of potential and its cruel habit of leaving behind a trail of unfulfilled dreams and unrealized promise...
What is profoundly disturbing about "Hoop Dreams" is not that its two protagonists will probably fall short of NBA stardom. Rather, it is the particular kind of failure--intractable, cyclical and tragic--that makes the film pathetic...
...Hoop Dreams" is a tragedy of bad advice. Bad advice begins with bad fathers, or more aptly, absent fathers. Both Arthur Age and William Gates, the two young players whose high school careers this film traces, grow up in single-parent homes. This fact becomes central to the narrative of their lives as time and time again they are manipulated by would-be fathers--be they coaches, recruiters, or corporations...
...good thing is that none of these questions is posited outright. The text of the film does not include the discourse of politics; it is simply the talk of daily life. And, in fact, "Hoop Dreams" was not made with film but rather with high-quality video, with no pretense of artistic ingenuity. It is the medium of video which allowed the filmmakers to take five years of footage on such a small budget, and perhaps video proved the most appropriate format for a documentary that needn't be clouded over with aesthetic concerns...
Undeniably topical, "Hoop Dreams" is not just a movie about basketball. It captivates its audience at every smooth pass and at every slam-dunk, but it is more far-reaching than the hype of a Nike commercial and vastly more politically-infused than a Duke game. See it, and see what's going...