Word: hoops
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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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...
...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...
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...