SOCK IT TO HIMAccording to a recent issue of Harper’s Bazaar, today’s hottest fashion trendsinclude “feathers, florals, patterns, bold colors, [and] safari.” WillFerrell, then, is a trendsetter. He’s sporting all those looks — minus feathers— in his new movie, Semi-Pro. (We figure the orange palm treecounts as both floral and safari.) Ferrell goes one better than Bazaar by bringing short shorts back tobasketball. Trust us, they’re going to be bigger than Uggs. Read more aboutbasketball, not fashion, on the following pages.
[dl]Movies
Big-Screen Hoop Dreams
Can Will Ferrell reverse the sloppylegacy of basketball films? Don’t count on it. By Eric Celeste
Basketball is hard to do right on the big screen. More often than not, movies, both comedies and dramas, flub the game — even if they get the story right. So we have reason for concern about Will Ferrell’s new movie, Semi-Pro. It tells the story of a team from the now defunct 1970s American Basketball Association. To be sure, the perm Ferrell is sporting for the film is giggle-worthy. But the basketball? Well, if history is any guide, we won’t be impressed. Herewith are a dozen of our favorite good and bad hoops flicks.
THE MOVIE | One on One, 1977 | Coach, 1978 | Fast Break, 1979 |
THE PREMISE | A squeaky-clean high school star tries to prove he's incorruptible. | A woman is mistakenly hired to coach a high school boys' team. Whoops! | Welcome Back, Kotter star Gabe Kaplan plays a coach who recruits street ballers, including a woman who's disguised as a man, to play for his horrible college team. |
THE PLAYERS | Robby Benson and Annette O'Toole | Cathy Lee Crosby and Michael Biehn (whom you'll remember as Kyle Reese from The Terminator) | Gabe Kaplan, Harold Sylvester (who was Griff on Married with Children), and New York Nets star Bernard King |
OFF THE COURT | Released in the shadow of Rocky, this film sought to mix underdog achievement with a love story. How'd it do? Well, consider this tagline: "There comes a time when love stops being a ball and starts being a woman." | Before That's Incredible!, Crosby was best known for this late-night Cinemax special, a film that's best remembered for Crosby's character's decision to change clothes in her office. As Reese might say, "That's what she does. That's all she does." | This Bad News Bears of basketball was Kaplan's big-screen break after he'd gained TV popularity. |
THE GAME PLAY | Whatever. Though not quite six feet tall, Benson is passable at times as a b-ball phenom. Still, his skills never really exceed pickup-game status. | Awful. Simply awful. Crosby, a former tennis star, is the film's best athlete. | Surprisingly accurate. It helps that the producers snagged both King, one of the most underappreciated NBA stars of all time, and Mavis Washington, who was an All-American basketball player for University of California-Riverside in the 1970s. Washington plays "the girl." |
THE MOVIE | The Fish That Saved Pittsburgh, 1979 | Teen Wolf, 1985 | Hoosiers, 1986 |
THE PREMISE | An entire team is composed of athletes born under the astrological sign of Pisces. | A teenage werewolf helps his high school team win and becomes a celebrity - to the detriment of his relationship with his girlfriend. | A stern high school coach leads a 1950s Indiana team to an unlikely state championship. |
THE PLAYERS | Julius Erving, Stockard Channing, Flip Wilson, Jonathan Winters, Meadowlark Lemon, and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar | Michael J. Fox and, um, well, we're not sure | Gene Hackman, Barbara Hershey, and Dennis Hopper |
OFF THE COURT | The soundtrack was notable for featuring funky songs from the Four Tops, The Tonight Show's Doc Severinsen, and others. | When Fox graduates from high school and goes on to college, guess what he becomes (besides a werewolf). He becomes Jason Bateman, the star of Teen Wolf Too. | It nabbed two Academy Award nominations, and though one was for the soundtrack, that's still impressive for a sports movie. |
THE GAME PLAY | Pretty good. With Dr. J and a ton of other NBA players on board, this movie gets most of the details right. | It's so implausible that tiny Fox - who constantly looks at the ball while dribbling - could score a point, let alone win a game, that the business with the wolf almost seems like part of a documentary. | There are a few nits to pick, but they are minor quibbles. This is one of the few sports movies in which the on-court action is actually exciting. |
THE MOVIE | Amazing Grace and Chuck, 1987 | White Men Can't Jump, 1992 | Blue Chips, 1994 |
THE PREMISE | A child baseball player quits his team to protest nuclear weapons, and a famous Boston Celtics basketball player joins his quest. | Two basketball hustlers join forces to double their take, only to find that their friendship is destroyed. | It takes a look at the less glamorous side of college basketball - the recruiting wars, where grown men slather over 18-year-old guys. |
THE PLAYERS | Jamie Lee Curtis, Alex English, Gregory Peck, CSI star William Petersen, and the late, great Red Auerbach | Wesley Snipes, Woody Harrelson, and Rosie Perez | Nick Nolte, Shaquille O'Neal, J.T. Walsh, Bob Cousy, Anfernee Hardaway, and Jim Boeheim |
OFF THE COURT | Sort of a Field of Dreams for nuclear disarmament, this was as sanctimonious as movies come. But it was also a sign of its times - 1983's WarGames had sparked a run on nukes films. | The film was directed by Ron Shelton, who also helmed Bull Durham. | It's no coincidence that Nolte plays a Bobby Knight-like character. He studied Knight's bombastic coaching style before shooting began on the film. |
THE GAME PLAY | Utterly forgettable. Fortunately, there is very little actual basketball to speak of. | The basketball sequences are overrated. Both Snipes and Harrelson appear as though they could be stripped of the ball by a seventh grader. Good slo-mo work, though. | This is among the best basketball films ever. We could have done without the game-winning alleyoop, though. |
THE MOVIE | Basketball Diaries, 1995 | He Got Game, 1998 | Harvard Man, 2002 |
THE PREMISE | A Catholic high school star turns into a street junkie. | The personal lives and pressures of NBA stars are magnified. | A Harvard point guard gets involved with criminals and fixes a game. |
THE PLAYERS | Leonardo DiCaprio, Mark Wahlberg, and Bruno Kirby | Denzel Washington, Ray Allen, and Rosario Dawson | Adrian Grenier, Sarah Michelle Gellar, and Joey Lauren Adams |
OFF THE COURT | Shot just three years after DiCaprio departed Growing Pains, the movie was filmed when he still looked like a little boy. Oh, wait - he still does. | Several critics slammed the movie, suggesting that director Spike Lee let his style overtake the subject matter. | Perhaps knowing that the cast was under-qualified, the producers also cast Ray Allen - of NBA and He Got Game fame. |
THE GAME PLAY | You would have to be on drugs to buy even a second of the basketball action here. Every basket in the movie appears to be a foot short - which explains why DiCaprio can dunk and why Wahlberg, who is well below the six-feet mark, is a stud rebounder. | Not bad at all. It always helps to find a basketball star (like Allen, one of the sharpest sharpshooters in NBA history) who can act, rather than the other way around. | If you were to match Grenier and Basketball Diaries' Leonardo DiCaprio against each other in a one-on-one game, who'd win? No one. Unless, that is, you were rooting for the death of basketball. |