Movies - #1583 - Hoop Dreams

It's that time again. Time for me to watch a documentary. I really feel that I should watch them more often, but I always seem to find myself in the mood for fiction. Which, of course, is the beauty of the Netflix queue. Intellectual-me can throw one on there, and, later on, it shows up at my house and spur-of-the-moment-me decides "Well, it's that time again.

The documentary today was Hoop Dreams(1994).



For those of you unfamiliar with it, Hoop Dreams follows Arthur Agee and William Gates, two teenage black kids living in Chicago projects who aspire to play professional basketball. The film opens on them at 14, both trying to get accepted to the same private high school with a prestigious basketball program, and follows them until the day they each leave for college.

The film, despite it's length, is an incredibly engrossing movie to watch. If it weren't for the interviews and narration, it would seem very much like a narrative Hollywood movie, with a screenplay and actors and everything. That uplifting, heart-stringing quality that pretty much every sports movie is shooting for? This movie has it. But the fact that what we're watching is real makes it all the more poignant.

We watch both boys struggle through adversity that, if you didn't know it was true, would make you think the screenwriter was taking a cheap shot, layering it all on like that. One boy's family can barely scrape together enough money to survive, let alone keep him in that private school. The other suffers a knee injury that threatens to keep him from ever playing again. One of the more moving scenes: one boy's estranged father shows up at the playground to play some ball with him. It's all very heartwarming until he reveals why he really came there, stepping off the court to buy some crack as his son watches.

What the movie really hinges on, and what ultimately makes it an uplifting experience, is the idea of the attempt to escape the poverty and unhappiness they're growing up in. And both boys do find some sort of success. In neither case is it exactly what they started out looking for, but both do manage to use basketball to improve themselves and their lot in life.

Here is my one problem with this movie. It has a theme song. A bad theme song. You know that song that Public Enemy wrote for Do the Right Thing? (If not go watch that movie right now.) It's sort of like that, but with less social commentary. It's mostly just guys shouting the words "Hoop Dreams" over a drum machine. It's like this weird, really soulless rap thing that seems like a shameless attempt to draw in all those youngsters who just love that damn newfangled rap music. It's really distracting. And seems really out of place in a documentary.