Where is my sports movie screenwriter when I need him most?

Or her. Sorry, that just made the subject of this post too long.

I've made mention recently of the fact that I don't like sports movies all that much because I don't believe the amazing comeback a screenwriter would write for a team at its lowest moment. I like to leave that up to what really happens in the real world, and just be amazed by real comebacks.

On Memorial Day, I could have used something written by a screenwriter.

My beloved Boston Celtics -- the first sports team I ever loved back in the early 1980s -- were on the verge of making history. 

In woeful and sometimes pitiful fashion, they had fallen behind 0-3 to the Miami Heat, who came into the playoffs as the 8th seed while the Celtics were a mighty #2 seed. They were well aware that no team has ever come back from that sort of deficit in the NBA playoffs, and only three had even made it to a Game 7. Those three were 0-3 and the other teams that tried to make it all the way back were 0-147, losing in a sweep more than 60% of the time.

Well, the Celtics defied the odds. They won Game 4 and they won Game 5, both in rather convincing fashion. They won Game 6 by the skin of their teeth, on an improbable put-back as time was expiring by Derrick White. Literally the shot left his hand with 0.1 of a second remaining on the clock.

If a screenwriter had written this, I wouldn't have believed it.

Game 7 was on their home floor, where they not only always win Game 7s, but where they usually win them in a blowout. All signs pointed to this being another case of that. After all, Miami felt the pressure after missing three opportunities to close out the series, or so you would think.

Then on the first play of the game, the image you see above: Celtics star Jayson Tatum grasping his ankle after he rolled it while coming down from a shot on another player's foot. 

He played the rest of the game, wincing, but his impact was minimal, and the rest of the team could not rise to the occasion. They lost by 19 points.

If a screenwriter had had anything to say about it, it wouldn't have gone this way.

Oh, screenwriters like underdogs, sure, I get that. But Miami is not your typical underdog. They were a #8 seed and they had a fair number of injuries, but last year they were a #1 seed, and they went to the finals in 2020. 

Even if a screenwriter did fancy the Heat the heroes of this story, you don't make a good underdog story by having the underdog win the first three games and then barely avoid calamity/make history for all the wrong reasons.

So the Celtics were the hero of this story, right? They were the underdogs within this series, fighting back from accusations that they quit in Game 3, storming all the way back and taking Game 6 on enemy court via one of the most miraculous season-saving shots in NBA history.

Well that shot is now just a historical footnote, and my Celtics are not going to be NBA champions this year.

What I realize now is that it's not that I want a sports movie to resemble real sports, it's that I want real sports to resemble a sports movie. I want that historic comeback. I want that impossible dream. I want a team erasing a deficit they never should erase and coming together as a group to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat.

Kind of like the Boston Red Sox did in 2004, when they came back from 0-3 down against the Yankees to win the American League Championship series, the first baseball team ever to accomplish a feat that no basketball team has ever accomplished.

But maybe a sports fan base only gets one of these, ever, and we had ours 19 years ago.

And now, like 27 other teams before them in 2023, the Celtics will have to think ahead to what might be possible next year. They'll have to make whatever roster decisions are necessary not to blow games they are leading comfortably, to play basketball consistently for 48 minutes, not to turn over the ball ... all the things that we hoped they had finally learned, long enough to outlast the Miami Heat and then maybe even the Denver Nuggets after them. 

You don't get many chances at championships, and even fewer at history. And it's hard to know when the Celtics will get their next of either.

Oh I can cry myself to sleep on the banners of 17 previous championships, knowing the Celtics are tied with the Lakers for the most of all time. And at least the Lakers won't be adding one this year either.

But that's why it's so hard to be a sports fan. You can only think in the now, and it takes so long before another opportunity will arise ... even next June feels like ages away, and in the worst case scenario, it might be decades.

At least with a movie that's disappointing, you just move on to the next one. 

A reminder why we love sports

I didn't intend to watch a movie about female soccer fans in Iran who are so crazed, they will risk imprisonment or execution in order to get in to "the big game," on the same day that I woke up before 5 a.m. to watch my Boston Red Sox get eliminated from the 2017 baseball playoffs.

But one did inform the other, in a way. Because of my early rising time, I needed something really short if I were to watch a movie last night. Offside, Jafar Panahi's 2006 film, was the shortest in the collection of library movies in my possession, at just 88 minutes. Even so, I was tired enough that I took about five short naps during it.

Fortunately, my regular need to pause was a reflection only of my exhaustion, and the fact that I was reclined on the couch way too close to parallel with the cushions to have any hope of staying awake. I was quite captivated by the film, and it was perfectly timed in many respects.

First, some explanation of that early awakening.

I live in Australia, which, as you know, has a very different time zone than North America. This often means that the sports I want to watch are on at terrible times. Coming on in the middle of my workday is bad enough, but it can be even worse when it's an afternoon game, and the damn thing starts at 4 in the morning. Because Major League Baseball didn't consider the Boston Red Sox and the Houston Astros much of a draw -- not the draw it considered the Cleveland Indians and the New York Yankees, anyway -- all four of the games in that opening series were played in the afternoon, with the earliest coming at just 1 p.m. Eastern on Monday. That was 4 a.m. my time on Tuesday.

I wouldn't have considered waking up at all, except that the Sox showed some unlikely mettle by blowing out the Astros in Game 3 to stave off elimination, after getting blown out themselves in Games 1 and 2. It's only a five-game series, so one more win and suddenly the thing would go to a decisive Game 5. And the 4 a.m. start time might have its advantages, in the following respect: It might cut into my beauty sleep, but it might also finish entirely before I even left for work. In a way, this was actually my best opportunity to watch an entire game.

I left it to my body clock, which has been waking me up at strange hours in recent weeks for much less important reasons than a playoff baseball game. And though it didn't get me up for start time, I was awake not long after 4:30. At which point I saw my first innings of Boston Red Sox baseball in 2017. Hey, there's a trickle down effect to those inconvenient start times, and this year, I hadn't managed to get in a single bit of live game action.

Unlike the other games in the series, this one was close throughout. (Game 3 was close for seven innings before becoming a blowout.) I missed the Sox' first run, but they were down only 2-1 when I decided to get in another hour's sleep from 6 to 7, a decision prompted by the prediction that the game was about to be halted by inclement weather. Apparently, it was never halted. By the time I woke the Sox had taken a lead, 3-2.

By the time I left for work, they were down 4-3, and that eventually became 5-3 before they gave their fans a last gaps of hope with a leadoff homer in the ninth. But they ultimately fell short by a 5-4 final score. They scored on three separate occasions, none of which I saw, and I ended up catching a total of about four innings. This being the total number of innings I watched my favorite sports team all year.

Clearly I wasn't as invested in the Red Sox this year, in part because my favorite player (David Ortiz) retired last year, and in part because as a Boston sports fan, I've had it too good for too long. Since everything turned around for Boston sports teams in February of 2002 when the New England Patriots beat the St. Louis Rams in Super Bowl XXXVI, there have been four more championships for the Patriots, three championships for the Red Sox, and one each for the Celtics and Bruins, if I cared about hockey. At this point I don't have the right to be disappointed about any of my teams not winning a championship, and it's not much of a step beyond that to just disengage. I wouldn't say I'm fully disengaged from the Red Sox, but during the baseball season I get much more involved in my fantasy team -- even though it too has experienced the thrill of a championship in 2010 and 2013.

Offside reminded me what it's like to be hungry for victory.

And I'm going to spoil this movie, because it's 11 years old and I don't flatter myself that my writing about it is going to make you run out and see it. Though you really should.

Continuing a proud tradition that I suppose you could call Iranian neo-realism (perhaps some people do call it that), Jafar Panahi -- you know, the guy who has been placed under house arrest by his government and can't make movies for 20 years -- filmed his last movie before the government descended upon him about the Iranian soccer team's attempt to qualify for the World Cup in 2006. Of course, it's not really about that quest per se. It's about the attempt of a handful of young women to view that quest.

See, in Iran, the government does not allow women to enter a football stadium -- the rest of the world calls it football, remember -- for fear that they will become sexually aroused by seeing men in shorts. Or something like that. Anyway, the punishment for even attempting to enter the stadium is severe. The movie never completely reveals what is expected to happen to these young women, but one who dressed up as a soldier to try to gain entry is told she would have been executed if she had come in an officer's outfit. Yikes.

But some women do try to get in anyway, or at least, some did in this movie -- about seven or eight that we see. We follow one girl on a bus of male revelers before the game, looking nervous as hell as she has stuffed her hair inside a hat and painted her face, in the hopes of coming across as male. And because this is as close as you can get to real life, and not some Hollywood movie, the ruse is completely unconvincing. Everyone she comes in contact with sniffs her out in an instant, and in the case of those that don't, you have to figure they just can't be bothered and are going to let her try to get away with it.

She doesn't. Not even close. She successfully buys a ticket from a scalper -- at a heavily marked up price, to cover his risk for making the sale -- but she completely loses her composure when a guard at the gate motions to pat her down prior to entry. She doesn't even sniff the seating area, being escorted directly to a makeshift detention area outside one of the gates, that might have been mistaken for a smoking section. A half-dozen girls are already being kept there, and more join as the narrative progresses.

In a Hollywood movie, our protagonist would find a way to sneak away from the guards, or perhaps receive the help of a sympathetic guard, but in Iran, they're as much at risk of punishment for aiding and abetting as she is for trying to break the law. One girl does escape when she concocts a story about needing to use the bathroom -- the guard escorting makes her wear a poster over her face so others don't see her gender -- but we don't follow her into the stadium. She reports back later on, presumably having gotten in at least some of the action. But our protagonist? She never gets closer than a guard having pity on her by offering her a brief bit of secondhand play-by-play commentary.

As you keep watching Offisde, you figure that something has to break their way and these girls get to see at least a couple plays of Iran's match with Bahrain. But it never comes to pass. Instead "the chief" finally appears and directs them down to a waiting bus, where they are going to be taken elsewhere to have whatever punishment is waiting for them meted out to them.

In that bus, the closest they get to experiencing the game finally transpires, when one of the guys who has been guarding them the whole movie takes pity on them and fixes the broken antenna well enough to get the game on the radio. You sense this is as much out of self-interest as it is an actual favor to the prisoners. But the upshot is that they get to listen to about the final five minutes of action -- something they could have done at home, of course. At home, they could have even watched it on TV.

And they hear Iran wrap up a 1-0 victory that helps them qualify for the World Cup. A victory that really happened, fortunately, as Panahi was filming in and around the actual match, in the guerrilla style for which he has since become famous. Though I suppose, given his methods and his commitment to harsh realism, Panahi would have been able to turn either a win or a loss into compelling drama.

I'm happy it was a win, because my God does bedlam ensue. Whatever fates may await them, these girls go crazy, lost in the sheer exhilaration of victory -- a victory not even really comparable to winning the championship, except that when you love the game and you love your team, even a lesser victory is the occasion for intense exultation.

Panahi captures the celebrations not only inside the bus, but outside of it, catching the passing cars honking, the people hanging out their windows holding up Iranian flags, through the bus windows. Then the bus stops, the guards as overcome as the prisoners, none of them fearing the repercussions that may await them, as everyone pours out and joins the pandemonium in the streets. Oh, and did I mention that contraband fireworks are whizzing everywhere, both inside and outside the bus?

The film's final shot is a return to our protagonist, focus on whom has drifted from time to time during the narrative, as she becomes enveloped by the crowd, a sparkler in each hand.

They might have watched this game at home, but if so, they mightn't have experienced a moment of community, a loss of inhibition, a surge of pure happiness quite like this.

That's what sports can do. And that's how I want to feel about sports again. So if my teams need to go another ten years without a championship, just to give me that feeling again, then so be it.

When you consider imprisonment as a consequence of trying to see your favorite team compete, losing three hours of sleep doesn't seem like much at all.

Retirement of a movie character

David Ortiz is the reason I don't like sports movies.

He has to be seen to be believed. He has to be real to be believed.

If someone wrote a movie in which David Ortiz was a fictitious character, I would call bullshit on that movie. He wouldn't seem real.

But David Ortiz is real, making the crazy things he's done all the more wonderful.

For those of you a few steps behind here, David Ortiz is the long-time designated hitter of the Boston Red Sox, my favorite sports team. He began his Red Sox career back in 2003, when he almost vaulted his team into the World Series with an amazing second half and playoff run. He took that not one but two steps further the next year, when the Ortiz-led Red Sox won the World Series, ending an 86-year drought that began in 1918 with the ominous portent of trading Babe Ruth to the Yankees so the Sox owner could dump money into a failing Broadway show. Ortiz didn't care about curses. He helped the Sox win again in 2007 and 2013. And every two years when his contract was up, he signed a team-friendly two-year extension, one that paid him handsomely but nowhere near what he was worth to a team and a city.

We all hoped Ortiz, nicknamed Big Papi, would be able to bring one last ring to the Boston faithful in 2016, as he used perhaps the best statistical season of his career to bring his team back from a last-place finish in 2015 to a division title in 2016. "One last ring" because before the season even started, Ortiz announced that at age 40, this would be his final season as a player.

But the Red Sox had an ignominous finish to an otherwise positive season when they were swept by the Cleveland Indians on Monday. It happened at home, and after the game's final out -- at the urging of a crowd that refused to leave the stadium -- Ortiz came out to the pitcher's mound for a final acknowledgement of his fans, doffing his cap and wiping tears from his eyes.

If it all sounds too good to be true -- all except that ignominious finish, of course -- then that just makes David Ortiz seem all the more like some hack's idea of an epic movie character. That's an insult to that screenwriter, but of course, a compliment to David Ortiz.

He did things no one thought he would do, he could do. He had no fewer than 37 clutch hits that saved games for the Red Sox in the postseason alone. Okay, it was a bit fewer than 37, but Games 4 and 5 of the 2004 ALCS against the Yankees both ended on hits by Ortiz (when the Sox were facing elimination), and Game 2 of what was looking like a lost series against Detroit in 2013 was salvaged when Ortiz somehow hit an 8th inning grand slam to tie up the game. Playoff heroics aside, this was a man who announced he was done and then went on to have the greatest final season in the history of baseball, hitting 38 home runs, leading the league in RBIs, leading the league in OPS, batting well over .300, and giving himself perhaps his best shot ever to win a league MVP trophy, something that is utterly unheard of for a designated hitter and in fact has never happened before. In his last season.

If this were a movie, I'd be heckling the screen.

But I lived through David Ortiz. He was real. He is real. (He's still alive, and long live Papi.)

It's why I'll always love sports a lot more than I'll ever love sports movies. Sports movies -- the fictitious ones, anyway -- can't have David Ortizes in them. A David Ortiz in your sports movie is almost like having a deus ex machina in your regular movie. You don't believe a single character can save the day time and time again, yet that's what David Ortiz did. Or maybe you do believe that, but if you do, you know you are willfully suspending disbelief, believing in Harry Potter or Ethan Hunt or Superman or James Bond, someone who is always going to win and that's okay because you've bought into that.

But they don't make series of sports movies with recurring heroes, like David Ortiz, because it just doesn't have the ring of truth to it. Athletes fail more often than they succeed, in almost every venture but especially in baseball, where a successful hitter still only succeeds 30% of the time. Even if they made a really good movie about a fictitious athlete with the touch of gold, you'd be tired of him by the second movie. You'd think "Screenwriters ... what will they think of next?"

We Red Sox fans were lucky to be treated not only to a great first movie in which David Ortiz didn't quite win, but its very satisfying sequel in which he did, and then 12 more sequels of varying quality but always filled with smiles and heroic moments. We would keep watching those movies until Ortiz turned 50, and with the way he hit this year, he might still provide heroic moments for movies to come.

But the best movie series are the ones that quit before you get tired of them, not after. So I'm glad that David Ortiz hasn't decided to give us a bunch of subpar sequels as his skills deteriorate but we love him so much we continue to let him play. Big Papi is leaving baseball as a hero -- not a conquering hero in this case, but the type of hero who won our hearts.

And sure, retirement doesn't always stick. Sean Connery mocked his own supposedly final retirement from the aforementioned role of James Bond by appearing in a movie called Never Say Never Again. To say nothing of how Bruce Willis, who I have enjoyed trudging on this week, has continued sleepwalking through Die Hard movies into his 60s.

But that's not Ortiz. (At least, I hope it isn't -- check back with me next spring.) He knows when to quit. He knows when the feeling is right. Even if the feeling of never playing baseball again is probably so, so wrong. Even if it hurts.

David Ortiz has the memories, and those will sustain him through the peaks and valleys of retirement as he looks longingly out at that field and thinks of saving the day one last time.

I'm so glad he wasn't a figment of some screenwriter's imagination.

The movies ain't got nuthin' on real life

Exhibit A of why I don't care for most sports movies: Super Bowl XLIX.

In case you don't know -- though as a human being living in the world, I'm sure you do -- my New England Patriots defeated the Seattle Seahawks yesterday by a score of 28-24, taking home their fourth championship in 14 years and first since 2004. 

And if it had happened in a movie, I wouldn't have believed a second of it.

Check that -- there were plenty of believable seconds in the game yesterday. Just none in the final minute of action, which is the important part when thinking about the game cinematically. 

To set the stage a little bit, the Patriots came into the fourth quarter down 24-14, having yielded 17 straight points to the Hawks and seen their earlier momentum completely vanish. Sitting there on the couch at a local sports bar in Melbourne -- appropriately named the Turf Club Hotel -- I felt another loss creeping its way toward inevitability. I say "another" loss because the Patriots lost Super Bowls in 2008 and 2012, both to the New York Giants, by heart-breakingly close margins. It didn't appear this one would be so heart-breakingly close.

But New England quarterback Tom Brady is known for his calm under pressure when needing to score, so if anyone could come back, he could. He had brought this team back from multiple 14-point deficits against the Baltimore Ravens just three weeks ago. He could do it now. 

And he did. Brady constructed two determined drives and threw two touchdown passes, turning a 24-14 disadvantage into a 28-24 lead. Brilliantly, he worked down a significant chunk of the clock as well, leaving only 2:02 for Seattle quarterback Russell Wilson to mount his own comeback drive to win the game.

Unfortunately, Wilson is also cool under pressure and brought his own team back from a seemingly insurmountable 16-point deficit against Green Bay earlier this postseason, and that was with like three minutes left in the game.

Suffice it to say I was not yet feeling confident on the couch there at the Turf Club -- just less depressed than I had been 30 minutes earlier.

Sure enough, Wilson began advancing the ball. Down four, he still had to get his team in the endzone rather than just settling for a field goal, and I knew this would not be easy against a determined Patriot defense. 

And that's when things started to get crazy.

Wilson lofted a pass down the right sideline to a receiver named Jermaine Kearse. New England rookie cornerback Marcus Butler tipped the ball, enough of a disruption to the pass that Kearse couldn't come down with it. I saw the ball bounce off Kearse's hands and breathed a sigh of relief at another wasted down. That meant only two more times the Patriots would need to stop Wilson and the game would be over.

Except Kearse actually caught the ball.

The contact with Butler knocked him on to his back, and since Butler's tip had sent the ball aloft, Kearse hit the ground before the ball did. And in fact, the ball did not hit the ground at all. It bounced on his body once, twice, three times, before he ultimately corralled the thing in for a complete pass.

Just yards from the endzone, with plenty of time left on the clock.

My Patriot fan heart sunk. It was a play very similar to this by New York Giants receiver David Tyree that had kept the decisive drive alive in the 2008 Super Bowl, which ultimately ended the Patriots' hopes for a perfect 2007 season. That ridiculous catch was made with the football pinned against Tyree's helmet. This one might have been even more ridiculous, as it was just dumb luck that the ball fell on to his body rather than the ground.

Well, now Wilson had all the time in the world to run whatever plays necessary to score the go-ahead touchdown. He was no longer desperate or under the gun. He had literally dozens of options, the best of which was to hand off the ball to stud running back Marshawn Lynch, widely considered one of the most unstoppable at his position in all of football. He did just that on the next play, as Lynch rumbled to the one-yard line, putting another Super Bowl on the brink of extinction for the Patriots, in a manner that might be the most painful of the three since their last championship.

Then came the game's least believable moment. Instead of handing to Lynch again on the next play, Wilson threw a pass to the goal line -- and Butler stepped in to intercept the ball. The very same Butler whose inability to fully knock the ball away from Kearse had put them in this situation in the first place.

Game over, this time in favor of the Patriots.

At the Turf Club Hotel, I shouted until I was hoarse, and hugged my friend Conan.

Now, why were you reading this post again?

Oh yeah -- the point of all this was, if you had watched it as a movie, it would have seemed like a bunch of screenwriting bullshit. The veteran quarterback trying to win one last Super Bowl. The absurd catch that seemed so eerily familiar to the ones that had beaten him in the past. The rookie cornerback coming in to save the day, redeeming himself for an earlier miscue (even though that Kearse catch was just dumb luck). The play that never should have been made, costing the villains the victory. (The Seahawks are the villains in this scenario, because the Patriots won the game, and in a Hollywood movie the good guy has to prevail. Of course, I'm fully aware that Deflate-gate, other cheating scandals in the past and the general dislike directed toward a team that wins a lot would leave many viewers casting the Patriots as the villains instead). 

It's a succession of unlikelihoods that makes a fictitious movie about sports seem far-fetched. We love sports in real life precisely because "you couldn't script it better." On those rare occasions when sports resemble a movie about sports, that's when they are the greatest and most memorable. Conversely and perhaps a bit paradoxically, we don't get the same rush from that movie about sports because it sets off our bullshit meter. 

Super Bowl XLIX had to be a real event for us to believe it. To get that rush, we had to know it really happened.

I sure am glad I told my boss my son had conjunctivitis. 

Lady's choice: Play ball!

This morning at approximately 3 a.m. Los Angeles time, the Oakland A's and the Seattle Mariners played the first regular-season game of the 2012 baseball season.

No, it wasn't some kind of weird publicity stunt. Well, it was a publicity stunt of sorts, but not the kind you're thinking of. See, it wasn't 3 a.m. in Japan, where the first two games of the season will be played, as they have been a handful of times over the past decade.

The night before this first game, to celebrate the ceremonial arrival of spring that this first game traditionally represents, my wife and I watched Major League.

That probably wouldn't have been her choice -- but that's why our bi-weekly Tuesday night movie series is all about alternating who gets to choose. It's called Lady's Choice Movie Night, but as I've described in the past (and will probably have to again), I serve as the "lady" in this scenario once a month. It's really not worth going into. All you have to know is that it doesn't involve me dressing up in her clothing or anything.

But I wasn't just forcing my wife to watch something that would probably hold little appeal for her, because the ground rules of this movie series allow me to. She's not a sports fan, but she's a big fan of sports movies -- a much bigger fan than I am, in fact, so in that sense I was actually kind of throwing her a bone. (For a fuller discussion of my feelings about sports movies, see here.) "It's all about the human drama," she said last night, explaining the genre's appeal to her.

Well, there's plenty of human drama in Major League -- not to mention plenty of laughs, plenty of swears and plenty of actors who are still nearly as familiar today as they were back in 1989.

But let's start with those swears. On this viewing in particular I appreciated how damn much the characters in this movie swear. They elevate profanity to an art form. That's undoubtedly accurate when you're looking inside the locker rooms of professional athletes, but that doesn't mean Major League would be made like this if it were made today. Made today, Major League would be PG-13 and might have a smattering of naughty words. But it probably would not have a single f-bomb. And in fact, as I was discussing on Facebook earlier today, nearly every classic line in the movie contains an f-bomb -- with the notable exception of Bob Uecker's famous quip "Juuuust a bit outside." Forthwith:

"Who's THIS fucking guy?"

"Nice catch. Don't ever fucking do it again."

"If you ever tank another play like you did today, I'm going to rip your nuts off and shove 'em down your fucking throat."

"I say 'fuck you' Jobu. I do it myself."

"Strike this motherfucker out."

You get the idea.

Yet what's so wonderful about this movie is that it's not the least bit mean-spirited. That's just how we've changed as a movie audience in the past 23 years. Major League probably has at least 50 f-bombs in it -- isn't it funny how I'm still saying "f-bombs" even though I just wrote out the word "fuck" five times -- yet it's incredibly light-hearted and fun. It seems hard for us to imagine that kind of balance today. Movies that relied on such profanity would seem to be showing off, or trying to emulate Quentin Tarantino. Unlike Major League, which is just plain realistic.

Okay, not entirely realistic. I could certainly quibble with parts of the movie. Like, how would Pedro Cerrano ever keep a starting job all year if word spread around the league that he couldn't hit a curveball to save his life? Or, in order to pull off his big move at the end of the movie -- spoiler alert -- Jake Taylor would have to show bunt on the brush-back pitch from The Duke that knocks him to the ground. Yet he doesn't.

These things don't matter, and you wanna know why? Because Major League also has one of the tightest scripts around. It's incredibly detail-oriented, yet the details are always there to show us more about the characters and the "inside baseball" (an appropriate use for that term) we're seeing on screen. They are never belabored, and there are numerous short scenes that tell us plenty without even any dialogue. My wife even said that watching Major League gave her ideas about how to make her own script, on which she's stalled around page 40, even tighter. It's a point A to point B to point C type of screenwriting that blows you away with both its efficiency and its unexpected depth.

Let's take Rene Russo's character, Lynn, for example. Stop and think about how many times she appears in this movie. She's in like five scenes. Five! Yet you know a ton about Lynn and her relationship with Jake, because each scene accomplishes exactly what it needs to accomplish. There's no way you get to the end of that movie and realize she may have only had ten minutes of screen time. She feels like a full-on co-star, a fully developed romantic lead. Credit that to David S. Ward, a name I don't really know, who is nonetheless both the writer and director of this wonderful movie.

I also enjoyed realizing how many stars were in this movie, and how they were truly the right stars, perfectly complementing each other in the truest sense of the word "team." You've got the ever-reliable Tom Berenger as the aging catcher with bad knees. You've got fleet-footed Wesley Snipes as the hot shot outfielder who invites himself to spring training. You've got Corbin Bernsen as the primadonna with the big paycheck who will no longer sacrifice his body. You've got Dennis Haysbert, much more famous now than he was then, as the voodoo-practicing slugger who defected from Cuba. And you've got one of the most notorious personalities of the past year, Charlie Sheen, as an ex-con with a bad attitude and a haircut that looks like he lost a fight with a weedwacker. This is to say nothing of the delightful Russo, the hilarious Uecker and James Gammon, the salty old manager, who will be sorely missed after dying in July of 2010. (Odd -- he was 70 when he died, making him only about 49 in Major League. He plays at least ten years older than that.)

Oh, and I said something about laughs. Yeah, we were laughing consistently. Both of us. And this was at least my fifth time seeing the movie.

More than anything, though, I was interested to see Major League again because the former host of the Filmspotting podcast, Matty Robinson, unabashedly touts this movie as his favorite of all time. Think about that for a second. He is (or was) the co-host of a highfalutin podcast where, for example, they spent a half-hour dissecting, analyzing and gushing about The Tree of Life. Yet this modest little baseball comedy from 1989 is his favorite movie of all time.

Last night's viewing reminded me that Mr. Robinson might not be so crazy.

You're so money, baby

I think Moneyball is going to be awesome.

This may surprise some of you. After all, I spent two posts in the past two weeks (here and here) explaining to you why I don't really like sports movies.

Then again, the second post dug into that argument a little deeper. My biggest complaint is with standard sports movies -- and Moneyball promises to be anything but. (Now that I think about it, my original statement wasn't that bold -- who likes the most standard version of anything?)

It's a movie about an unconventional sports philosophy, made unconventionally. If you only know that Moneyball is a baseball movie starring Brad Pitt, let me tell you a little bit more about it. Brad Pitt plays Oakland Athletics general manager Billy Beane, who tried to make the most of his team's miniscule payroll by using a revolutionary new set of metrics to assess ballplayers. He figured he could get some players on the cheap because they were considered castoffs by their current teams. What their current teams weren't considering was that these players had the ability to get on base, and getting on base is the most basic building block to scoring runs. Didn't matter if how they got there wasn't flashy, or whether they could play good defense (or were even suited to playing their defensive position). All that mattered was their ability to get on base, and this radical philosophy coalesced into a ton of wins at dime store prices.

So not only was Beane's philosophy unconventional (to say the least), but this movie is unconventional as well. The book it was based on, written by Michael Lewis (full title: Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game), was a best seller, beloved by both baseball fans and people who don't know a double from a double play. So why shouldn't that make for a hit movie?

Because a lot of it is about analyzing baseball stats, which can be dry as toast if you are not a baseball fan. And not even the "good stats," like home runs. Beane didn't really care if you could hit home runs, though that was certainly a bonus. He cared if you could walk. He cared if you could get hit by the pitch. He cared if you had more of a likelihood of reaching base on an error than the next guy. (Okay, that's totally out of the hands of the batter -- but if he felt it was reasonable to consider that, he would have.)

It's exactly these reasons that I think the movie might be really interesting. I already know what happened in this particular season of Oakland A's baseball (2002 -- you can look it up if you want), so I know there could possibly be some "typical" baseball scenes of game-winning homers and other moments of joy. However, I also know the A's didn't win the World Series that year (spoiler alert!) so I know it certainly doesn't end in prototypical sports movie fashion. (Not without a massive outcry from anyone who considers the truth to be sacrosanct, that is.)

So I'm thinking this movie is going to do a lot of cool stuff with on-screen representations of baseball stats. I know this partially because I actually saw a bit of one such scene in the trailer.

And this is the kind of sports movie I can get behind. A movie that uses the sport in ways that don't put paramount importance on the outcome of one final match. A movie that uses a baseball locker room for color and atmosphere and humor, not for a rousing speech by the team captain before the big game.

And it does look like it will be funny, right? I especially like that bit where Pitt says "I'll tell them" with a mouth full of food.

But another reason I'm looking forward to Moneyball is that I've actually read the book on which it was based. As I've committed myself more and more to watching movies in the last half-decade, I've sadly been reading fewer and fewer books. I was never a fast reader, but I used to get through at least 2-3 per year. I don't even want to tell you my current reading rate. In the book I'm reading right now, a book I'm re-reading, I devoured about 150 pages of it while I was on vacation in Mexico back in April. Since then I've read about 50 more pages over nearly half a year. (In case it isn't obvious, I greatly regret this priority shift and hope to make a course correction ... next week. Yeah, next week.)

So when a film adaptation of a book I've actually read does come out, I'm all the more excited to get my eyeballs on it. In this case I'm not going to be judging "how they got the book wrong," because it's not that kind of book. Really, I'm just familiar with the stories presented in Lewis' book and I want to see how they materialize on screen.

One last reason I think Moneyball is going to be awesome: The poster above. Can you judge a movie by its poster? I hope so, because this poster is so money, baby. And I'm not just talking about its lush green color.

The one thing about Moneyball that's unfortunate -- but then in a different way fortunate -- is that I'll have to wait until next weekend to see it. My friend Don will be out in Southern California next weekend for a convention in San Diego, and I'm going to meet him down there to spend Saturday night in my sister city to the south. (I don't think San Diego is actually considered the "sister city" of Los Angeles, but it sounded good when I wrote it.) We'll be catching Moneyball in a theater that's as-yet unfamiliar to both of us. We always put an emphasis on seeing a good movie together when he visits, and hopefully, this will be no exception. (Last year we saw 127 Hours and Four Lions in the same weekend-long visit -- talk about some of the best of 2010.)

Truth is, I couldn't see Moneyball this weekend anyway because my wife will be two hours east of here for the weekend on a work weekend. My son and I will be joining her for about 24 hours from Saturday afternoon to Sunday afternoon, but I'm on daddy duty both before then and after then until she gets home on Tuesday.

So the flip side of not being physically able to see Moneyball this weekend is that I will have the living room TV at my command tonight, Sunday night and Monday night.

Suffice it to say I will use that time to watch movies, not to become a better reader again. (Next week, I promise ...)

Okay, which sports movies do I like?

I haven't done a Flickchart Tuesdays for a couple weeks. This week, it falls on a Thursday. So be it.

Last Friday I opened up a can of worms when I said I didn't like sports movies in a piece about Gavin O'Connor's Warrior (which I hadn't/haven't seen). I don't mean it was a can of worms in the sense that you tore me a new one -- just that it was an issue I'd wanted to broach on the blog for a long time now, but hadn't previously done. Now that the can is open, I want to dig deeper into it -- you know, to find the worms at the bottom, the ones that were squished by having all the other worms on top of them.

(Note: Although I owned up to the mistake in my comments section for that post, I thought I should repeat it here: My entire premise for the post was somewhat flawed. I thought (assumed?) that Warrior was a boxing movie, so the entire post was about boxing movies -- in fact, Warrior is about mixed martial arts. That may be splitting hairs, but I thought I should mention it here anyway just to set the record straight.)

I have this general idea in my head that I don't like sports movies, or at least that I am wary of them. Of course, that's not entirely true as I have some sports movies ranked very highly in Flickchart. Also, as I tried to get into last Friday, not all sports movies are created equal. Some sports movies are "sports movies" in the way we tend to think of them, where an underdog athlete/team overcomes huge obstacles or a huge talent gap to beat the favored Goliath, who is also probably kind of an asshole. Then there are some sports movies that just exist in and around the world of sports, concentrating on the characters rather than pointing toward the outcome of a climactic game.

For the purposes of this post, where I will look at my favorite sports movies, I'm not going to draw a distinction between the two categories. And at the end, I'm going to see how the list breaks down, between traditional and non-traditional sports movies. I think it'll be quite educational.

I'm also interested to see how the movies on this list are divided between the various sports. Since baseball is my favorite sport, will the lion's share of my favorite sports movies be baseball movies? Or will the sheer quality of the movie trump all other considerations, making the sport in question irrelevant? Of course, this can never be a perfectly fair exercise, since I'm quite sure I've seen more movies about baseball than I've seen about any other sport. I also know that I tend to like the presentation of baseball on film more than I do some other sports, particularly basketball. Basketball is my second favorite sport, yet I think basketball movies are almost always lacking.

In choosing what I consider to qualify as a sports movie, I'm going to make some judgment calls. For example, I'm not going to count Darren Aronofsky's The Wrestler, which would be very highly ranked if I did count it. This may be obvious, since professional wrestling is staged -- thereby removing it from the realm of "sport." But it's sort of a gray area. Would I include The Wrestler if it were the same movie, except that Mickey Rourke were playing a boxer? I guess I would, but it's a tough call -- it's still more about him, his character and his demons than it ever is about competition and athletic outcomes. I guess it will be a "know it when I see it" type situation, and I will include the ones that pass my sniff test.

Incidentally, I should note that Flickchart has a perfectly good filter that could tell me right off the bat what movies it considers to be sports movies. Just by using that filter I could immediately have my top ten (which I will discuss) and my 11-20 (which I will only list). However, the spirit of this exercise is not to use the filter, but rather, just to drill down through my rankings to see what I come up with. It's a little bit more interactive that way, and I get to choose what I think qualifies -- rather than having someone else choose that for me.

Okay. Shall we begin?

1. Field of Dreams (1989, Phil Alden Robinson). I guessed that this would be my favorite sports movie, and indeed, it is. Not surprisingly, it's about baseball, and not surprisingly, it isn't about the outcome of a particular game. What better way to please a sports fan who doesn't like sports movies, than to make the movie about the love of the game itself, and use it to help explore the relationship between a father and a son? Few images in sports movies are as iconic as the line of cars winding through the darkened roads leading up to the baseball field in an Iowa cornfield. Of course, the climax -- not a World Series game, but a simple father-son game of catch -- gets me every time. Flickchart: #126

2. The Karate Kid (1984, John G. Avildsen). I wasn't sure at first if I should include this, because I tend to think of it as a coming-of-age story first and foremost. But heck, karate is a sport, right? I wouldn't want to say otherwise, lest a bunch of martial arts devotees come up to me on the street and kick me in the windpipe. My highest-ranked David vs. Goliath sports movie ... and yeah, the Goliath sure is an asshole in this movie. In fact, couldn't you say that Daniel-sahn is the ultimate underdog, and Mr. Miyagi the ultimate coach? Flickchart: #224

3. Rocky III (1982, Sylvester Stallone). You may recall in my aforementioned piece on Warrior that I described this as my favorite boxing movie of all time, and also told you that I hadn't seen either of the two Rocky movies that came before it. You may also recall that I love this movie so much because I had it on videotape when I was a kid, and watched it probably ten times. Rocky III is an interesting kind of underdog movie, because the former heavyweight champion of the world is the one who's the underdog. Not your typical underdog at all, but it works in this movie, in part because they make Mr. T such an (I'll say it again) asshole as the physically superior Goliath. At least Hulk Hogan is a good sport after Rocky comes back to whip him. (Funny tie-in to what I said about The Wrestler earlier -- in Rocky III, wrestling is treated as if it were real.) Flickchart: #226

4. Major League (1989, David S. Ward). My second favorite baseball movie is in fact a typical David vs. Goliath type sports movie, but I still love it. (I actually name-checked this in last week's post as well.) There's something about that goofy group of misfits they get to play the woebegone Cleveland Indians that just makes this movie so lovable. Perhaps what I also like about it is that the big finale does not involve them winning the World Series -- it just involves them winning the division, hence making it to the playoffs. Fictitious sports movies where the grand finale involves something less than the whole enchilada have their own kind of charm and restraint. Flickchart: #264

5. Eight Men Out (1988, John Sayles). And baseball rears its head again. And here we have our first sports movie that's a recreation of actual events. This kind of sports movie theoretically interests me more than the David vs. Goliath sports movie, because I know whatever the outcome was, it was not the result of a screenwriter dreaming up some wild and improbable ending. In fact, the outcomes of the games in Eight Men Out are anticlimactic by design, since the movie's about the Chicago White Sox throwing the 1919 World Series. Very definitely a period piece about integrity and honor, not to mention the corruption of the purity of a sport Sayles clearly loves, than a straight sports movie. Flickchart: #282

6. Cobb (1994, Ron Shelton). One of my favorite biopics of all time just happens to be about one of the greatest baseball players of all time. It is borderline in terms of whether it qualifies here, because it's much more about an irascible old man and the sportswriter who's trying to write a biography of him, than it is actually about baseball itself. In fact, if memory serves, there is only a single scene devoted to Ty Cobb's on-field exploits, which is included to demonstrate his cruel and ruthless nature -- as he steals second and then third base, he comes in spikes up at the fielder waiting to tag him out, seeming to relish the harm he inflicts on the opposing player. Still, my own personal definition of a sports movie is broad enough to include Shelton's underappreciated gem. Flickchart: #474

7. He Got Game (1998, Spike Lee). The first movie on this list that isn't about either baseball or fighting. (Or in the case of Cobb, both.) I wouldn't have immediately produced this title as my favorite basketball movie of all time, but it makes sense that it is. And of course, it makes sense that it isn't about actual games -- basketball game choreography tends to be some of the sloppiest sports choreography in movies. In fact, like Field of Dreams, it's mostly about the relationship between a father and a son. I also like the way the film touches on the business aspects of sports, how Jesus Shuttlesworth (Ray Allen) is trying to resist the corrupting influences of sports agents (before he's eligible to use them). Of course, since it's Spike Lee and Lee loves basketball, it's not surprising he'd make a good basketball movie -- an intelligent basketball movie. This movie also has to do with why I love NBA player Ray Allen so much -- even before he became a member of my hometown Boston Celtics. Flickchart: #499

8. Bull Durham (1988, Ron Shelton). And the Hollywood director most known for being dedicated to sports movies makes his second appearance on the list. I must say my appreciation of Bull Durham is more abstract than the other films on this list -- I remember liking it a lot, but I've seen it only once, and I elevate it in my rankings based more on its general reputation than on a specific love I have for it. In fact, I can't even remember if there's a climactic game in which Crash Davis, Nuke LaLoosh et al are involved -- I suspect there is, but I couldn't say for sure. So maybe this is more of a romantic comedy than a straight-up sports movie, but in no world are you not going to say that Bull Durham is a sports movie. Flickchart: #509

9. Blue Crush (2002, John Stockwell). This is another fringe inclusion, because it's a lot more about teenagers coming of age and a bunch of beautiful Hawaiian scenery than sports. But at the heart of the story is a surfing competition, so I'm including it here. It may be sacrilege to some of my readers (I'm thinking of one in particular) that I am counting this as my favorite surfing movie of all time, but it really worked for me, and I've been longing to go back for a second visit to see if I wasn't crazy. Flickchart: #513

10. Bring It On (2000, Peyton Reed). And we finish the discussion portion of the list with possibly another cheat. You don't think "sports movie" when you first think of Bring It On -- several other genres would occur to you first. However, there's no doubt that cheerleaders are incredible athletes, and just as I wouldn't want to cross a karate expert by telling him his pursuit is not a sport, neither would I want to cross a cheerleader. (Sharp nails.) Bring It On builds toward the big showdown with the rival team at the end, just as dozens of other sports movies do. It's most likely the other aspects of this movie -- the cheery, bubblegum world, Kirsten Dunst at her most spunky and fetching -- that cause me to rank it as highly as I do. But the sports aspect also works for me because it's not an underdog team trying to rise up -- it's the multi-time state championship trying to hang onto glory under a new regime, and make itself respectable after a cheating scandal. Neither does the film have a strictly predictable outcome ... though you can predict it pretty easily if you know anything about Hollywood racial politics, and can sense the subtleties in how the rival inner-city team is portrayed. Flickchart: #597

And now, the honorable mentions:

11. Surf's Up (2007, Ash Brannon & Chris Buck). Flickchart: #613
12. When We Were Kings (1996, Leon Gast). Flickchart: #686
13. Raging Bull (1980, Martin Scorsese). Flickchart: #704
14. Seabiscuit (2003, Gary Ross). Flickchart: #709
15. We Are Marshall (2006, MdG). Flickchart: #715
16. The Karate Kid Part II (1986, John G. Avildsen). Flickchart: #752
17. Hoop Dreams (1994, Steve James). Flickchart: #812
18. Happy Gilmore (1996, Dennis Dugan). Flickchart: #889
19. Caddyshack (1980, Harold Ramis). Flickchart: #906
20. Chariots of Fire (1981, Hugh Hudson). Flickchart: #911

So, no hockey movies make my top 20. Consistent with my sports fandom in general. Also, I've really only seen one or two hockey movies. In fact, I can't immediately think of another hockey movie I've seen other than Miracle (ranked at #1694).

The sport I'm not seeing here, which I do really love, is tennis, but that's because there are almost no movies about tennis. The only movie devoted to tennis that I've ever seen is Wimbledon, currently at #1568 (which is too low -- it's a sweet movie).

So I feel like I had to make exceptions all over the place on this list. For example, once I included Blue Crush, I felt like I needed to include what is apparently my second favorite surf movie (blasphemy again): Surf's Up, which is actually an animated movie. Did I expect an animated movie to appear on this list? I did not. But you have to make the judgment calls as you see 'em. And part of me even wonders if surfing movies should show up here, since they are sort of their own genre. If there had started to be more of them, I might have arbitrarily excluded them.

There were also some movies I didn't include that might have made it in under logic I'd used previously. If I include surf movies, do I include skateboarding movies? Well, I didn't, passing up the opportunity to include Dogtown and Z-Boys on this list.

Not surprisingly, baseball was the leader here, but not by as much as I expected: Five films out of the top 20, all appearing in the top 10. Oddly enough, boxing was the next most prevalent, with three movies -- even after I said last week that I didn't like boxing movies. Then again, I've probably seen more movies about boxing than I have about either basketball or football -- strange as that may be to say -- so it doesn't surprise me that a couple more of them showed up here.

In terms of what kind of sports movies they were, it seems clear that most of them were not of the David vs. Goliath variety. In fact, the only ones I'd describe that way are the two Karate Kid movies, Rocky III, Major League, Surf's Up and Happy Gilmore. The rest were in-and-around sports type movies, as well as documentaries and recreations of events that really happened.

Useful exercise, I thought. What about you?

Good (Celtics) vs. Evil (Lakers)

It being the NBA playoffs was probably only a small factor in why the Martin Lawrence vehicle Rebound rose to the top of my Netflix queue.

More important was the fact that I'd been approved to review it a long time ago, and I like to go through and clean house on my older approvals from time to time.

And though I didn't like this movie, I didn't hate it, and one of the primary reasons for my not-hatred was that it served as an allegory for the NBA's greatest rivalry, prizing my side over the other.

You know I live in Los Angeles -- but if you thought I liked the Los Angeles sports teams, you'd be dead wrong. I'm from Boston, and my Boston teams will always be my teams. I have a limited fondness for the LA teams that don't have a natural conflict with my Boston teams (say, the Dodgers), but I hate hate hate the ones that do (say, the Lakers).

And by the end of Rebound, I was quite sure that the movie was on my side, too.

See, Lawrence's disgraced college basketball coach, Roy McCormick (another one of those Irish black dudes, like Shaquille O'Neal), is forced, through a strange set of circumstances, to coach a hapless middle school basketball team. How hapless? We see them lose games by scores of 56-0 and 109-0. That's right, they get shut out in a basketball game. Which, by the way, has never happened, anywhere, in the history of time. But it happens to this team twice. Screenwriting subtlety at its finest.

The team is from Mt. Vernon Middle School, where Coach Roy attended middle school himself, and they are called the Smelters. A somewhat unusual mascot, yes? I thought so too -- and when I realized that they dress in green, I could not help make an association with the Boston Celtics, who also wear green. Smelters and Celtics sound pretty darn similar.

But I actually sort of deduced this in reverse, because the first thing I noticed was the signature purple and gold worn by the Smelters' chief rivals, the Vikings. The Los Angeles Lakers, the chief rivals of the Celtics, also wear purple and gold. And while the words Lakers and Vikings have fewer sounds in common than Smelters and Celtics, they do both have the letter K in the middle of a two-syllable word. (If you want to go a step further, the Vikings are the professional football team from Minnesota, and Minnesota is where the Lakers originated before moving to Los Angeles -- hence their name.)

There are other aspects that enforce the good-evil dynamic as well as the Celtic-Laker dynamic. The Vikings coach, played by Patrick Warburton, is a very tall white man (like Laker coach Phil Jackson) and very evil (unlike Jackson, but then again, that's the kind of assessment a person would make subjectively). Meanwhile, Lawrence is a short black man, kind of like Celtics coach Doc Rivers. Both were coaching their respective teams at the time the film was released, although the chronology was somewhat goofy: Rivers began as Celtics coach in 2004, the same year that Jackson stopped being the Lakers coach. However, Jackson spent only one season out of the Lakers coaching position, before being rehired about two weeks before Rebound hit theaters.

Surely someone else other than me must have noticed this, but the movie was such a dud (it made only $5 million with a plumb July 1st release date) that no one ever really considered it worth writing about. No internet search of relevant terms gave me anything useful.

So I decided to look up the writers, to see if I could find anything in their histories that would have caused them to give the film a blatant Celtics bias. After all, movies are made in Los Angeles, so you'd expect the reverse bias if anything.

It didn't take long to figure it out. The story was developed by Ed Decter and John J. Strauss, who also wrote There's Something About Mary along with the Farrelly Brothers. Never mind the precipitous drop in quality from Mary to Rebound -- the relevant info is that the Farrellys and these two other guys are all New Englanders. Decter went to Wesleyan University in Connecticut, at least. It stands to reason that they were Farrelly buddies, since Mary was the first movie gig for both Decter and Strauss, who had previously worked together in TV.

I originally thought I'd found a connection with the third guy who receives a story credit, William Wolff. However, I suspect his IMDB page could be screwed up. His most recent two credits are in 2005 and 1999, but it was his third most recent credit that caught my attention: a TV series called Boston Blackie. However, since this TV series was apparently on the air in 1953, and his older credits are also from the early 1950s, I suspect that two different people may have been morphed into one. I'm sure that kind of thing happens with some frequency with a database as large as IMDB's.

That's a pretty long post for a pretty forgettable movie. But that's what we're all about here on The Audient.

And just as the (spoiler alert! ha ha) Smelters prevailed over the Vikings in Rebound, here's hoping the same will happen in the NBA Finals this year, if my team and my most hated team do in fact meet again.

Secretariat finally crosses the finish line

How in the world could it have been 37 years since Secretariat won the triple crown of horse racing, yet we are only just now getting a major motion picture about him?

I'm sure if I delved into it, I'd find a history of some legal wrangling over the rights to the story of probably the most famous racehorse of all time. But it's still very strange to me that it's taken so long, and that we've seen so many other horse stories come to the big screen in the meantime, many of whom were horses we'd never heard of until a movie was made about them. Seabiscuit seems like the most prominent example of this. I don't know about you, but I had no idea who or what Seabiscuit was until the movie came along.

Thirty-seven years seems like a particularly long time when you consider that the most talked-about "period piece" of the fall is The Social Network, which deals with events that occurred entirely since Seabiscuit hit theaters in 2003. Presidents don't even leave office before films are made about them (Oliver Stone's W in 2008). You can no longer afford to let the "appropriate amount of time" pass before delving into a historical event cinematically. If you do, someone else will get there first. Even the highly sensitive events of 9/11, which were once thought to be utter cinematic taboo, only took five years to reach theaters (United 93 and World Trade Center in 2006).

Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that the most famous version of anything rarely gets an interesting cinematic treatment. In the first month of my blog's existence, I wondered why there had not been a definitive biopic about Martin Luther King Jr. And I concluded, among other things, that there was more mileage in the story of a civil rights figure we did not know quite as much about, namely, Malcolm X, who came viscerally to life in one of Spike Lee's best films.

Similarly, I expect Secretariat not to get the same kudos that Seabiscuit got. Seabiscuit was roundly praised and eventually earned Oscar nominations for its screenplay, sound, art direction, cinematography, costume design and editing, as well as a nomination for best picture. Even with twice the best picture nominees this year, Secretariat doesn't seem like it will figure into that discussion, going just on my impressions of it and some early reviews.

Of course, this argument is pretty specious, because prestigious subject matter does not always get matched up with prestigious filmmaking talent. Secretariat director Randall Wallace, for example, has only two major directing gigs to his credit, the forgettable duo of The Man in the Iron Mask (1998) and We Were Soldiers (2002). Why hand the reins, as it were, of this film to a man who hasn't directed a film in eight years? Only Disney knows that.

Then again, Seabiscuit director Gary Ross had only directed Pleasantville, five years earlier, and doesn't have his next feature coming out until next year -- which will be a similar eight-year gap, but a slightly more surprising one, given that his last film earned seven Oscar nominations. (Though, we should note, none for directing.)

Hollywood can be a mysterious place. I won't even give you the list of terrible directors who have directed a half-dozen films since Ross directed Seabiscuit.

Even if I didn't have a baby at home severely limiting the number of films I can see in the theater, I don't think I'd make Secretariat a priority. Perhaps it's because it seems to have a "been there, done that" quality to it -- which, granted, is a strange thing to say about the biopic of a horse that had been places and done things most horses never had. Perhaps it's because I don't really like sports movies, especially ones where I already know what happens. Perhaps it's because Disney's live action movies are often lacking in nuance or edge, and this figures to be no different.

Too bad, because Secretariat was an exceptional athlete, and really deserves a good film to be made about him. ESPN ranked him 35th on a list of the 100 best athletes of the 20th century.

Then again, have you seen a good movie about the #1 or #2 athletes on that list, Michael Jordan or Babe Ruth? There has been no Jordan movie, and Ruth has appeared as a character in a number of not-very-good movies, most notably Arthur Hiller's The Babe (1992). Muhammad Ali, the #3 on the list, was featured in a well-made biopic that is still not very memorable: Michael Mann's Ali (2001).

In fact, going down that list, the next athlete on the list who's even the subject of a prominent film is Ty Cobb at #20. I found Ron Shelton's Cobb (1994) to be a dynamite sports biopic, one of my favorite of all time. But Cobb is only the sixth highest ranked baseball player on the list, lending more credence to the idea that the best of anything rarely makes the most interesting film. Perhaps that's why there are not prominent films about Willie Mays, Hank Aaron, Jackie Robinson or Ted Williams, the other four between him and Ruth on the list.

When you consider that the youngest on that list, Hank Aaron, retired in 1976, only three years after Secretariat won his triple crown, maybe 37 years isn't such a long time to wait after all.