Because sport movies are better

Sport is the last thing on my mind: it is the last on my priority scale, I have a hard time understanding what the fuss about it is, why there is so much money in it and so on and so forth. And yet, when it comes to sport movies, I am the biggest fan. Maybe everyone needs a certain amount of sport adrenaline in their lives, but given that I am not an admirer of real sweat, I need to fall back on the romantic version of it: namely, sport movies.

All sport movies are different, but there are some common elements. I think the most frequent one is that sport is a “tool” to tell a story about serious problems: racism, redemption, decadence, politics, love and so on and so forth. Besides this, this kind of movies differ in two main ways:

-Some of them end up good: the redemption is complete and the champions are victorious; some of them do not: the sense of decadence that pervades them taunt the protagonists all the way to the end and after.

-Some of them have the sport as a main character: it is always a tool to give a message, but it is the main tool. Others, focus more on the private lives of the characters or the background story and the sport is a secondary element.

Usually, these two sets of differences go together. Example of movies in which the redemption does not happen are Raging Bull (1980) and The Wrestler (2008): there are scenes concerning the matches, even very long and intense ones, but “the rest” is more prominent. Neither of these ends well. On the other end, there are those movies where the scenes of the actual games are the first one coming to end are usually the ones that end well: one example, to stay in the fighting field, is the Rocky saga. Of course, there are exception to this: for example, The Fighter (2010) and Invictus (2009) have, in my opinion, a definite prominence of non sport narration (although the last game in Invictus is heart racing!) and yet they end up well. Another exception is Warrior (2011), which achieves a good balance between those adrenaline sport scenes and all the personal dimension of the characters, touching many different themes in a deep way. However, this movie is over two hours long and this balance is achieved through a quite neat separation between pure sport and background (see full review here).

It is obvious that there are lots of possibilities to meet everyone’s taste. My personal preference goes for the fairytales one, the ones that, even if you know your hero is going to win, make you bite on your nails and jump on your sit. Some of my all time favorites are Remember the Titans (2000), Coach Carter (2005) and Glory Road (2011). In all of them, there is a strong personality coach that leads a team of high school/collage kids to victory. They all deal with racism, marginalization, difficult conditions and so on…and sport (respectively football, basketball and basketball) saves them all. In all of them, sport is the star of the film, just as I like it: a combination of great photography, editing and music makes the topic scenes epic. And a round of applause goes to the “games choreographer”, which are former players that support the shooting of the games scenes, directing everyone just as if it was ballet.

There are tons of films worth watching, but I cannot mention them all. There are two recent ones I would suggest. One, I would have not bet 1 cent on: Real Steel (2011). I saw it only because I adore Hugh Jackman and it surprised me: set in a future in which boxing is made by huge robots and piloted by people (like a real life videogame), the last fight had a real impact on me and, overall, I found it a very well done entertaining movie. The other, much better one is Money Ball (2011), whose merits I have already praised here.

It does not matter which sport, who is playing, for what they are playing, if they win or not; there is always something magical about sport movies that, I am sorry to say, is just not there in real life one. At least not for me.