Posted on 02/18/2009 9:50:28 AM PST by TheConservativeComeback
If you have been reading this blog since its inception one month ago, you know that we like to mix in a lot of sports and movie posts. Today we combine those with our top 5 sports movies of all time.
A couple of rules you should be aware of with our selection process. First, if your favorite sports movie was made in the 40s or 50s...it is not on this list. I'm going to speak the truth right now and say what a lot of people won't say, Pauly Shore would've been a 5 time Oscar winner in the 40s. For the most part the acting was terrible.
Second, being that this list is so short we decided that sports comedies would be put under a different category. So while Slapshot, Major League, and Caddyshack are some of the great movies ever made, they fall under a different list.
(Excerpt) Read more at theconservativecomeback.blogspot.com ...
‘Yeah the same situation happened down in Odessa Texas when Buzz Bissinger wrote Friday Night Lights. Dont mention his name if you go down there.’
I heard that, I think in an interview sometime in the past two years. No surprise.
I liked Miracle. Did you ever see Mystery, Alaska? It was a good "Rocky-on-Ice" movie.
didnt crack the top 5
“The Worlds Fastest Indian”
Slow in your old age.
It’s a lighthearted post. You might be taking that line a little too seriously
I'm going to speak the truth right now and say what a lot of people won't say, Pauly Shore would've been a 5 time Oscar winner in the 40s. For the most part the acting was terrible.I don't know whether Pauly Shore would have won an Oscar in any earlier time, never mind the 40s and the 50s, but the writing in a lot of those 40s and 50s sports movies was even worse than the acting---and so (as, for example, Pride of the Yankees, which bowdlerised both the Lou Gehrig story as a whole and the famous Yankee Stadium farewell speech to the point that, knowing what I now know of the story and speech, the film is unwatchable no matter how much you admire Gary Cooper or Teresa Wright) were the absolute distortions of history. (In the Gehrig case you can paraphrase, of all people, Sonny Barger of the Hell's Angels: Ain't the truth good enough for 'em?)
So which sports films would I pick, then? Here's my list:
Bang the Drum Slowly
The Bingo Long Traveling All-Stars and Motor Kings
Bull Durham
Eight Men Out
Field of Dreams
For Love of the Game
Hoosiers
The Natural
Raging Bull
61*
I thought League of Their Own pushed all the right buttons. I even love the 2 theme songs: Now and Forever by Carole King and ‘This Used To Be My Playground’, sung and allegedly written by Madonna. (I’ve heard that Madonna takes credit for things her staff writes)
The Running Man
It should have. For nothing else euthanasia day at the geriatric ward scene was brilliant!
Grace Pander: Well, those doctors - dear friends of mine - have been pretty smug all these years setting up the old folks. Frankenstein must have decided it was their turn.
Harold: Which only goes to show that even the fearsome Frankenstein has a one-hundred-percent, red-blooded American sense of humor, heh heh.
>> Everybody cheats. Even the Italians.
Ever watch the World Cup? The Italians are the champions of cheating.
How is Miracle not on the list? A great movie and perhaps the greatest moment in American sports history
Good list. Im not as big a Field Of Dreams fan as a lot of other people seem to be
I resemble that remark.
“I believe we live two lives, one we learn form and one we live with afterward.”
It’s clear you haven’t lived the first as of yet if you prefer juvenile sex and bodily function jokes over a good dramatic story of failure and redemption.
Great movie but it can’t top the memories of watching it as it happened.
I’d also add Cinderella Man to the list
Sometimes the actual events don’t make for good cinema. Hoosiers is a great film, with a great score and a wonderful cast. Its based on a true story, it never claimed to depict the actual events.
That would have made it a documentary.
Good list. Im not as big a Field Of Dreams fan as a lot of other people seem to beI'll tell you a factoid about Field of Dreams you may not have known. (For the record: I think the novel on which it was based, Shoeless Joe, was better, but I still think it's a terrific film.) The man who actually designed the cornfield baseball field was once a major league baseball player: Chris Krug, briefly a catcher for the Chicago Cubs, probably remembered best for being number one of the three strikeouts Sandy Koufax nailed to secure his perfect game in 1965.
Krug went on to earn a degree in landscape architecture after his very brief playing career . . .
Would have been on there but comedies are a different list. Who doesnt like Lacy Underall?
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