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Synopsis
An Extraordinary True Story.
Every school day, African-American teenagers William Gates and Arthur Agee travel 90 minutes each way from inner-city Chicago to St. Joseph High School in Westchester, Illinois, a predominately white suburban school well-known for the excellence of its basketball program. Gates and Agee dream of NBA stardom, and with the support of their close-knit families, they battle the social and physical obstacles that stand in their way. This acclaimed documentary was shot over the course of five years.
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More
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"If I don't make it, don't you forget about me."
At once a class-conscious procedural of the American dream (its genuine allure vs. the abuse of young bodies needed to sustain it) and a richly detailed portrait of the emotional lives of human beings that would otherwise be treated like statistics. One of the most intimate studies of the economic realities of this system and the people most preyed upon/left behind by it. Every shot of Curtis watching his little brother fuck up a play is heartbreaking, nobody is more aware of the personal stakes of William not making it than he is. Shoutout to Spike Lee who shows up for 30 seconds in the middle of the film to…
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the great lies of the american dream: that we all are born at the same starting line in the race to the top, that it's possible for one to achieve success without the help of encouraging adults working at thankless jobs, that you don't have to sell a part of your soul to get it. victory and happiness are so, so fragile.
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Impressively, this did not feel like a 3 hour movie. Though its initial intended medium of television is somewhat evident in the look of it, that really adds a journalistic air to it that is fitting. It still looks good; it just also looks like public television sometimes.
What struck me most while watching this was the implication that the best way these kids saw for improving their lives was to escape the places they were from. While I share almost nothing with these kids in terms of where I come from or how I grew up, I did share that need to find a way out of where I was from. Though I had a decent family, small town…
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This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.
It really is about so much more than basketball. (Note that it doesn’t end with William and Arthur’s final high school games, but rather with their high school graduations.) It’s like Spike Lee says when he shows up at an elite camp for college prospects to warn them to understand the role they play in a larger system: “This whole thing is revolving around money.” Dreams are beautiful. Until they don’t come true.
The prevailing feeling left by Hoop Dreams is that there are two games; the one on the court, and the one played around it by coaches and scouts. And that second game sure seems rigged. But what else are William and Arthur supposed to dream about?
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”That's why when somebody say, "when you get to the NBA, don't forget about me", and that stuff. Well, I should've said to them, "if I don't make it, don't you forget about me.’”
BUZZER BEATER 10
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Hoop Dreams is truly an American epic. It a landmark of cinema and the sort of film that you measure all others by. Cinema is the most powerful medium, because it has the ability to be the most objective medium. It can show a moving image of real life which, without comment, can tell you of an existence. Through this matter of fact documentary, we get everything else. It of a canvas of a thousand stories achieved by just focusing on two. It is not a film about basketball, it is a film about education, family, race, class, employment, drugs, crime, welfare, poverty, religion, and values.
Hoop Dreams depicts basic dreams, essentially people who want to lift themselves out of…
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The burden of dreams…
Fourteen-year-olds watching parasitic mentors descend on the next possible meal ticket.
Fourteen-year-olds transferring to schools where no one looks like them.
Fourteen-year-olds carrying the dreams of brothers and coaches and friends and people they don’t even know.
Fourteen-year-olds watching a father come back into the picture at an opportune time.
Fourteen-year-olds hearing about pots of gold and coming home to find the electricity’s been turned off.
Fourteen-year-olds with matriarchs cutting through the noise.
Fourteen-year-olds coming to the realization that they’re a knee injury away from all of this going away.
The stakes shouldn’t be this high this early, but they just are. What a privilege it is for those of us who actually got to be kids when we were kids.
Favorite Documentaries
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I watched this like so long ago I think I tried to say on letterboxd that roger Ebert was right when he said it was the best movie of its year, better than pulp fiction
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“A film like Hoop Dreams is what the movies are for. It takes us, shakes us, and makes us think in new ways about the world around us. It gives us the impression of having touched life itself.”
Ebert gets it, guys.
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‘You have to realise that nobody cares about you. You’re black. You’re a young male. All you’re supposed to do is deal drugs and mug women. The only reason why you’re here... you can make their team win. If their team wins, these schools get a lot of money.’
~ Spike Lee in "Hoop Dreams."
This is the seminal sports documentary about a couple of young men with basketball dreams, whom we are first introduced to as awe-struck 14-year-olds immersed in television monitors beaming footage of their heroes Isiah Thomas and Michael Jordan playing the game professionally. Their hunger to one day play at the NBA level is an evident, all-consuming desire. At that age these iconic figures are their…
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"Basketball is my ticket out of the ghetto"
Hoop Dreams seems too good and too unbelievable to be true. The peak we get inside the lives of these two boys and their families is so candid and emotional, it's hard to believe it all wasn't meticulously scripted out. Hoop Dreams has the right to be called a once in a lifetime phenomenon. Movies of this power and originality don't come around all that often, so when they do, it's something special to say the absolute least.
The film centers around two boys, Arthur Agee and William Gates. They live and breathe basketball. Both of them dream of the day they grace the basketball courts and television screens as a player…
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This documentary ultimately demonstrates that the culture of competitive gaming does not have much room to appreciate or even recognise the notion of kind-heartedness. It began its existence as an undertaking on sports played on recreational grounds before ripening into the tale of two high school students in Chicago pursuing their ambition of becoming professional basketball players.
Maintaining strides with their disappointments and accomplishments, director and narrator Steve James develops an extraordinary story of inner-city struggles, and as the students stumble into manhood from the debris of their endeavours what materialises goes far beyond the conventional sports feature. Hoop Dreams hauls its themes together and implicitly questions the standard judgment of athletes as enfants terrible.