A young John Wayne. A chicken farm in peril. A hockey team that's sort of like the New York Rangers, and John Wayne playing hockey for that team to save his chicken farm. It's 1937, and it's about as weird as it sounds.
The NBA was a strange place in the late 1970s, if probably not quite as strange as the version depicted in 1979's gloriously batshit Jonathan Winters/Julius Erving vehicle The Fish That Saved Pittsburgh. Few things, really, could be much stranger.
A movie theater owned by Shaquille O'Neal canceled a screening of a documentary about Mumia Abu-Jamal. Dave Zirin is not happy about it. What's going on here?
In which Alan Thicke and Werner Herzog, two of the great film artists of their generation, tackle the filmic possiblilities of skiing. Not in the same film, sadly.
The very term "Cinderella Team" is a reminder of the cinematic aspect that's inherent to NCAA Tournament upstarts. But in the case of Florida Gulf Coast University, an epic upstart with a beachfront location, casting the movie adaptation is almost too easy. The hard part is traveling back in time to 1985 to make it.
In the long list of films about college basketball, only one dares to cast Kadeem Hardison as a ghostly version of J.R. Rider, and it happens to be the only one that understands how wise it is to cast David Paymer as a hard-driving basketball coach. The 6th Man is that film.
Before the World Baseball Classic, slightly after the actual fall of the Soviet Union, and definitely on inexpensive Canadian locations, one baseball movie dared to ask: could David Mamet's favorite actor coach a ragtag bunch of Soviet athletes to semi-competence?
Finally, buddy-cop movie that's secretly a long satirical skit about the NHL, in which a mismatched pair of francophone and anglophone Canadian cops team up to solve a murder and realize, in the process, that they both really hate Gary Bettman.
Reggie White only got one chance to make an uplifting, evangelical-flavored film about believing in yourself (and God). Thankfully, it features Pat Morita, Brett Favre, MC Hammer and wrestling's The Big Show. Surprisingly, it's kind of... good?
It may be some time before the Buffalo Bills play in another Super Bowl. Luckily, there's Second String, the movie in which a tiny Canadian quarterback with a big heart leads the Bills to an unexpected win. Also, Jon Voight wears a hat and looks angry.
