Spike Lee’s Essential Films (SLEF) — Episode 6: Hoop Dreams (1994)
Inspired by my friend Krishan’s 2016 goal to watch 100 films from 100 different countries, my dad and I have tasked ourselves with the similar project to watch all the films on Spike Lee’s Essential Films list. Every week we’ll try and have a quick conversation about what we just watched.
The list was picked out from a shortlist of many, on the basis that there are about 50 films on it that we have both not seen, and that cross a wide variety of genres, years, countries etc. I am not particularly a fan of Spike Lee as a director, but I do believe he has good taste!
We are using the site www.icheckmovies.com to track our progress. It’s a site I highly endorse for all film nerds and list lovers — you can find my profile here.
This week we watched the classic basketball documentary, Hoop Dreams.
Brief Synopsis: A film following the lives of two inner-city Chicago boys who struggle to become college basketball players on the road to going professional.
David: Right then. This was the sort of film I was expecting to get from Spike Lee.
Mick: Yep, he was even in it. Bit self-indulgent Spike.
David: But we like basketball, so this was a good one for us. It didn’t feel like 3 hours to me.
Mick: Yes I found it a very absorbing film. We really got to know the central characters very well, and I thought it was a poignant commentary on American society, plus the film contains a ton of great basketball shots as well. It was particularly eye-opening seeing the situation for urban black communities.
David: Yeah from our vantage point in the UK that seems like a whole other world. High school arenas the same size as professional sports stadiums in England, televised high school sports, the racial segregation and wealth disparity, the underlying racial condescension — all these things feel foreign to me, and I’m mostly thankful for that.
Mick: Well, you’d have liked to have played at school in front of thousands of people, wouldn’t you?
David: As long as I didn’t have to shoot free throws!
Mick: The thing that I kept coming back to when I was watching, was if you’re the producers, how do you make this film? How do you make a story out of the situation, when you have no idea how things are going to pan out?
David: The journey is the destination. I think the choice they made to cut and release the film when they did validates that. If their aim was to document a young man’s rise to the NBA they could’ve waited another year or two to see whether Arthur Agee made it. It’s pure documentary, it’s a time capsule for a period of time for these two young men.
Mick: When they started do you think they were planning to end production when the kids graduated high school? Or do you think they started filming not knowing where it would end up?
David: I imagine like most documentaries they would’ve gone into it with some sort of planned time frame, but whether that changed over the course of shooting it, who knows.
Mick: I also wonder how much footage they filmed. I mean, how involved are the filmmakers, did they just drop by every few months and film a few shots or were they a constant presence in these kids’ lives.
David: Yeah and if they were a constant presence it begs the question of whether that presence could’ve been detrimental to the kids’ development, both in terms of basketball and their education. If they came into these households and told them they were filming a documentary tracking the journey of young kids to the NBA, just think how this could warp the expectations of these kids and their families.
Mick: Of course the real stars of the film were those Nineties spectacles. I had forgotten how bad fashion was in the early nineties.
David: I think the coach, Gene Pingatore, was thinking more of practicality than fashion when he picked those glasses.
Mick: Besides the glasses one of the things I was struck by was the segregation between the races. The scenes in some of the districts of Chicago, it was not just that most people were black or most people were white — it was one or the other, all black or all white. The St Joseph’s basketball games were the most striking examples, not a white face on the court, not a black face in the crowd.
David: When Arthur Agee went off to Mineral Area College and was taken to see his accommodation, a small shack seemingly in the middle of nowhere that was shared with 6 other black students — 6 of the 7 black students at the whole university — that seemed outrageous. I thought it was a racist joke of some sort.
Mick: One of the lessons from the film was about being successful at sport. You’ve got to have the motivation, and that comes from enjoying what you’re doing. William lost his passion for playing, whereas Arthur never did. Despite it seeming at the start of the film like William would be a huge star and Arthur a no-hoper, in fact things turned out almost the opposite.
David: Along with that I think the real villain of the piece was William’s coach Gene Pingatore. His harsh methods seemed to sap the joy of playing out of William. Like he said towards the end, “it began to feel like a job”.
Mick: For all the close basketball games, the highs and lows, I think the most poignant moment was when Arthur’s mother got her Nursing Certificate.
David: It almost felt like a reminder that some things are bigger than sport, and that’s the case for 99.9% of people who don’t get the opportunity to be sports stars.
Mick: So conclusions?
David: I was impressed with the film. The subject matter is really quite ordinary, it is a struggle and reality for thousands of poor families in the States, but the story was delivered elegantly. You quickly grew attached to the characters and could easily empathize with the frustrations and futility of their situations. A solid 8/10.
Mick: As I said at the start, it was an absorbing film. I really wanted to know at conclusion what the characters and their families got up to after this. It’s sad to see that neither of the two main characters made it to the NBA, and that both went on to suffer personal tragedies within their families. Overall, 8/10.
Join us next week when we watch Bad Lieutenant (1992).
