Rez Ball

Sydney Freeland's 2024 film "Rez Ball" is a potent sports drama based on true events that rocked a small Native American town. The movie deftly addresses difficult subjects like suicide, pain, and loss while emphasizing the resiliency, optimism, and solidarity that arise after tragedy. The Chuska Warriors, a high school basketball team on the Navajo Reservation, must unite under the new coach Jimmy Holiday (Kauchani Bratt) after their top player Nataanii committed suicide. What might have been a tale of hopelessness turns into one of resilience and healing as basketball becomes the motivating factor for their group's recovery.

Through a deft blending of themes of coming-of-age, bereavement, and community, Freeland's directing crafts an emotionally charged and inspiring story. The movie manages to find a fine balance between exploring the painful nature of loss and being a pure sports story, using basketball as a metaphor for the community's tenacity. With the help of a formidable ensemble cast that includes Jessica Matten and Julia Jones, "Rez Ball" depicts Native American resiliency in addition to highlighting the emotional hardships of its characters. The breathtaking New Mexico vistas are used to provide depth to the tale in this masterfully shot movie. "Rez Ball" delves profoundly into the themes of optimism, loss, and cultural pride.

This deserves way more credit. 6.3/10 is not doing this movie justice. If you like a good bball movie it's definitely one! I'd want to see a bit more background on the coach but really loved the WNBA/lgbtq trope, which off course you see coming when you hear WNBA! I liked the highs and the lows and it was all in all really entertaining.

I don't often write reviews but damn, this is worth it. You can always count on female creators for recommendations! In this case Lily Gladstone and Erica Tremblay came through for the indigenous community and hyped this up! (And no, it's not just about community, this movie was a good one)

Highly recommend for a family movie night or like in my case...a singly single pop corn/wine all alone Saturday movie night 😂

Netflix brings us a sports drama from director and screenwriter Sydney Freeland that takes us to the Navajo reservation with an emotional basketball sports drama.

The long list of sports dramas in the cinema is varied in terms of memories and quality, and here Netflix gives us a proposal where we can find many of the iconic clichés in action, but which guarantee a fairly emotional and functional pastime like those moments of the most outstanding titles of this subgenre.

The film, while not afraid to follow the tried and true beats of the genre, is the specificity of the film that is handled with total care by its director who knows how to give you just the right amount of sports drama, life drama, Navajo drama and social drama that with all of that makes the perfect mix so that the path to the heroic act works as the main course of the film in a satisfactory way.

With a fairly efficient cast, where Kauchani Bratt stands out in the main role and a satisfactory Jessica Matten in her leading role, they are the most notable point of a cast that in its entirety is quite fulfilling and rewarding.

A proposal that knows how to mix comedy, courage, drama and redemption in a genuinely exciting way that makes us have an entertaining film without having to demand itself, but rather with the solvency of having a sports drama full of everything that one seeks to find within these proposals, but it does so with the desired measure so that nothing is too much and neither is it limited so that it is unsatisfactory, a mix with the precise doses to give a good weekend show.

This is a story about a Navajo basketball team, so I wonder why the writers who write the description blurbs on streaming sites and IMBD can't be bothered to state that the team is Navajo, instead of "Native American". OK, that was my one quibble with the way the film is marketed.

The film itself is well produced and has a good cast. The story is, for the most part, believable. It does seem to be aimed at ticking as many boxes as possible for woke points. What's good is the number of relatively new faces in the cast as well as some familiar actors such as Ryan Begay, Kiowa Gordon, Morningstar Angeline and Amber Midthunder. None of the cast did bad jobs with their roles, IMO, all good work.

Forget the cultural differences, this movie has heart. The tropes are common in sports movies, the underdogs fight back in dire circumstances, but it executes to inspire. It speaks from the perspective of those who have plenty to fight for.

There are many movies to compare to but none that have spoken from the voices that have been unheard for a long time. Think Rocky, Coach Carter, and Remember the Titans.

It's worth a watch based solely on understanding those unlike ourselves but with the same inclination to prove they matter. It is not a perfect movie by any means. The young actors do an excellent job of portraying what others like them direly need. Inspiration.

It's worth the watch.