Hurricane Season

I didn't care for the movie. It seemed like a lifetime movie or something.

What kept going through my mind is if the coach actually cared about his team, he wouldn't have had issues with him players going elsewhere. If you had students that had potential, you're holding them back by having them play in a broken city where they won't get visibility.

As for the team building exercises and stuff like that, that was good. I could see focusing on basketball helping build a team and doing so could be a distraction that relieves some of the pressures of being in a destroyed city.

Hurricane Katrina comes. New Orleans is devastated: a thousand dead; tens of thousands of homes destroyed; 28,000 never returned. Forest Whitaker is the basketball coach at a high school in one of the worst hit areas. He puts together a team.

It's one of those high-school sports movies based on reality, and the first question I asked was "how much is real?" In truth, there's nothing real about a movie: the characters fall into categories. There will be conflicts. There will be the moment of despair during the big game. There will be a great locker room speech, and final victory. It's all very inspiring, and all very set. No one makes movies about underdogs who lose.

Yet when Forest Whitaker takes the sort of role made into a plaster mold by Pat O'Brien in KNUTE ROCKNE ALL AMERICAN, he brings to it an ability and energy that makes it real. You can see him thinking. You can see the anger and sympathy and honesty in his impassive face. You can see the dignity with which he walks through the sidelines to his place on the bench: always in character, always in the moment.

It's a great piece of acting in what should have been a cookie-cutter movie, and which went straight to video. Bonnie Hunt gets two lines and three scenes. Taraji P. Henson gets the thankless job of his wife. Courtney B. Vance, Isaiah Washington, all take small roles, and Tim Story directs cameraman Larry Blanford to shoot images of devastation and triumphant shots from the hoop's viewpoint. It's a canned, cardboard, conventional, derivative, imitative, ready-made, tried-and-true, unimaginative, uninspired, unoriginal sort of movie that is startlingly good.

Apparently, the New Orleans City Commerce collected money to put together a movie. This movie featured one of the most openly selfish coaches I've ever seen on film as the protagonist. After hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans and the entire city was underwater, all this coach could think about was getting his basketball team on the court again. Nevermind that they had no homes, no food, and no school; to Coach Al Collins (played by Forest Whitaker) basketball was the most important thing in the world.

At one point Coach Al tried to shame his best player out of transferring to a better school where he'd have a better opportunity to get recruited. He tried to persuade the boy's father by using lines like, "Is that what you want to teach your son, to run when things get tough?" as if pursuing a scholarship to college was some how less noble than playing basketball for him.

After failing at that weak Jedi mind trick he went to another player and shamed him by saying "Don't take the easy way out," and other lame lines as though leaving was a shameful thing. I wonder about all of those people who relocated and what message this movie is sending to them? You guys are soft. You're traitors. You're weak.

This whole movie was a sham. It was yet another movie showing that the only way out of a bad situation for young Black men is sports. But it wasn't just that. This movie barely showed the deplorable state of things in New Orleans. It was as if as long as there was Patriots basketball then everything was right with New Orleans.

This was no "Coach Carter," or "Glory Road" for that matter, even though it featured angry players and a yelling coach. This movie resembled your traditional against-all-odds sports movie, but it was only a superficial resemblance. Where it counted this movie was vacant. I don't want to make it seem like I'm denigrating the team, or the city of New Orleans by extension (maybe Coach Al a bit), but this movie was just a carbon copy of sports movies past.

This is a wonderful movie. Too bad that it was not managed properly. The story needed to be told and will be one of the greats as far as I am concerned. The acting is superb, it brings the devastation of Katrina into each American home like no news reports could. It is an injustice to consider this movie just another "out of the ashes" "feel good" story. During the time of Katrina I could not help but wonder why we Americans had allowed the Patriot Act and Homeland Security to start taking over our lives, when mother nature is a much more formidable force than any terrorist acts. This movie made me think about how great people are when they have the resolve to do the extraordinary because of rather than despite insurmountable odds.

Just the theme, overcoming after a catastrophe at the level of Hurricane Katrina is already moving, associated with the passion, love and dedication of a teacher/coach, it makes you want to cry, the dramas faced by the athletes/students, all very exciting and cute, of course, as it could not be otherwise, I love these films, it makes us believe that humanity has a future through kindness and fraternity...