CAM-32

This is a good movie, because it is a documentary, and documentaries by nature start on such a higher playing field. As a documentary, it is somewhat below average. There are gaping holes and topics that are completely ignored that are integral to the subject matter. For one thing, there was not a single speaking agent or pro scout/rep in the movie. It is basically a summary of the games he played as a senior, a post season all-star game, the announcement of his shoe deal, one cover shoot, and coverage from the draft. That said, the content of the film is excellent... it is just not complete. I found Telfair's two older brothers to be radiant characters... the kind of stuff you'd never see in scripted material. Telfair's high school coach (not in as many scenes) was another highlight. Another odd thing about the movie is that it is clearly avoiding what is common knowledge to almost anyone who actually watched this. Telfair is struggling. He is arguably the 2nd/3rd PG on the worst team in the Western Conference... losing minutes to Jarret Jack (a late first round rookie) and Steve Blake (a backup on any other team). Lebron James was the first, and thus far only, elite performing star straight out of high school. This movie was clearly made in the wake of Lebron James in an effort to capture Lebron II. So instead of looking at the hype from the outside as a documentary, this movie itself is part of the hype. This is made clear based on the futile efforts to skirt Telfair's pro career. For one thing, this movie was released almost two years after its final event, the 2004 draft. Not all that suspicious, except that there was no text at the end of the movie, updating us with information on his pro career. Put those two together and it appears that ESPN tried to wait for him to be successful before airing the movie. Which gets us to what reeks about this movie. Telfair and his brothers seem intelligent and honorable, and they are being exploited in an effort to make money. This common nowadays with reality TV, but Telfair's career is at stake here. Dollar-crazed industries scrambled for the next Lebron, knowing and banking on the fact that plenty of money could be made before one of these guys even made it to the pros. This juicy topic is not addressed in the movie... as I said before, the packaging of this movie is just another example. The result is fans hating on Telfair and calling him a bust, which he is not. He isn't Todd Van Popple or Brian Bosworth... there was almost zero assurance for all the Telfair hype, again not his fault. That this movie was aired instead of the World Baseball Classic is another strike against the sickeningly self-indulgent ESPN. ESPN doesn't seem to realize that people like it and watch it because it is a window to sports, and not because of its slapdash, substandard original programing or haughty, moronic personalities.

Its pretty obvious that the author wrote the screenplay here... given that his pontificating prose makes the transition to the film as voice-over narration. Come to think of it... I didn't see a credit for the narrator, and I didn't recognize the goofy voice either... I wonder if this guy could possibly be THAT self-indulgent.

Anyway, this movie is OK. I'd say about half the scenes are good and half are bad. It's pretty inconsistent in its level of phony-ness.

It is overall an interesting and engaging story, but I think it is greatly hindered by the cheap crutch of a purely evil character.

Hoffman and Robin Wright Penn were both really good in the flash backs. William Fichtner struck me as the only guy who carried his weight in the modern scenes. Dennis Farina was good, but it was a one note job.

The glove box and the cat were painful.

I have to say, my jaw about hit the floor when a lowered newspaper revealed Josh Lucas in a cameo as a young Paul Newman... it was a brief but unbelievable scene.

This movie is well-intentioned, but it ends up really falling in line with your basic movie... not necessarily a bad thing.

One reason why I say this is that movie stands stalwart behind it's two main characters. During the course of the movie they are inspirational, whimsical and seemingly never wrong, yet somehow they have highly-checkered pasts. They also conveniently don't spend enough time together to get into the guts of what their relationship would be like... a sort of post-Sleepless-in-Seattle phenomenon that this movie does nothing to break away from.

Of course there must be an enemy, in this case it is his father. I don't understand why he is made to play the villain. It is certainly not necessary. The character is designed to have excellent inner-conflict and motivation for his actions, he's also played by a fantastic actor, yet he is made to be a cold, plotting, one-dimensional villain from start to finish. A villain such that the movie can climax with him being put in his place by his son, as any cheap trick movie would.

The movie is nice, but utterly fanciful in the same way as say, The Shawshank Redemption or Forest Gump, where it has a realistic plot, but unrealistic execution. This is not Mean Streets... not that a movie has to play it straight to ring true. An outside-the-box movie can have an unrealistic plot, but realistic execution. Take Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind; the plot is out there, but the movie is genuine. If you've seen both Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Garden State, think of the weight and depth of the central characters. In Garden State, the characters are fun and neat, but their depth is falsely created in a few sentences of plot-work that doesn't match what's on the screen. What's on the screen is NOT a study of an over-drugged boy (with a severely traumatizing incident) falling in love with a girl who has clinical mental issues. That topic is really left for documentary because how, as sane people, can we begin to structure the feelings behind such a plot? What's on the screen fits a couple normal slackers, there's nothing wrong with simply making them slackers and that's who these characters should be. Slackers can be clever and endearing like these characters, they don't have to be defined as insane and on drugs.

Maybe I was in a grumpy mood... but what was with all those barely funny sight gags? These 2-3 second, no-dialogue shots of stuff like, all of them on the motorcycle, or all of them wearing the plastic bags for the rain etc. It looked like the stuff on sitcoms, I was wondering where the laugh-track was (cue laugh-track)