Results 1 to 13 of 13

Thread: Hoosiers!

  1. #1
    Join Date
    Apr 2007
    Location
    Atlanta, GA (Buckhead)

    Hoosiers!

    It's 1:15 a.m.

    I did a bunch of "housecleaning" chores tonight, had a few brews, and was about to go to bed. Channel surfing, I see that Hoosiers is on AMC.

    I will watch Hoosiers. All of it. I have to. It's the law.

    God I love that movie.

    Tomorrow, I shall likely be hungover - but I will have watched Hoosiers (please, no Dennis Hopper jokes) so it's cool, it's cool.

    -EarlJam

    P.S. I love the movie Hoosiers. And okay, feel free to throw Hopper jokes this way.

  2. #2
    Join Date
    Feb 2007
    Location
    Asheville, NC

    Hoosiers -- The Memories

    Hoosiers -- in my opinion, the best sports movie ever made.

    In high school our first practice every year was to crowd into a small classroom, both jv and varsity, and watch Ollie hit those granny shots

    Wish we could have played a game immediately afterwards -- what a rush!

    --grad_devil

  3. #3

    Hoosiers

    Agree ... the greatest sports movie ever.

    Let me suggest, if you really love the movie, that you buy the two-disc DVD edition. The extra scenes are worth the purchase price (especially the scene that explains the mysterious return of Buddy Luper to the team; there's also a wonderful early scene where the whole community gathers for a corn husking).

    The commentary explains that the movie was cut on orders from studio execs, who insisted on a certain running time. For that reason, the director made some cuts he didn't want to make -- I'd love to see a Director's Cut of the film released in its original form.

    The two-disc edition also includes the complete film version (with radio play-by-play) of the 1954 Milan-Muncie Central championship game -- the game that inspired the movie.

    Bobby Plump, meet Jimmy Chitwood!

    Definitely a must for fanatics.

  4. #4

    Have you recovered?

    EarlJam, have you recovered from you late night with Hoosiers or is your picture an accurate depiction of your current state?

  5. #5
    Join Date
    Mar 2007
    Location
    New Orleans
    I've never understood why the 1982 Indiana high school state championship game, which I was privileged to watch, living in Indiana at the time, hasn't been immortalized in the same fashion as the 1954 game. Especially since it launched a semi-legendary individual career.

    The final saw a hugely favored Gary Roosevelt team of 6-4, 6-5 jumping jacks going up against a bunch of farm boys from Plymouth, whose tallest player was 6-2. Basically, all Plymouth had was a backcourt -- a decent 5-10 point guard and Scott Skiles. For most of regulation the expected mismatch took place, but then Skiles just decided he was going to win the game. IIRC, he hit about a 30-footer at the end of regulation to tie it, and then did everything in the three overtime periods, including lots of rebounding, and Plymouth won.

    Prior to the game, no Div. One powers were looking at Skiles, but Jud Heathcoate quickly offered him a scholarship. He had a fine career at Mich. St., but was overshadowed a bit as a guard his senior year by Johnny D. and a superb Hawkins-Les backcourt at Bradley. Then, with the physique of a slightly pudgy Div. III linebacker, he forged an improbably successful NBA career, and still holds the single game assist record with 30. Kind of an edgy guy, but he'll always be one of my favorite athletes, and another reason, along with Deng and Duhon, to root for the Bulls.

    A couple of further notes: We lost one of the country's great sports traditions when Indiana decided to go to division play in high school hoops and did away with the state tournament that included every school.

    Also: Coincidentally, in 1982 I met Angelo Pizzo, who wrote Hoosiers, as well as Breaking Away and Rudy. Sad to say, it was through his close connection with the magazine, The American Spectator, published in Bloomington at the time. The right is welcome to a monopoly on religious fundamentalism, but not sports uplift. Notwithstanding the occasional individual performance such as that of Skiles, the sports stories that move us are about teams pulling together. That's a communitarian ideal, which the right has largely denigrated.
    Last edited by dkbaseball; 08-29-2007 at 01:42 PM.

  6. #6
    Quote Originally Posted by Olympic Fan View Post

    Agree ... the greatest sports movie ever.

    Let me suggest, if you really love the movie, that you buy the two-disc DVD edition. The extra scenes are worth the purchase price (especially the scene that explains the mysterious return of Buddy Luper to the team; there's also a wonderful early scene where the whole community gathers for a corn husking).

    The commentary explains that the movie was cut on orders from studio execs, who insisted on a certain running time. For that reason, the director made some cuts he didn't want to make -- I'd love to see a Director's Cut of the film released in its original form.

    The two-disc edition also includes the complete film version (with radio play-by-play) of the 1954 Milan-Muncie Central championship game -- the game that inspired the movie.

    Bobby Plump, meet Jimmy Chitwood!

    Definitely a must for fanatics.
    Also worth checking out -- Bill Simmons' classic column on Hoosiers from a few years ago (in which he touches on a couple of the same points, including Buddy's mysterious reappearance):

    http://espn.go.com/page2/movies/s/simmons/020827.html

  7. #7

    Simmons

    Dagnabit, You just made me waste 10 minutes re-reading a column I've probably read two dozen times before. Awh, I shouldn't complain, I enjoy reading Simmons' column on Hoosiers almost as much as I enjoy watching the movie.

    Just a few comments:

    -- The Buddy Luper issue. Simmons writes:

    "Buddy mysteriously re-joins the team midway through the movie, with no explanation given. Was the "Buddy returns and asks forgiveness scene" simply cut from the movie? Was it ever written in the first place? Did the director think that we wouldn't notice that a seven-man roster inexplicably went back to eight? This one's been bothering me for 16 years."

    If Simmons had access to the two-disc DVD, he's get his answer. To briefly explain, the story of Luper's return basically involves TWO cut scenes. The first is very early, when Coach Dale has dinner with Cletus and his wife (who holds up the rabbit that's going to be their dinner). The director had to cut the second half of that scene, around the dinner table, which isn't very important, except it introduces Cletus' daughter, who is a cheerleader and BUDDY LUPER'S GIRLFRIEND. That pays off later, when she drags Buddy to see see Coach Dale and beg for reinstatement on the team.

    The problem the director had was that he couldn't include the second scene -- which is important -- without the first, explaining who the girl is, but otherwise, just a pretty lame scene that deserved to be cut.

    -- Simmons also takes at shot at the South Bend Coach:

    "Up by four in the final minute, needing only to dribble out the clock, South Bend's coach (wearing an overmatched, "I'm just happy to be here" look all movie) inexplicably calls a play, leading to a missed shot and a Hickory rebound. After Hickory scores, the South Bend coach never calls timeout, leading to another turnover. After another Hickory basket, no timeout ... and they turn the ball over again! Tie game! Then they turn the turn the ball over again (no timeout). Who was coaching South Bend, Rick Adelman's black grandfather? No wonder Spike hates this movie."

    Simmons should have know this, since he's actually credited in the film. But the South Bend Central coach is Ray Crowe -- who was in real life the coach of the Crispus Attucks team with Oscar Robertson that won back-to-back state titles in 1955 and 1956.

    This gets to Spike Lee's complaints about the movie and its racism. The poor white farm boys beat the team of talented blacks, he complains ... I heard him ask why couldn't they make a movie about Crispus Attucks, the first all-black team to win a state title in Indiana?

    Well, first I'd suggest that if he wants that movie, he should make it -- I'd pay to go see it. But secondly, his criticism is basically unfair because the story that's depicted in Hoosiers DID happen. The small team of farm boys did win the state title in 1954, beating a mixed-race team from Muncie Central (not South Bend Central) in the finals. Maybe more importantly, Milan High also beat Crispus Attucks -- with Crowe as coach and Oscar Roberston as a skinny sophomore forward -- in the semi-finals.

    As for the criticism of the final play -- and Crowe's failure to double team -- that's almost an exact recreation of the game-winning shot Bobby Plump (the model of Jimmy Chitwood) hit to beat Muncie Central. Plump has been living on that shot forever -- he has long owned a popular Indiana Restaurant known as Plump's Last Shot.

    Another BTW: Bobby Plump has a cameo in the movie, but I've never found him.

    -- Simmons makes a good point about George the Barber being the same actor who played the nasty junkball pitcher Eddie Harris in Major Leagues. But he forgets that Chelcie Ross also played Dan DeVine in Rudy -- has anybody else had a triple crown of sports villians to compare with that lineup?

    In a similar vein, in addition to playing the soul-destroying Myra Fleener in Hoosiers, Barbara Hersey also has a key role in another great sports movie -- playing Harriett Bird, the mysterious woman in black who shoots Roy Hobbs early in The Natural.

    I wonder which Simmons would consider the more destructive woman?

    -- Simmons notes that Maris Valainis, who plays Jimmy Chitwood, is the lone Hickory starter who didn't play college hoops. In the commentary, we learn that the director had less trouble making Valainis look good than he did making Wade Schenck (who plays Ollie) look bad. In fact, he says that Schenck is in real life, by far the best player in the cast. FWIW, his sister Libbey Schenck is also in the cast as one of the Hickory cheerleaders.

  8. #8
    Quote Originally Posted by Olympic Fan View Post
    In a similar vein, in addition to playing the soul-destroying Myra Fleener in Hoosiers, Barbara Hersey also has a key role in another great sports movie -- playing Harriett Bird, the mysterious woman in black who shoots Roy Hobbs early in The Natural.

    I wonder which Simmons would consider the more destructive woman?
    Simmons talked about Myra Fleener's role as the "Wet Blanket Girlfriend" in a later column, after he got a sneak peek at some deteled scenes from the DVD:

    http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/page2...simmons/040629

    Interestingly, he left unanswered the questions about Buddy's Mysterious Reappearance (between our posts and Simmons' columns, I figure it's been talked about enough that it deserves capitalization), even though he also presumably would have watched the deleted scenes that explained it.

    Another pet peeve of mine from Simmons' original Hoosiers column is that he keeps calling one of the players "Flatch." Technically it's correct, but Flatch is actually the player's last name (and the last name of Shooter, Dennis Hopper's character, who is the player's father in the movie). The player's first name -- and the name that he goes by in the film -- is Everett.

    Incidentally, the actor who played Everett (David Neidorf) is, to my knowledge, the only person to appear in two of the top five films in ESPN's list of the Top 20 Sports Movies (he also had a small part in Bull Durham). Barbara Hershey comes close, though, as The Natural was #6 on ESPN's list.
    Last edited by Tom B.; 08-29-2007 at 07:12 PM.

  9. #9
    Join Date
    Feb 2007
    Location
    Raleigh, NC
    Let me second the DVD suggestion. Unless you have serious insomnia issues, having your own copy that you can watch whenever the mood strikes seems like a better option than staying up until the middle of the night for a random sighting.

    There's only one reason to be awake at 1:15 and it ain't a movie.

  10. #10
    Join Date
    Jun 2007
    Location
    brooklyn

    hoosiers is good...

    but D2 is better. i think its function as both a sports movie and a cold war allegory place it into an elite group of 'best movies ever'

  11. #11
    Join Date
    Feb 2007
    Location
    Asheville, NC
    Quote Originally Posted by NovaScotian View Post
    but D2 is better. i think its function as both a sports movie and a cold war allegory place it into an elite group of 'best movies ever'
    Heresy! Heresy! Burn him at the stake!!

  12. #12
    Join Date
    Feb 2007
    Location
    Washington, D.C.
    Hooisers is great but The Replacements is funner. Hackman is way great in both, heck, in everything he has ever done.

  13. #13

    replacements?

    Ah, come on greybeard. I know NovaScotian was joking about D2, but the Replacements? Lame ... Hackman mails it in and Keanau Reeves is a joke (and not a funny one). The script is full of logical inconsistencies -- okay, I get that the players are on strike ... but the cheerleaders go on strike with them (although the whole idea of replacement cheerleaders is the funniest thing in the movie)??? And Reeves is the starting replacement quarterback when the highly paid regular QB comes back ... and Reeves is off the team, back on his boat, watching on a little TV? They don't have a backup QB?

    There are some funny moments -- the big guy throwing up and the wise-http://www.dukebasketballreport.comhttp://www.dukebasketballreport.comhttp://www.dukebasketballreport.com WR, but overall, the film needed one more re-write.

    Just to be clear, I've never claimed that Hoosiers is the FUNNIEST sports movie ever, just the best. But for pure laughs, Slap Shot is far and away No. 1 -- ahead of Bull Durham, the first two Major League movies (the third is awful), the original Longest Yard, the original Bad News Bears (but not the sequels) and the one with Scott Bakula as the 35-year-old quarterback..

    And ALL of them light years ahead of The Replacements

Similar Threads

  1. Following up on the HOOSIERS thread
    By dukemomLA in forum Off Topic
    Replies: 6
    Last Post: 08-29-2007, 01:26 PM

Posting Permissions

  • You may not post new threads
  • You may not post replies
  • You may not post attachments
  • You may not edit your posts
  •