Sports movies
I watched Ping Pong on BBC4 last night. It's up there with the more intelligent sports films I've seen. It has good characterisation and it tries to explore why people compete in sports, and the ambivalent rivalry-friendship between players. Yet it still has some of the elements that you always seem to get - "unbeatable" opposing team dressed in black, a coach with a history the young players don't know about, a talented player who has to overcome his own indiscipline, training montages, a big tournament, playing through an injury...
I like sports films, if they're done well. I like films like Ping Pong or Bull Durham or Any Given Sunday, but also have a guilty fondness for the corny underdogs-win-through comedies and the "Boy's Own" heroics stories, and the based-on-a-true-story triumphs against the odds. Marvellous. Which is odd, because sports are often very hard to make convincing in a film - look at Escape to Victory's football scenes. Ping Pong does a great job of getting round this with a highly stylised "bullet-time" approach, slowing and freezing the play, circling the players with the cameras. Other sports work well with the traditional slow-motion, of course - Chariots of Fire, anyone?
I guess that what makes sports films entertaining is the reverse of what makes sports themselves worth watching. They take the drama, the narrative, that can occur naturally, and lay it out in front of you. Unlike real sport, where you pay your money and might get a goalless draw or a last-minute loss, so the team don't make the play-offs this year, a football movie will give you a glorious final-second goal so the team wins and the orphanage is saved. Every defeat is the springboard for some human interest, every win a heartwarming moment to make the audience cheer. Back in reality, even a win won't pan out that way. The Edgbaston Test this Summer did have that excitement, tension and drama, and it did have sportsmanship (Flintoff consoling Lee at the end). But the series was decided anticlimactically, when light stopped play at the Oval, not by something cinematic - say, a brilliant shot by the Australian captain needing a six from the last ball somehow being caught at the boundary by the clumsiest player on the England side finally making good, followed by triumphant slo-mo scenes of celebration.
But when sport delivers drama, it really delivers. When the good guys win at the last minute (and they pretty much always do) in a film, it's because it was scripted that way. but in the real world, the drama is unscripted. Manchester United win a European final with extra-time goals from their two substitutes, or the commentator becomes so emotional he cracks up when Graham Hill's son wins the F1 championship. As you learn watching any sport, your side or your heroes can lose, too. And they often do. In a film, Paula Radcliffe would have picked herself up from the side of the road in Athens and charged through the field to win the marathon at the tape. England would finally beat Germany on penalties. Steve Bull would have won the FA cup for Wolves. We've all had our disappointments. But those are part of the emotional involvement of watching sport, too. Willing the players on, screaming at the pitch or the track or the TV screen, and still seeing them fail. That's something that precious few films ever seem to reproduce. The emotional investment, whether winning or losing, of sportswatching.
I like sports films, if they're done well. I like films like Ping Pong or Bull Durham or Any Given Sunday, but also have a guilty fondness for the corny underdogs-win-through comedies and the "Boy's Own" heroics stories, and the based-on-a-true-story triumphs against the odds. Marvellous. Which is odd, because sports are often very hard to make convincing in a film - look at Escape to Victory's football scenes. Ping Pong does a great job of getting round this with a highly stylised "bullet-time" approach, slowing and freezing the play, circling the players with the cameras. Other sports work well with the traditional slow-motion, of course - Chariots of Fire, anyone?
I guess that what makes sports films entertaining is the reverse of what makes sports themselves worth watching. They take the drama, the narrative, that can occur naturally, and lay it out in front of you. Unlike real sport, where you pay your money and might get a goalless draw or a last-minute loss, so the team don't make the play-offs this year, a football movie will give you a glorious final-second goal so the team wins and the orphanage is saved. Every defeat is the springboard for some human interest, every win a heartwarming moment to make the audience cheer. Back in reality, even a win won't pan out that way. The Edgbaston Test this Summer did have that excitement, tension and drama, and it did have sportsmanship (Flintoff consoling Lee at the end). But the series was decided anticlimactically, when light stopped play at the Oval, not by something cinematic - say, a brilliant shot by the Australian captain needing a six from the last ball somehow being caught at the boundary by the clumsiest player on the England side finally making good, followed by triumphant slo-mo scenes of celebration.
But when sport delivers drama, it really delivers. When the good guys win at the last minute (and they pretty much always do) in a film, it's because it was scripted that way. but in the real world, the drama is unscripted. Manchester United win a European final with extra-time goals from their two substitutes, or the commentator becomes so emotional he cracks up when Graham Hill's son wins the F1 championship. As you learn watching any sport, your side or your heroes can lose, too. And they often do. In a film, Paula Radcliffe would have picked herself up from the side of the road in Athens and charged through the field to win the marathon at the tape. England would finally beat Germany on penalties. Steve Bull would have won the FA cup for Wolves. We've all had our disappointments. But those are part of the emotional involvement of watching sport, too. Willing the players on, screaming at the pitch or the track or the TV screen, and still seeing them fail. That's something that precious few films ever seem to reproduce. The emotional investment, whether winning or losing, of sportswatching.