They are the directing-writing team behind “Hoosiers” and “Rudy,” two
movies so ingrained in the jock culture that merely saying the words “You’re
five foot nothin’, a hundred and nothin’, without a speck of athletic talent”
or “Boys, don’t get caught watching the paint dry” will reflexively turn the
manliest of men into a whimpering puddle of tears.
“The Game of Their Lives,” the latest motivational speech of a movie from
the pair, is a deserving account of the underdog United States soccer team’s
match versus powerhouse England in the 1950 World Cup. But even though the
film includes many of the elements that make Anspaugh and Pizzo’s previous
collaborations great, funding problems and casting miscues render the finished
product disappointingly mediocre.
The treacly dialogue that fills “The Game of Their Lives” was equally
thick in “Hoosiers” and “Rudy.” Those who remember the “Rudy” soliloquy about
playing Notre Dame football instead of working in the steel mill will
experience a deja vu moment in “Game” when one player insists: “Momma, how
many times do I have to tell you? I’m not going to embalming school. I don’t
want to be an undertaker!”
So why is one movie great and one not so good? Sean Astin as Rudy was
impossible to forget, while the actor who made the undertaker comment is, at
this moment, impossible to recall. In casting the “Game” leads, someone
appeared to be looking for the 11 most identical-looking brown-haired actors,
with only team captains Wes Bentley and Gerard Butler distinguishing
themselves before the film is over.
The nonplayer characters are even harder to watch. John Rhys-Davies, well-
shorn after his work as Gimli the Dwarf in the “Lord of the Rings” movies, is
not only less engaging than Gene Hackman in “Hoosiers,” but a notch below Gene
Hackman in “The Replacements.” Equally forgettable is Patrick Stewart, who
narrates the film with the same patronizing tone one might use to read
“Goodnight Moon” at bedtime to a 4-year-old.
That’s the bad news. Thankfully, Anspaugh and Pizzo stick to what works
in the script, providing several genuinely moving scenes. Anspaugh also
deserves credit for insisting on location shoots in St. Louis — where many
of the players on the 1950 team lived — and Brazil. The result is a great
sense of time and place, making the protagonists easier to root for.
And while there are signs of limited cash flow in the copious game
footage (after the most pivotal play, the spectators don’t bother to get out
of their seats), the soccer scenes are well-filmed, without the quick jump-
cuts that ruin most modern sports movies.
“The Game of Their Lives” delivers its share of rousing moments. But the
first tears don’t flow at the 77-minute mark, when a military official gives
the David-and-Goliath pep talk that was handled by the preacher in “Hoosiers”
and Charles S. Dutton in “Rudy.”
Yes, large men in the audience will weep before the end of “The Game of
Their Lives.” But they can shed twice as many tears — and spend no money –
watching the Hickory basketball team run the old picket fence one more time
on TV.
– Advisory: This film contains some adult themes, drinking and one
instance of drug use.
– Peter Hartlaub
‘Winter Solstice’
Drama. Starring Anthony LaPaglia, Allison Janney, Aaron Stanford and Mark
Webber. Directed by Josh Sternfeld. (R. 85 minutes. At Bay Area theaters.)
Because everyone in “Winter Solstice” is miserable, because everyone is
sensitive, because nothing happens, because people smile through tears and
tear through smiles, and because there isn’t a single explosion or car chase,
there will be people who’ll insist that this film is a searing examination of
the human soul. In fact, it’s dreadful, but it’s a special kind of dreadful –
the kind designed to appeal to intelligent people on principle.
A distinction must be made: Just because a movie is about sensitive
people doesn’t mean that it’s a sensitive movie. “Raging Bull,” for example,
is a very sensitive movie about a completely insensitive person. “Winter
Solstice,” by contrast, is a completely boring, counterfeit movie about a guy
who’s feeling some things. He’s feeling it. We’re not.
Anthony LaPaglia, a good actor, plays Winters, the father of two sons,
who works as a gardener and makes enough money to live in a comfy home in
suburban New Jersey. (He must be charging a thousand a pop to mow lawns.) A
widower for five years, he has to deal with a younger son (Mark Webber) who is
screwing up in school and an older son (Aaron Stanford), who, quite reasonably,
wants to leave home and start a new life. Winters has trouble communicating
with his kids — everything he says turns into an argument — and he’s
still busted up about the loss of his wife. He is the walking wounded.
That’s the setup. That’s also, in a sense, the whole story, except for
the entrance of Allison Janney as Molly, an unmarried woman who moves into the
neighborhood. Janney is a dynamic actress, with lots of humor, but Molly is a
cipher, a gentle, careful, innocuous, mild, lonely, smiling presence, who is
too much of a drip to make any man forget his high school prom date, much less
a deceased spouse. She and Winters talk a few times, and he seems to get
marginally better. The film’s depiction of middle-aged grief is antiseptic and
uninformed, and its depiction of middle-aged bonding is trite and unreal.
“Winter Solstice” is the feature debut of writer-director Josh Sternfeld,
whose screenplay was developed at the Sundance Film Festival Screenwriter’s
Lab. It’s hard to imagine what the Lab did for him, as the film is scene after
scene in which little or nothing happens. In between scenes, there’s the
Sundance signature — acoustic guitar interludes that try to artificially
generate a sense of something mournful and magical moving through the lives of
the characters.
– Advisory: This film contains strong language and sex talk.
– Mick LaSalle
‘Schizo’
Drama. Starring Olzhas Nussuppaev, Eduard Tabyschev and Olga Landina.
Directed by Guka Omarova. (In Russian with English subtitles. Not rated. 86 minutes. At
Bay Area theaters.)
“Schizo” offers not just the proverbial window into village life in
Kazakhstan, but a panoramic view. Guka Omarova, an imaginative and keenly
observant director who grew up in Kazakhstan when it was still under Soviet
rule, sets her first film in the 1990s. So she’s able to show the awkward
attempts of locals to mesh their new freedoms with the more familiar Communist
system, complicated by the fact that there are no jobs to be found.
From the oddly humorous opening scene, the practice of medicine appears
to be suffering. A concerned mother brings her teenage son Mustafa (Olzhas
Nussuppaev) to a village doctor because the boy is slow to learn. His
classmates mock him by calling him Schizo. The doctor ceremoniously unfurls an
arm cuff. But instead of wrapping it around Mustafa’s bicep, the physician
takes his own blood pressure — an act so bizarre it couldn’t be made up.
The doc receives sour cream and eggs from the family farm as payment, and
crams them into a refrigerator already packed with jars of pickles and other
goodies bartered in return for questionable medical treatment.
Rudimentary gangster activity gains an immediate foothold in the town and
flourishes under capitalism. Sakura (Eduard Tabyschev), one of the small-time
operators, lives with Mustafa’s mother, and he hires the teen to help arrange
bare-knuckle boxing matches performed outdoors under the crudest conditions.
When one fighter is brutally beaten and on the brink of death, his last wish
is that Mustafa bring his winnings to his girlfriend, Zinka (Olga Landina).
The boy develops a crush on her. His inherent sweetness gets to Zinka,
and an unlikely romance unfolds culminating in his first sexual experience.
This scene is right out of “Tea and Sympathy,” proving that in at least one
area there’s not much difference between cultures.
With bangs down to his eyebrows, Nussuppaev looks like the fifth Beatle.
He’s an instinctive actor, and he plays the title role as far from a simpleton.
His Mustafa is a watcher, his dark eyes taking in everything around him and
struggling to figure out what it all means. The only time everything falls
into place is when he is with Zinka. Landina is enormously appealing in the
role, lively and indefatigable despite Zinka’s dire poverty. Tabyschev
displays a Russell Crowe-like bravado as a hood with aspirations to be a
contender. They’re all characters who stay with you long after this perceptive
film ends.
– Advisory: This film contains scenes of violence.
– Ruthe Stein
