Thanks all for your birthday felicitations. It will alas, be a whirlwind of insurance people, doctors, and car salesmen this week. Ginny, your Skyline chili wish made my mouth water (though I'm actually a Dixie chili guy...though Skyline, Gold Star, any will do).
Most of my favourite sports movies have been named: BULL DURHAM, EIGHT MEN OUT, 61.
A few others high on my list: REQUIEM FOR A HEAVYWEIGHT...Anthony Quinn, Jackie Gleason, and Mickey Rooney all at the top of their game. GENTLEMAN JIM...one of Errol Flynn's best movies and one of his best performances. Does THE SWIMMER with Burt Lancaster count? I'm fascinated by this movie. It doesn't wholly work, but I love it.
A recent sports movie I quite enjoyed was FRIDAY NIGHT LIGHTS about high school football and football mania in Odessa, Texas. I worked in Odessa a couple of years (at the Globe of the Great Southwest...a Shakespeare Theatre, believe it or not) and can attest to the mania of football there. I also went to a high school in Northern Kentucky, Highlands, where there was a milder form of the same mania and pressure on the players to perform...we were division champs year after year and went to state many times. Losing was not considered.
One sport movie I've never seen but I hear is great is THIS SPORTING LIFE with Richard Harris.
One sport movie that's rep has always mystified me...RAGING BULL. People consider it Sorcese's best, but it just sort of leaves me cold. There are a lot of Scorcese film I like better.
I also thought the whole DeNiro gaining weight thing was the height of pretentious performing. I prefer Olivier's admonishment to Dustin Hoffman when he had stayed up all night, because his character was supposed to be sleep-deprived in the scene the were shooting for Marathon Man: "Try acting, dear boy."