Based on the book by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Michael Shaara, “For Love of the Game” tells the story of Billy Chapel (Kevin Costner), a baseball pitcher for the Detroit Tigers. He has had a 19-season career that should get him into the Hall of Fame, but those glory days are long behind him. The Tigers are in the bottom of the standings and Chapel’s 40-year-old arm is bothering him. As the film opens, the team is in New York to play the Yankees, who are battling the Red Sox for the pennant at the close of the season. Beating the Tigers is just a formality. The night before the game, Chapel has dinner plans set with Jane (Kelly Preston); this appears to be a regular occurrence; however, he is stood up. When morning comes, he is very upset that she didn’t ...

  It was only a matter of time before someone in the movie industry succeeded in making a male-oriented, mockery film about figure skating. While a giant marketing success, this film proved to fall short of being a truly memorable comedy film. The film is not much more than 90 minutes of Olympic figure skater cameos, semi-slapstick humor, and sexual innuendo. According to Ben Stiller himself, who produced this film, it has always been his life long dream to create a figure skating movie about two guys who must team up. It took him most of his career to gain enough stature with the studios to push the idea for "Blades of Glory" through. "Blades of Glory" is really nothing more than a modern day farce on skating, with several aspects stolen directly from "The Cutting Edge", a film from back in 1992. Jimmy ...

  “We Are Marshall” is an emotion-driven blockbuster that twists and turns like a runaway rollercoaster. As you get hooked into the story, propelled by the acting, the story, and the musical score, you’re going to be dragged through pain and loss and uplifted to glorious victory that is the stuff of enduring myths. In 1971, Marshall University of West Virginia suffered a tragic loss of 75 townspeople in a plane crash. Thirty-seven of them were college players; others were coaches, parents, supporters, and sports announcers. With the town depleted of athletes, family, and friends, the Marshall University football program had to start all over from scratch, bend rules, and drive themselves harder than anyone had ever been asked since the inception of the program. David Strathairn plays university president Donald Dedmon, who was a real person, but uninvolved in rebuilding of the program. As it turns out, there are as many events changed to ...

  Seabiscuit is the Rocky of horseracing movies. This small colt was deemed too small and too unskilled to make it in the big time world of thoroughbred horse racing, so he spent his days in the minor leagues, running and usually losing against mediocre competition and he ran up an unimpressive string of losses. No one wanted him. At the same time as Seabiscuit was losing races at bush league tracks around the country, young jockey Red Pollard, who was sent to live with foster parents because his real parents could not afford to raise him thanks to the great depression, was grinding out money at these same minor league tracks, supplementing his income by trying to be a boxer. Red was too big to be a jockey and too small to be a boxer. Tobey Maguire plays the part of Red Pollard in the film and his five foot six; ...

  In the name of honesty—I don’t like sports. I don’t like to watch them on TV, I don’t like to see them in person, and I don’t like to participate in them. This may be because, as a fat nerd, I was always chosen last, but be that as it may, I don’t like sports. But I often like sports movies, which are very rarely about the sport in question, and instead about the people who are involved. “Friday Night Lights” goes a step further, and in so doing, becomes a unique sports movie, and one of the best of the last 20 years. It’s not about a sports figure, but about how a town and its inhabitants live, even exist, through their high school football team. Evidently, high school football is enormously important in west Texas, even more so than in other areas of the U.S. Writer H.G. Bissinger spent ...