Yeah, but The Natural has exploding outfield lights.
Bad News Bears. Even the updated version was pretty good.
Nobody has voted for this?
What about Chariots of Fire?
My favorite part is when he carried his teammate up the mountain.
Actually you bring up a good point. I think Creed is a better sports movie (the boxing scenes are phenomenal) but Rocky is the better movie.
Eight Men Out.
The Mighty Ducks and Cool Runnings, for sure.
Does Moneyball count? I’ve got to say, I’ve not seen that many sports movies and certainly not many of the ones listed above. Goon was terrific. Million Dollar Baby? The Fighter?
Eight Men Out
Raging Bull
Gregory’s Girl
Horse Feathers
Favourites, excluding the above:
Escape To Victory
Shaolin Soccer
Rocky
Day At The Races
I can’t stand The Natural, for some reason.
The Natural is about as manipulative as a movie can get, so a healthy distaste is understandable. I think that it really helps to have watched it as a virginal young man who loved playing baseball. I haven’t watched the whole thing in years, but clips give me that tingly, nostalgic feeling coupled with some serious eye rolling.
And nothing is more manipulative than that light-exploding ending, which is 180 degrees opposite of the book. The funny thing is that Bernard Malamud apparently really liked the movie.
I think a distinction needs to be made between team sports and individual sports as the treatments are by necessity so very different. The individual sports tend to focus a hero’s journey type of story while team sports tend to examine the process of building a team greater than the sum of its parts.
I finally watched this yesterday. I’ve been meaning to for years, especially since you thought it was one of the best sports movies!
I found it very odd. It’s got kind of a natural chaos of a kids movie about actual kids. There’s scenes on the Ice that are very natural, like they filmed with actual young players (faces are covered, so they don’t have to do much to hide the stuntpeople). But there’s dialog scenes with adults that are so wooden. Is it just the acting that’s wooden? The acting and the dialog both I think? Plus the way kids behave in this movie, it’s kind of a hybrid, it’s not fully realistic, but it’s also not the way we are all used to seeing kids in John Hughes movies and other Hollywood films, it’s some kind of weird middle ground.
Overall I still enjoyed it, but it’s not great. It’s like a Hollywood sports movie, but with much less drama and more realism and worse acting.
Oh man, wow, four years ago and reading my post back I think that was a world class fail at sarcasm because I don’t remember enjoying either of those movies a great deal! I must have been tired or in a weird mood, or both, because it totally reads earnestly now. The second paragraph is the serious one though.
God, I’m sorry @Rock8man! I’m glad you had some fun with it. For what it’s worth, I’ve not seen either of them since they were released. My girlfriend is telling me now as I lament this 4 year old ‘recommendation’ that she quite enjoyed Cool Runnings. She also mentioned Eddie the Eagle which is a fun true story.
Note to self: people do listen to you.
I feel like I should watch The Mighty Ducks as penance now.
I love Cool Runnings! Me and my friends had SUCH a good time watching that one.
Okay, well that’s one we’ll chuck on the pile for a rewatch then! Of the two that’s the one I’d most like to watch again :-D
I showed my son Mighty Ducks recently. It wasn’t as good as I remember, and much less hockey fun than I remembered. mD2 might be better in that regard, I’ll watch that with him soon.
But Cool Runnings? That holds up. That was a fun film, and part of that is because it is willing to have a Rocky style ending, where they don’t win but have a personal victory.
REPORTED.
Seems a little excessive @triggercut. You could’ve just said you didn’t like the Mighty Ducks movie.
Disney+ has a new Mighty Ducks feature today, March 26th 2021, so I decided to continue watching the Series. I watched D2: Mighty Ducks tonight. My son fell asleep during the movie so I watched it without him.
I liked it! There’s a lot more hockey and some roller blading scenes through the mall and through the park are really impressive, it made me wonder how they filmed it. In parts of the sequence the camera is being carried by the skaters themselves! On roller blades and then later on the ice!
The story does well to establish a moustache twirling villains in the Iceland team. It’s definitely a more cliche sports movie but it’s better for it, IMHO. Oh and Kenan Tompson is what, 13 in this movie? His character is not out of a cliche sports movie! And he’s hilarious.