Coach Carter (2005) or, Basketball and Beyond

♥♥♥♥

+ Best Sports Movie of the Year

Samuel L. Jackson's stopping the basketball on the poster for Thomas Carter's Coach Carter carries symbolic weight for the story of the film

QUICK REVIEW:

Carter is a veteran basketball champion, who now takes the challenge of training the basketball team of his old high school. But for Carter, success at ball isn't enough for the young men. His high ambitions bring him at a collision course with just about everyone.

Samuel L. Jackson (Pulp Fiction (1994)) is excellent as the proud, disciplined title hero, and he gets backed up here by a wealth of handsome young men like Robert Ri'chard (House of Wax (2005)), Antwon Tanner (One Tree Hill (2003-12)) and Channing Tatum (Side Effects (2013)) as well as Ashanti (Resident Evil: Extinction (2007)). This partly MTV Films production is also very enamored with its long string of contemporary (censored) hip-hop hits. - If any of the elements mentioned thus far are of interest to you, you should check out Coach Carter.
As the film takes its 3rd act leap, its conflicts unfortunately begin to repeat themselves in Mark Schwann (Whatever It Takes (2000)) and John Gatins' (Flight (2012)) script.
Still, Carter is a film with heart and sense behind its true story, and I couldn't help but getting happy in its company, despite its exaggerated pathos.
It is directed by Thomas Carter (When the Game Stands Tall (2014)). 

 

Related post:

 

2005 in films and TV-series - according to Film Excess [UPDATED I] 

Watch the great trailer for the film here

Cost: 30 mil. $
Box office: 76.6 mil. $
= Minor hit
[The film went # 1 in the US with a 24.2 mil. $ opening weekend, ending its 16-week domestic run with 67.2 mil. $, accounting for a whopping 88 % of the total gross. It seems to me that Coach Carter's distributors should have been able to scrape a better result together for the film internationally.]

What do you think of Coach Carter?

Flight (2012) - Character study masterpiece from Zemeckis and Washington

♥♥♥♥♥♥

+ 3rd Best Movie of the Year
+ Best Drama of the Year

Denzel Washington at his very best, in Robert Zemeckis' Flight

Captain Whip Whitaker lands a crashing airplane so that only 6 of the passengers die. His drug- and alcohol abuse, however, is against him, while he desperately steers his lie-clouded life onwards in the aftermath.
Great American director Robert Zemeckis (Back to the Future (1985)) has here made his best film yet, his first actual masterpiece. Flight impresses by moving from one outstanding scene to the next, unpredictable to the last one. The film is like a shark in the water and not, as the old Woody Allen joke continues, a dead shark.
An Oscar-nominated Denzel Washington (Training Day (2001)) gives the performance of a lifetime, commanding his character spectacularly, and everyone else follows his lead: John Goodman (The Big Lebowski (1998)), Bruce Greenwood (Star Trek Into Darkness (2013)), Don Cheadle (Hotel Rwanda (2004), Kelly Reilly (Me and Orson Welles (2008)), James Badge Dale (The Departed (2006), Tamara Tunie (Wall Street (1987)) and Melissa Leo (Frozen River (2008)).
The flight crash is especially spectacular and real edge-of-your-seat-exciti. For anyone with anything resembling discomfort or fear of flying, that scene is sheer terror.
The photography is eminent (by Don Burgess (Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines (2003)). Several scenes are held for a long time, building a fierce intensity, in the Oscar-nominated script by John Gatins (Coach Carter (2005)).
Flight is a film about alcoholism, existential flight - and flying. It is thought-provoking and rock-solid.
As we re-watch Flight over and over again, we can also look forward to Washington's next movie, a more traditional vigilante actioner titled The Equalizer (2014) and Zemeckis' next, a period drama about the Twin Tower high wire artist of 1974 played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt called To Reach for the Stars (2015).

Related posts:

Robert Zemeckis:  2012 in films and TV-series - according to Film Excess [UPDATED V]
2012 in films and TV-series - according to Film Excess [UPDATED IV]
2012 in films and TV-series - according to Film Excess [UPDATED III]
2012 in films and TV-series - according to Film Excess [UPDATED II] 
2012 in films - according to Film Excess
Back to the Future Part III (1990) or, The DeLorean Time Traveler's Last Adventure 
Back to the Future Part II (1989) or, The DeLorean Time Traveler Returns 
Back to the Future (1985) or, The DeLorean Time Traveler

Watch the trailer here

Budget: 31 mil. $
Box office: 161.7 mil. $
= Big hit

What do you think of Flight?
What other movies command the subject of alcoholism as powerfully in your opinion?