SESB 25 Favorite Sports Movies: 15-11

15. White Men Can't Jump (1992)
For my money, while you may enjoy Hoosiers, Love & Basketball, Hoop Dreams or He Got Game, this is my favorite basketball movie. This is the first of three Ron Shelton directed films in my Top 15 (who also wrote Blue Chips and directed Play it to the Bone), who simply does sports movies better than anyone else. There are three really good performances turned in here by the three lead characters in Woody Harrelson, Wesley Snipes and Rosie Perez, and the movie doesn't work without all of them. The white hope with the money trouble, the street baller who says he's better than Jordan and is trying to protect his family, and Perez's Gloria, who dreams of being on Jeopardy and is pushed to her limits by Harrelson's Sidney Deane. And the on court basketball and hustle stuff is well played as well - like all of Shelton's movies, this one comes close to the formula but always swerves off course in the final act, and so while the end result may not be overly appealing with the audience, it's much more interesting and, in this case, true to life when it comes to Sidney and Gloria. And while Gloria has some of the best lines in the film, we're going instead with...
Favorite Quote: Sidney and Billy discussing the finer points of Jimi Hendrix

14. Any Given Sunday (1999)
This is a movie that everytime I watch it, I will it to be good. Coming in it had all the pieces - the dual QB threat with Dennis Quaid and Jamie Foxx (who you can still argue that this movie helped make a major star, because when I saw it in theaters I couldn't get over the fact that Al Pacino was having these in-depth conversations with the guy who played Wanda on In Living Color) the aforementioned Pacino as the head coach, the combination of names from the sports and music world to fill out the roster (LL Cool J, Bill Bellamy, Lawrence Taylor), plus roles from Cameron Diaz, Charlton Heston (RIP), James Woods, Lauren Holly, Ann Margret, Aaron Eckhart, John C. McGinley, and Jessie Spano as a prostitute. I mean, how can this movie miss? Yeah, it's a little long, and yeah, it's got Oliver Stone's fingerprints on it, which is a good and bad thing. And yeah, a movie that seemed to be going for mostly realism shouldn't have had that guy's eyeball ripped out in that last playoff game. But to make a point that I've heard several times before and totally agree with, you'll watch the whole movie just to get to Pacino's "game of inches" speech at the end. Plus, those Sharks uniforms are awesome. If this movie lived up to its billing, it'd be an all timer. It's still good...but all the great parts don't quite add up to a great whole.
Favorite Quote: "It's like my ex-wife. 21 different personalities and 7 of them hated me." - Jack Rose

13. Tin Cup (1996)
The second Ron Shelton addition to this list, and another appearance for Kevin Costner. I saw him on Inside the Actor's Studio a few years ago, and he talked about how this movie was his saving grace after making Waterworld and going through a divorce, and his apparently cathartic release shows in this movie. By the way, has any actor ever had a run like Costner from 1987-1994, where he made The Untouchables, Bull Durham, Field of Dreams, Dances With Wolves, Robin Hood, JFK, The Bodyguard, A Perfect World, & Wyatt Earp? He gets buried for Waterworld, and I agree, it's not very good...but then he did come right back with Tin Cup and then The Postman, which a lot of people don't like, but it's one of my favorite movies of all time. Costner still feels like an A+ movie star to me today just because of that run. Anyway, this movie is just fun - Cheech Marin is good in it, Costner and Rene Russo play well off each other, and Don Johnson joins the Shooter McGavin/Judge Smails pantheon as the perfect golf villains with his role as David Simms. And yeah, the ending does what Ron Shelton endings do. But that's part of its charm. And while this movie never achieved the same success as Caddyshack or Happy Gilmore, there are a ton of great quotes, lines and speeches in this thing. I've used "The Unfinished Symphony of Roy McAvoy" in a sermon before. The stuff just flows in this movie. Great, great stuff.
Favorite Quote: "Greatness courts failure." - Roy McAvoy

12. A League of Their Own (1992)
Sometimes you go see a movie and you've already made up your mind that you're not going to like it. Such is the case for lots of guys with this movie. But once we mature past that, hopefully, you find that this is actually a really good sports movie. Tom Hanks is great in this thing (Hanks 92-98: A League of Their Own, Sleepless in Seattle, Philadelphia, Forrest Gump, Apollo 13, Toy Story, That Thing You Do!, Saving Private Ryan. Take that, Costner). He really carries it for the male audience, though Geena Davis is actually really good in this thing too. And this is probably Madonna's best performance, take that for what you will. You look at this thing now, and it's full of women who used to be high-profile actresses - Davis, Rosie O'Donnell, Lori Petty...anyway, the story is good and you don't find a lot of women's baseball movies out there, so it stands out. The ending is great in the way that it too deviates from the formula. This is the second movie on this list that sent me to the TiVo - sadly, no dice on this one.
Favorite Quote: Anything from Jon Lovitz

11. For Love of the Game (1999)
To this day, I don't understand why this movie isn't more over, to use the wrestling speak. Maybe people had given up on Costner by '99, maybe they felt like they'd already seen it. You didn't know who Sam Raimi was in 1999, before he made Spider-Man. And while the supporting cast in this thing isn't Hollywood A-list, they're all very good - Kelly Preston, John C. Reilly, Jena Malone, Brian Cox, JK Simmons - and it's just a great story. Costner's Billy Chapel goes for a perfect game while flashing back to his courtship of Preston's Jane Aubrey while mulling retirement. The tension, both in their relationship and while he's trying to finish the game, is very well played. And if you like happy endings, this one does it very well. I still just don't get why people don't buy into this movie; no need to search the TiVo for this one, I think I'm one of eight people who bought it on DVD.
Favorite Quote: The last scene