Sports Films
A League of Their Own
Slap Shot
In preparation for the birthday of Elvis Presley, David Bowie, Stephen Hawking, Kim Jong-un, and (most notably) my dad, we’re celebrating a niche within film that is not niche at all: sports movies. Yes, this week I wanted to show the judges versatility and visit a realm of film that I would probably never explore on my own, so I asked my dad to join me and pick two sports films worth watching. I’ve seen a handful of sports movies, but the only ones that stick out in my memory are The Replacements and Bend It Like Beckham—two films I know that I enjoyed but still struggle to remember anything beyond Keanu Reeves and Jonathan Rhys Meyers. I don’t watch sports in my free time, I don’t know anything about them, because I figure what I don’t know can’t bore me, but the magic of the movies allows for even the densest and dullest of topics to be intriguing. A League of Their Own is required viewing for any feminist, sports fan, film nerd, history buff, or Madonna appreciator—especially this year, during its 30th anniversary. Penny Marshall’s 1992 film tells the story of Dottie Hinson (based off of Dottie Collins) and the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League. While this is a film revolving around baseball, it’s also just a beautiful depiction of female friendship and the things women can accomplish when they’re empowering one another and doing what they love. These lovely relationships and conversations stood out to me more than the baseball references I didn’t (and wouldn’t care to) understand. If only they’d stood out as much as each instance of Tom Hanks spitting on the ground, but alas, this happens so many times the movie could’ve been called A Gleek of Their Own, but I digress. A League of Their Own is a funny, female-driven story of tenacity that was able to take one of my least favorite sports and make it effectively interesting, suspenseful, and timeless. Penny Marshall really hit a grand slam (am I using that correctly?) when she put together this cast of Geena Davis, Lori Petty, Tom Hanks, Garry Marshall, Rosie O’Donnell, John Lovitz, Bill Pullman, and the everlasting tooth-gapping briefly British pop diva Madonna. Come for the cast, stay for the sweet story, and be amazed at how engrossing baseball becomes when it has jokes, tenderness, and lasts two hours instead of four. To offset all of the emotions and earnestness that came with A League of Their Own, we ditched the baseball field for the hockey rink with the 1977 film Slap Shot. While the terrain in this film’s setting was far chillier than the over 100-degree heat the actors of A League of Their Own endured, Slap Shot had its own brand of warm sentimentalism, with an equally dedicated cast of scrappy characters. This goofy, aggressive, profanity-imbued sausage fest was written by Nancy Dowd, who’d originally planned to make a documentary about hockey but somehow ended up with a comedy about an underdog hockey team who decides to amp up the violence to draw in a bigger crowd. The soundtrack, the style, and the creatively foul language all added to the lovability of this movie for me, despite any jokes that most definitely do not hold up. Michael Ontkean, the young pacifist among the goons with aggro tendencies, was everything that a Hollywood hunk should be, but standing next to Paul Newman, he never stood a chance. I mean Paul Newman, even at the ripe age of 52, would’ve stolen the show, with or without the fabulous fits he served in this film, but each fur coat and blingy medallion he wore made him infinitely cooler, sexier, and more interesting somehow. The film unexpectedly features open-minded conversations about sexuality, gender politics, and toxic masculinity—topics I came to expect from A League of Their Own, but not from a bro comedy like this one. Between its casual nudity, inappropriate sense of humor, and fierce sense of leather-clad fashion, Slap Shot is undeniably seventies, and yet it was still not quite what I expected from a movie with so much testosterone. As someone who knows extremely little about hockey, I appreciated how rarely hockey jargon was referenced or even taken seriously here. It’s still a love letter to the sport of hockey, albeit a complicated one, even in its most ridiculous, most antagonistic moments. In this sense it is one of the most realistic sports movies I’ve ever seen, due to its simultaneous praise and criticism of the male aggression that seems to exist at the core of this sport. There’s just something charming about a story who’s players are doomed to fail, but try anyway—it is, dare I say, the mode I’ve been in since the pandemic began—and this Bad News Bears attitude made a chilly movie feel a whole lot warmer. The entire vibe of Slap Shot seemed to be “screw it”, which, for this non sports fan, was a welcome perspective in a genre that can sometimes lean toward preachy. You can see the influence of this film (not only in the two sequels it inspired) but in more modern films like Goon, that also dares to lovingly poke fun at hockey and the traditionally masculine dynamics that come along with it. Both of these films required their actors to be well-versed in the sports they were playing, and pretty much every actor in these films contracted real injuries while playing. It speaks to the amount of effort and passion required for any sports participant or even fan, to endure this kind of pain in the name of a true love for the game. Or, in Madonna’s case, it shows the lengths she was willing to go to to get an Oscar nomination, which she never received. All in all, I found both of these movies to be extremely enjoyable, in spite of their subject matter. Sports have traditionally only existed as an un-relatable and uninteresting inconvenience for this film nerd, but I’ll say, through gritted teeth, that both of tonight’s films are worthy of your watch—whether or not you identify as a jock.
