Saturday, December 11, 2010

HERE'S TO 30 MORE:  With the final film of its first run airing tonight, Dan Fienberg ranks all of the ESPN 30 for 30 documentaries from bottom to top.  (We did some interim ranking in August.)  Where I'd disagree with him most is that he has the USFL and Loyola Marymount films too low (though that may be because of my affection for the subject matter) and the rotisserie baseball one far too high (stylistically, I couldn't deal with the goofiness).  As noted before, my top three is Reggie/Escobars/6-17-1994, and I'm not sure that the order matters.

Overall, what a nicely ambitious series, and a real demonstration that sports documentaries could move beyond Ken Burns/talking heads format into something with more authorial voice.  Yes, there were some stinkers towards the end, but given how generic so much of ESPN feels these days this was, overall, an unexpected pleasure.

16 comments:

  1. Heather K2:59 PM

    i do not particularly like sports but on the rec of the throwers and sepinwall, i tuned in around winning time and became a DEVOTED viewer, including picking up ones I missed on netflix (should be getting muhammed and larry in the mail today).

    i hope they continue, and so far, I totally agree with Adam's top 3!

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  2. Joseph Finn3:00 PM

    The box set of the series so far is top of my Christmas list, to be sure. (Interestingly, Bill Simmons said in his last chat that the Bartman episode was pushed back to do some more expanding on the subject. )

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  3. StvMg3:13 PM

    I'm with Dan on the Loyola Marymount film. I thought it was a wasted opportunity - a run-of-the-mill account of a truly amazing story. Adam, I agree with you on the top three, though I'd put the Marcus Dupree one in there as well. I liked The Two Escobars most of all. I also remember liking the Ali-Holmes one quite a bit. 

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  4. isaac_spaceman3:35 PM

    I deeply regret having missed the Guru of Go doc, because the Gathers footage also gets me every time -- I remember watching with my roommates on the TV in our dorm room, and most vividly I remember the footage of somebody telling Lionel Simmons, who was close to Gathers, in the middle of a game halfway across the country, and Hawkins just covering his head with a towel and sobbing on the bench in the middle of the game, his whole body shaking.  Awful.   

    But Winning Time made me so happy.  It was just so well edited.  The montage of interviews of people saying "never seen anything like it" was so great. 

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  5. Heather K3:39 PM

    I just saw winning time and it made me SO happy too. 

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  6. The series was... fine.  My expectations were too high, and I'm too hard on documentaries, but I think this was largely a wasted opportunity; for me the only two really masterful entries were The Two Escobars (and given that it is screening at lots of festivals, I wonder to what extent it was produced specifically for this series) and the Maysles' entry (whose best parts were filmed three decades ago).  At least 25 of the entries could have aired alone on any TV network and few would have thought they represented anything special, filmwise.  

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  7. Stevie4:33 PM

    I really liked Winning Time and the one about the Colts band in Baltimore. I also liked the one on the USFL because it was an interesting story that I just didn't know about. I ended up falling behind (I'm in grad school and working full time so I'm barely keeping up with NBC comedies, much less longer sports documentaries!) and am looking forward to catching up with the Two Escobars, 6/17/94, and the one that Steve Nash directed about the Canadian runner.

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  8. Daniel Fienberg4:52 PM

    Adam - You like the *stories* of the USFL and LMU docs. That's not a tribute to the docs. That's a tribute to the USFL being wacky and the LMU situation being simultaneously tragic and inspirational. But the filmmakers of both of those two didn't have to look very hard to finding those stories, so I judge them not on the stories, but on the storytelling. In both cases, those are exciting stories, told poorly or mediocrely. In contrast, in The Band That Wouldn't Die, Levinson found a story people didn't know and characters people hadn't seen before. Even if he did no more than that, that's *his* storytelling and story-recognition...

    And, on a side note, saying this moved away from Ken Burns to something with an authorial voice seems wrong to me, since Ken Burns' authorial voice is pretty clear to me in every frame of every doc he's ever made... 

    -Daniel

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  9. Yeah, but his voice is "I like this old-timey stuff, back when the game was pure (except for the racism)."  Yawn.

    I see nothing wrong in saying that I enjoyed stuff with low degree-of-difficulty/effort on subjects I liked more than more ambitious films about subjects I still couldn't get into.  Yes, "the USFL was wacky; what happened to Hank Gathers is sad" is low-hanging fruit.  So?  I don't *want* to see the more complicated version of the Gathers story, which would have spent more time on the lawsuit than the joy of the LMU style.

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  10. Professor Jeff5:44 PM

    Agreed, Isaac -- but wasn't "presence of mind" the great montage phrase?  (Referring to Miller's brilliant move of stepping back for the three after stealing Mason's inbounds pass.)

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  11. Charles Carmicheal5:45 PM

    I wouldput "The U" in the top five, but "The Two Escobars" blew me away

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  12. Benner7:14 PM

    There's "The Two Escobars," and then there's everything else.  

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  13. I think the Dupree documentary is ranked too high.  It was one of the longest stories, but didn't find time to balance the story with a better sense of Dupree's own irreponsibility, not just athletically, but personally. How many kids did he leave fatherless? Did you know he served jail time for refusing to pay $1200/month child support? I suppose the family wasn't willing to talk, but that in itself is telling. It tugs at the heartstrings with the tale of Dupree's disabled brother, but then we find out that the brother is alive and apparently well-adjusted.  Dupree received a several-million dollar insurance settlement from his knee injury; we never find out what happened to his money other than an inference that it was his agent's fault, though Dupree made his own share of bad investments.

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  14. isaac_spaceman1:37 PM

    I'm pretty sure they did "never seen anything like it."  They may also have done "presence of mind" -- there were a bunch of quick-cut interview montages, all of which served to show that these people who had completely different perspectives remembered the events in exactly the same way. 

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  15. Professor Jeff2:24 PM

    Aha -- looking at this clip, it was both "never seen anything like it" (at 7:54) and "presence of mind" (at 9:10).  The whole sequence beginning around 7:00 is just fantastic.

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  16. Chris G.11:53 PM

    Gotta say my favorite was the June 17, 1994 one.  I remember sitting in front of my TV with the remote doing almost exactly the same thing, just flipping back and forth between the Rockets-Knicks game and the OJ chase.  Brought back a lot of memories.  Really enjoyed the series overall, as well as everything else Simmons does.  I realize he didn't do any of the movies other than a cameo in a couple of them but it was his baby and his vision that sparked the whole thing.  The last 30 for 30 podcast he did with the other ESPN guys who helped him was very interesting and informative.  Highly recommended.  

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