Description

Set in 1965, Glory Road could easily be mistaken for just another triumphal basketball movie. Thankfully the film is so much more and most viewers be pleasantly surprised by this bio of the 1966 Texas Western Miners, the first college basketball team to win an NCAA championship with a starting lineup of mainly "Negro" players.

Josh Lucas - in possibly the best role of his career - plays Don Haskins, young and good-looking coach who spends much of his time coaching women's basketball teams. Suddenly given his shot at coaching Division I basketball in football-mad Texas, where part of the jobmore… meant living in the dorms with his wife (Emily Deschanel) and three kids.

Haskins is determined to build a winning team, but with pathetic recruitment resources, the coach is forced to use his imagination. So he tours Northeast ghetto playgrounds and ends up busing half a dozen African-Americans to the banks of the Rio Grande. This proves to be a culture shock on both sides.

The local whites and Latinos don't know what to make of the new scholarship students - some of them have probably never seen a black person before - while the Northern urbanites get their first tastes of deserts and tacos. Of course, there's some inevitable racial tension, but Haskins soon gets his white and black players working together.

There's no doubt Haskins is a tough taskmaster, and he hates to see the boys wasting time with wine, women and song. He also refreshingly acknowledges that he's not that talented and doesn't have all the answers. As the team rises in the national rankings, they are forced to endure racism and suffer various indignities especially in the South - from being pelted with food as they enter arenas to having racial epithets scrawled on their hotel-room walls.

When the attacks on them grow more vehement and even violent in their animosity, their morale is affected and in one near-brilliant sequence, the black players refuse to work with their white teammates, resulting in a rare, humiliating loss. When the Miners reach the final against "Baron" Adolph Rupp's (Jon Voight) Kentucky Wildcats, Haskins decides to make a statement by only playing the African-Americans.

The film has a great look and feel of the sixties, with Lucas perfectly cast as Haskins and Mehcad Brooks leads a solid cadre of youthful players who manage to both look convincing on the court and convey the mix of anger and enthusiasm that the youths felt. Although Glory Road is essentially a Disney Film, it doesn't shy away from showing the ugliness of racism and it's as much a civil-rights drama as a sports story.

There's a real the commitment to believability here and it's felt mostly between the interaction between the black and white teammates, whose path to total solidarity is more complex than merely learning to appreciate each other's cute little music. Although Glory Road is ultimately a C+ film, it is buoyed along by its earnestness and for the most part is pretty well executed. Mike Leonard September 06.

Cast list

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Info:

Category:

Movies > Films

Case Type:

DVD

Release Type:

Retail

Language:

Greek

Region:

R2

Comments:

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Cover Info:

Title:

Glory Road (2006) R2 Greek Retail DVD

Part:

Front

Dimensions:

3224 x 2167 px

Size:

2,485 KB

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33 (0 today)

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27/07/07 by allcdcovers

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