Ok so I may have jumped the gun when I mentioned “Halloween season” in my little blurb about I Saw the Devil but I want to make it up to you by bringing up something summery. Yea it’s another basketball movie but this time it’s a documentary.
The top eight high school basketball players in the country (USA) are brought together to play one game called the Boost Mobile Elite 24 Hoops Classic (not sure why it’s called that). I assume the purpose of this is to see how these players stack up against one another. I mean it’s also fun for the kids and everyone else to watch because people like seeing the best of the best going head to head. It’s why we have all-star games and home run derbies and slam dunk contests ‘n shit. This is the first Elite 24 event and it took place in 2006 at Harlem’s Rucker Park. This year’s Boost Mobile Elite 24 Hoops Classic takes place on Saturday (8/27) with a slam dunk contest happening the day before. Instead of Harlem though, they moved the game to Venice Beach, CA. They started using this venue last year and I guess they stuck with California because they were tired of dealing with the potential of rain like they did in previous years (it even comes up in this film).
Anyway, we get profiles on all the players involved and eventually get to see them play the big game. All of them end up doing very well as the score for the game winds up in the triple digits for each team. What does this mean for their future careers? Well they all eventually got drafted by the NBA. So as far as I’m concerned they lived up to a damn good deal of their potential.
If you like basketball then you’ll probably enjoy this on some level but if you don’t then I don’t think this is going to be very exciting for you. It’s certainly not the worst thing ever made but this doc probably isn’t the best that it could have been in my opinion. Although, I really like the title.
first of all, its called the elite 24 because its supposed to be the top 24 kids. i think mca just focuses on eight of them because there's really not enough time to do justice too all. plus although these kids are all unique, and basketball players are usually full of personality, including everyone's stories would have been really redundant. i think he chose a good group because the come from really different places in life (love and singler vs lance stephenson, beasley, etc).
ReplyDeletei agree that not much emphasis is put on the game, but i don't think there really needs to be - the game is just an exhibition, and the score is so high because they are all just 'gunnin' for attention, trying to score as much as they can and not playing much defense. this is similar to every one of these high school all star games. what's funny is that this isnt nearly the biggest one, or even the biggest in new york. but i guess mca chose the elite 24 game because its at rucker, and that makes for much interesting filming than in some stupid half empty stadium.
i think you make a good point about what it means for their futures - you're right that a lot of them made it to the nba, but they took pretty routes to getting there (for instance, singler was the only player to stay in college for four years and the only player to win a title). i almost wonder if it might have been better for mca to sit on his footage and release it later on when he could say what happened to all of them, but probably not, since you're right they did all make it.
i guess the point is, i really did like the movie a lot, but that's mostly because i knew a lot about a bunch of the guys in it already. i think the basketball scenes are better than you give credit for, but its been a while and i might be romanticizing things.
did i lend you this?