Sport and Cinema.com

During a recent interview with me in Shanghai when his team was in town to play the Sharks, Parker talked a lot about movies. The native New Yorker is very passionate about cinema and has grown increasingly so, saying he spends much of his free time in China watching titles from his massive, and still growing, DVD library he has built since going there to play in the CBA.

Oscar-winning actress Sandra Bullock leads a group of four football films as the leading-All-American winners at the box office. The star of “The Blind Side” who portrays NFL lineman Michael Oher’s adoptive mother, teams with the director of “The Rookie” John Lee Hancock to deliver a popular picture.

Rob Siegel, the writer of the Oscar-nominated drama, The Wrestler, writes and makes his directorial debut in this small, but exceptional and thought-provoking tale on obsessive behavior through the prism of sports – in this case NFL football.

Making her directorial debut, actress Drew Barrymore gives female roller derby movies a rejuvenation not seen since Raquel Welch “graced” the silver screen as K.C. Carr in 1972’s “Kansas City Bomber”.

“Whip It” stars Ellen Page (“Juno”) as Bliss Cavendar, an indie-rock loving misfit, a combat-boot-wearin’ square peg in the very round hole of Bodeen, Texas, where football and beauty pageants are the guiding lights, yet she finds a way of dealing with her small-town misery by discovering a roller derby league in nearby Austin.

With good reviews on the film festival circuit, the boxing documentary “Facing Ali” begins a theatrical run today in New York and Los Angeles.

Muhammad Ali, the three-time world heavyweight boxing champion and Olympic gold medalist who electrified the world with his unorthodox style and charismatic ways, is paid tribute by ten of his acclaimed rivals.

And the winner is… that popular phrase is something that remains to be seen after Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences Presdient Sid Ganis announced at a press conference last week, the board’s decision to expand the number of films nominated in the Best Picture category from five to ten.

Beginning tomorrow and running for a week and a half more than 200 films from 30 countries, including sneak previews from major studios and summer specialty releases will be presented in some of the finest theaters in Los Angeles.

Major releases debuting at the festival are “Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen” from Michael Bay and Johnny Depp starring as the Depression-era outlaw John Dillinger in “Public Enemies”.

“The Italians are coming!”

On the heels of the Giro d’Italia, we’d like to remind our readers that one of the great sports movies in Hollywood history revolved around the story of a talented young Indiana cyclist’s escape into a world of Italian bicycling.

Sean Faris (“Reunion”, “Life as We Know It”) stars as Rick Penning, a talented-but-troubled rugby player who must play against the team his stern father (Neal McDonough) coaches at the national championship.
Based on actual events connected to the dominant Highland Rugby program, Rick’s road to turning his life around begins at the juvenile detention center he has been sent to. It is there that a counselor (Sean Astin – “Rudy”) gets the confused teen heading in a new direction. When well-respected coach Larry Gelwix (Gary Cole) recruits Rick for his storied rugby squad, training for sports success takes on a deeper meaning.

Where did the idea for the story come from?

Originally, I had conceived Rudo y Cursi (Tough and Corny) as a mockumentary about Tato, a player from humble origins that attains glory within professional soccer, but disappears mysteriously and becomes a legend. When I told Diego and Gael the story, they both wanted to play Tato, which was really cool. The problem was that there was only one character. That is when I realized that I wanted to work with both of them together again and I had to grow the story to two characters. The first thing that came to my mind was the image of two soccer players solving an intimate drama right before shooting a penalty in front of a full stadium. Then I thought, why not make them siblings, so I started constructing the story backwards.