The late Muhammad Ali lives on in compelling docs ranging from the crowd-pleasing When We Were Kings to the heartbreaking Muhammad and Larry

(Photo source: RogerEbert.com)

I was too young to catch the late Muhammad Ali in his prime as a boxer and civil rights activist. So it wasn't until the 1996 release of When We Were Kings, Leon Gast and Taylor Hackford's Oscar-winning documentary about the lead-up to Ali's 1974 victory over George Foreman at the Rumble in the Jungle in Zaire, when I started to understand why from the '60s to the early '80s, the world was captivated by this former athlete whom teenage In Living Color viewers like myself knew only as a lethargic roach spray pitchman.

The nicely edited doc caused me to be won over by both Ali's sense of humor--which remained a part of his personality even during his weakened state due to Parkinson's disease, like when he pretended to doze off in the middle of David Frost's 2002 interview with him--and his activism, particularly the brave stand he took against the Vietnam War, which cost him his heavyweight title and his boxing license. He once amazingly said, "Why should they ask me to put on a uniform and go 10,000 miles from home and drop bombs and bullets on brown people in Vietnam while so-called Negro people in Louisville are treated like dogs and denied simple human rights? No, I'm not going 10,000 miles from home to help murder and burn another poor nation simply to continue the domination of white slave masters of the darker people the world over."



Also noteworthy for featuring "Rumble in the Jungle," a catchy original theme song that united the Fugees, Busta Rhymes and A Tribe Called Quest, one of whose members was another beloved African American figure who died this year, Phife Dawg (2016 can go fuck itself), the stirring When We Were Kings remains one of my favorite movies from the '90s. But When We Were Kings suffers from something San Francisco Bay Guardian columnist Johnny Ray Huston criticized Gast and Hackford for at the time of the doc's release--Huston was the only writer I saw point this out back then--and that flaw is devoting too much of its running time to George Plimpton and Norman Mailer doing what's known today as whitesplaining both Ali and a moment of worldwide black pride like the Rumble in the Jungle. Huston's attitude was like "Who gives a fuck what these old white men think, especially when a black perspective would be the perfect one to recall these moments?" He had a point there.

Gast's fascinating archival footage of the G.O.A.T. in his prime more beautifully conveys the speed, grace and brash personality of Ali than any of the talking-head segments Hackford shot in the '90s with Mailer, whose cringeworthy black guy voice while impersonating the boxing legend keeps reminding me of Wyatt Cenac's anecdote about how an improv session between him, another black comic and the late Robin Williams went from awesome to mildly uncomfortable when Williams started trotting out his clichéd black guy voice in front of them. Moments of interminable whitesplaining aside, When We Were Kings is a rare doc that deserves to be seen at least once in a theater with an audience, just to hear how other viewers react to Ali's one-liners, the trash-talking mind games he subjected his rivals to outside the ring and his rapport with his youngest fans.

While other heavyweight boxers at the time tended to be either glum or inarticulate, Ali knew how to charm a crowd. He was the ultimate boxer-as-rock-star. The 1997 theater audience I saw When We Were Kings with wound up cheering for Ali or enjoying his spontaneous antics as if it were 1974 again. That's how charismatic he was. The crowd gets turnt up even when it's just archival footage of him interacting with the press.

"I couldn't stand the Michael Mann film Ali starring Will Smith... The film's great flaw is the fact that no one can really play Muhammad Ali except for Muhammad Ali," wrote Nation sports columnist Dave Zirin in 2013. "That is why Muhammad Ali has always been served better by documentaries than dramatic films."

(.GIF source: Muhammad Ali - The Greatest)

And that is why after Ali's death from respiratory problems last Friday, I marathoned for the rest of the weekend a bunch of docs about Ali instead of watching either Mann's beautifully shot but hugely flawed (and stolen by Jamie Foxx as Drew "Bundini" Brown) biopic on HBO Go or 1977's The Greatest, a much less beautifully shot and much more stilted biopic where Ali stars as himself, but, as Zirin noted, "it was a disaster precisely because the wicked improvisation that marked both his style of speech and boxing were [sic] thuddingly absent." Ali's passing makes you eager to revisit the real, unscripted Ali on film, not the Hollywood versions of Ali like Smith's faithful and respectful but also overly mopey (which isn't really Smith's fault--the mopiness is due to Mann's propensity for brooding and largely humorless male lead characters, outside of Dennis Farina on Crime Story and Al Pacino in Heat) recreation of Ali.

My marathoning of all these Ali docs I highly recommend has made me realize there will probably never be another sports figure as simultaneously entertaining and humane as the Greatest was (although he wasn't so humane towards the late Joe Frazier, calling him an Uncle Tom despite the fact that Frazier actually vouched for the reinstatement of Ali's boxing license, but we'll just consider that a rare slip-up by Ali). In the world of hoops, current Oakland hero Steph Curry could be another Ali, but it's too early to tell. And for a while, to us Filipino Americans, it looked like Manny Pacquiao was going to be our humble Pinoy superhero who would make us even more proud to be Filipino because of his heroism in the ring, but then Pacquiao had to open his mouth about same-sex marriage, and he went from being a kindly Ali type to the embarrassing drunk uncle at the merienda table who should really shut the fuck up about politics.

The boxing world, which is currently being eclipsed in popularity by MMA fighting (another sport that, like boxing, has just lost one of its black fighters: Kimbo Slice, the guy whom Tracy Morgan memorably said should be President Obama's Secretary of Defense on Late Night with Conan O'Brien), needs more humane Ali types and less ignorant types like Pacquiao. That's why Ali's passing is a huge loss for boxing. It's also a huge loss for Islam. It loses one of its most eloquent voices in terms of speaking out against the stereotyping of Muslims as terrorists, which has intensified again ever since Donald Drumpf started persecuting them as part of his Penguin-running-for-mayor-ish presidential campaign.

Ali's earlier allegiance to the Nation of Islam (an offshoot of traditional Islam) and the way that Ali's anti-war activism stemmed from his faith are deftly explored in director Bill Siegel's 2013 doc The Trials of Muhammad Ali, which is now streaming on Hulu. Zirin is right about the Siegel doc's ability to communicate with nuance Ali's journey of rebellion against racism and war. This is the film to see if you've always been curious about Ali's activist side, the allure Ali saw in the Nation of Islam (it provided the former Cassius Clay with a way to become empowered as a black man, right when he was starting to question both Eurocentricism and mainstream America's bizarre preferences for white over black in everything from Christianity to nursery rhymes) and the career sacrifices Ali made due to opting to be a conscientious objector.

AFOS Blog Rewind: Steve McQueen: The Man & Le Mans, now streaming on Showtime Anytime, careens down the twisted path of a racing film that’s like no other

From November 20, 2015, here's a repost of my discussion of the 1971 film Le Mans, the subject of Steve McQueen: The Man & Le Mans, an intriguing 2015 documentary that premiered on Showtime on March 18 and can currently be streamed by Showtime subscribers on Showtime Anytime.

With Le Mans, Steve McQueen, an auto racing enthusiast, set out to make as authentic an auto racing film as possible. The result, which was credited to a director from network TV, frequent '60s Mission: Impossible episode director Lee H. Katzin, was an unconventional, existentialist and documentary-style sports flick that baffled film critics in 1971--they wanted way more melodrama than the scant amount the film preferred to give them--and was ahead of its time. The story of an introverted man who doesn't know how to do anything else, except drive fast, was essentially a Michael Mann movie long before such a thing existed. And what are most Mann movies about? Introverted men who don't know how to do anything else, except break into vaults or track down criminals.

Le Mans isn't the best auto racing film ever made--that spot belongs to the offbeat Talladega Nights ("I like to think of Jesus as a figure skater who wears like a white outfit and he does interpretive ice dances of my life's journey"). But as an auto racing film, Le Mans is more powerful and rewatchable than either the soapy and overstuffed Grand Prix--if John Frankenheimer pared that film down to just the excellently shot racing sequences, it would have been an action masterpiece--or Quentin Tarantino's favorite racing film, the similarly soapy Days of Thunder, Don Simpson's 107-minute love letter to his own coke-fueled self. The power and rewatchability of Le Mans are mostly because of what Le Mans doesn't show and what it doesn't have the characters say.

The subplot about Michael Delaney, McQueen's racer character, and his tentative friendship with the widow (Elga Andersen) of a racing rival who died during one of Delaney's racing accidents barely qualifies as a love story, but the minimal dialogue between McQueen and Andersen and the details their scenes leave out (did Delaney and the widow sleep together in his trailer?) automatically cause their subplot to be far more intriguing as off-the-race-track material than any of the off-the-track Grand Prix scenes that don't feature a hot Françoise Hardy or an equally hot Jessica Walter. I love how all the exposition in Le Mans is delivered by a barely audible PA announcer and the film--several decades before the invention of the closed captioning option on Blu-rays and DVDs would have made it easier--deliberately makes the audience work hard to understand what the announcer's saying.

I don't even like auto racing, yet Le Mans somehow comes up with many effective ways to make me give a shit about it, whether it's keeping the dialogue to a minimum, staging the racing sequences so that they're not the "disorienting, incoherent blur of mindless action" Nathan Rabin complained about in his Dissolve reassessment of Days of Thunder or capturing remarkable footage of either the actual 24-hour Le Mans race or the onlookers that would be impossible to capture today, perhaps for insurance reasons or simply because it's not 1970. It's hard to dislike a sports flick that comes up with a shot of a spectator like my favorite shot: a young lady is too passed out from drinking to bother to pay attention to Delaney's pit crew springing into action and assisting Delaney out of his Porsche at the end of his latest shift behind the wheel.

Behind the scenes, Le Mans was such a difficult film to make: it started filming without a script; the enigmatic McQueen was at his worst behavior and was at odds with everyone from studio execs to Le Mans' original director, John Sturges, who directed McQueen in The Magnificent Seven and The Great Escape; McQueen and his then-wife were cheating on each other; and a stunt driver had to have his leg amputated after an actual car crash on the set. The Le Mans shoot's endless troubles have been the subject of both a 1999 book (Michael Keyser's A French Kiss with Death) and now a documentary, Steve McQueen: The Man & Le Mans.

The Daily Beast calls directors Gabriel Clarke and John McKenna's new McQueen doc "a warts-and-all portrait of a man at an unstable time in his life" and is appreciative of how the doc "doesn't look away from the people who were hurt by McQueen's actions." But the Beast isn't as enamored with the doc's overexplanatory nature, in comparison to Le Mans' not-so-explanatory nature ("We don't need to hear someone tell us that McQueen cared about where the camera was, or what shots he was going to be in, because to look at scenes from Le Mans is to immediately understand the artist's curiosity to capture action in images").



The best thing to come out of Steve McQueen: The Man & Le Mans has taken place outside the movie. That would be the bonus tracks on the Varèse Sarabande release of Jim Copperthwaite's ultra-solemn score to Clarke and McKenna's doc. The bonuses are highlights from Michel Legrand's occasionally treacly but otherwise vibrant and effective jazz score to Le Mans.

In 2007, Legrand's Le Mans score--it's basically Legrand in froufrou Thomas Crown Affair mode--was reissued with additional tracks by Universal France, but Varèse's treatment of the Le Mans cues isn't too shabby either. Fortunately, in this incarnation, the Le Mans cues are without the Le Mans race track sound FX that were edited into the music on the 1971 Columbia Records LP release of the Le Mans soundtrack (and then were mostly omitted by Universal France, to the delight of film score music fans who don't like hearing sound clips from movies during those movies' score albums).

"The Race, Final Laps" was cut out of the 1971 film, but it's the best and most energetic of the cues Legrand wrote for Le Mans and Varèse added to the Man & Le Mans album. It best captures Delaney's intense drive to get his team to the top, even when he himself isn't in first place, as well as the very subject of The Man & Le Mans: McQueen's ambition and desperation to make Le Mans the way he wanted, even at the cost of several friendships, a marriage, a guy's leg and perhaps his own sanity.

A new doc careens down the twisted path of Steve McQueen's gritty, Michel Legrand-scored Le Mans, an auto racing film that's like no other

With Le Mans, Steve McQueen, an auto racing enthusiast, set out to make as authentic an auto racing film as possible. The result, which was credited to a director from network TV, frequent '60s Mission: Impossible episode director Lee H. Katzin, was an unconventional, existentialist and documentary-style sports flick that baffled film critics in 1971--they wanted way more melodrama than the scant amount the film preferred to give them--and was ahead of its time. The story of an introverted man who doesn't know how to do anything else, except drive fast, was essentially a Michael Mann movie long before such a thing existed. And what are most Mann movies about? Introverted men who don't know how to do anything else, except break into vaults or track down criminals.

Le Mans isn't the best auto racing film ever made--that spot belongs to the offbeat Talladega Nights ("I like to think of Jesus as a figure skater who wears like a white outfit and he does interpretive ice dances of my life's journey"). But as an auto racing film, Le Mans is more powerful and rewatchable than either the soapy and overstuffed Grand Prix--if John Frankenheimer pared that film down to just the excellently shot racing sequences, it would have been an action masterpiece--or Quentin Tarantino's favorite racing film, the similarly soapy Days of Thunder, Don Simpson's 107-minute love letter to his own coke-fueled self. The power and rewatchability of Le Mans are mostly because of what Le Mans doesn't show and what it doesn't have the characters say.

The subplot about Michael Delaney, McQueen's racer character, and his tentative friendship with the widow (Elga Andersen) of a racing rival who died during one of Delaney's racing accidents barely qualifies as a love story, but the minimal dialogue between McQueen and Andersen and the details their scenes leave out (did Delaney and the widow sleep together in his trailer?) automatically cause their subplot to be far more intriguing as off-the-race-track material than any of the off-the-track Grand Prix scenes that don't feature a hot Françoise Hardy or an equally hot Jessica Walter. I love how all the exposition in Le Mans is delivered by a barely audible PA announcer and the film--several decades before the invention of the closed captioning option on Blu-rays and DVDs would have made it easier--deliberately makes the audience work hard to understand what the announcer's saying.

I don't even like auto racing, yet Le Mans somehow comes up with many effective ways to make me give a shit about it, whether it's keeping the dialogue to a minimum, staging the racing sequences so that they're not the "disorienting, incoherent blur of mindless action" Nathan Rabin complained about in his Dissolve reassessment of Days of Thunder or capturing remarkable footage of either the actual 24-hour Le Mans race or the onlookers that would be impossible to capture today, perhaps for insurance reasons or simply because it's not 1970. It's hard to dislike a sports flick that comes up with a shot of a spectator like my favorite shot: a young lady is too passed out from drinking to bother to pay attention to Delaney's pit crew springing into action and assisting Delaney out of his Porsche at the end of his latest shift behind the wheel.

Behind the scenes, Le Mans was such a difficult film to make: it started filming without a script; the enigmatic McQueen was at his worst behavior and was at odds with everyone from studio execs to Le Mans' original director, John Sturges, who directed McQueen in The Magnificent Seven and The Great Escape; McQueen and his then-wife were cheating on each other; and a stunt driver had to have his leg amputated after an actual car crash on the set. The Le Mans shoot's endless troubles have been the subject of both a 1999 book (Michael Keyser's A French Kiss with Death) and now a documentary, Steve McQueen: The Man & Le Mans, which hit select theaters last Friday.

The Daily Beast calls directors Gabriel Clarke and John McKenna's new McQueen doc "a warts-and-all portrait of a man at an unstable time in his life" and is appreciative of how the doc "doesn't look away from the people who were hurt by McQueen's actions." But the Beast isn't as enamored with the doc's overexplanatory nature, in comparison to Le Mans' not-so-explanatory nature ("We don't need to hear someone tell us that McQueen cared about where the camera was, or what shots he was going to be in, because to look at scenes from Le Mans is to immediately understand the artist's curiosity to capture action in images").



The best thing to come out of Steve McQueen: The Man & Le Mans has taken place outside the movie. That would be the bonus tracks on the Varèse Sarabande release of Jim Copperthwaite's ultra-solemn score to Clarke and McKenna's doc. The bonuses are highlights from Michel Legrand's occasionally treacly but otherwise vibrant and effective jazz score to Le Mans.

In 2007, Legrand's Le Mans score--it's basically Legrand in froufrou Thomas Crown Affair mode--was reissued with additional tracks by Universal France, but Varèse's treatment of the Le Mans cues isn't too shabby either. Fortunately, in this incarnation, the Le Mans cues are without the Le Mans race track sound FX that were edited into the music on the 1971 Columbia Records LP release of the Le Mans soundtrack (and then were mostly omitted by Universal France, to the delight of film score music fans who don't like hearing sound clips from movies during those movies' score albums).

"The Race, Final Laps" was cut out of the 1971 film, but it's the best and most energetic of the cues Legrand wrote for Le Mans and Varèse added to the Man & Le Mans album, and it's currently in rotation on "AFOS Prime." It best captures Delaney's intense drive to get his team to the top, even when he himself isn't in first place, as well as the very subject of The Man & Le Mans: McQueen's ambition and desperation to make Le Mans the way he wanted, even at the cost of several friendships, a marriage, a guy's leg and perhaps his own sanity.

Hickory dickory Dock, peep the new score by Ad-Rock

The late Dock Ellis' primacy as a pitcher for the Pittsburgh Pirates was way before my time, so director Jeffrey Radice's No No: A Dockumentary does a solid job chronicling a transitional period in baseball I was never really aware of, since I'm someone who doesn't pay much attention to baseball outside of whatever gets covered in the news. Now in theaters and on VOD after well-received screenings earlier this year at Sundance and SXSW, No No interviews Ellis' surviving teammates and uses footage of both Ellis in his heyday and an interview with Ellis from towards the end of his life to recall the period when black baseball players like Ellis became the first of their profession to criticize the baseball establishment for its racial slights at the time. The outspoken Ellis' iconoclasm--he got in trouble with the MLB for wearing hair curlers on the field--coincided with the rise of the Black Panthers and the emergence of Soul Train and Shaft in pop culture.

But, of course, the part of Ellis' life in No No that's the most fascinating--even more so than Ellis' activism--to audiences at Sundance or SXSW and anyone who's renting No No on iTunes is the no-hitter Ellis threw while on acid at a 1970 Pirates vs. Padres game. Ellis was the ultimate high-functioning addict, pitching terrifically while whacked out on something, whether it was LSD or Dexamyl, a.k.a. greenies, the stimulant that's still popular among baseball players as a form of medication to get through the most physically demanding aspects of the game.



Pitching on acid for nine straight innings isn't exactly a simple thing to do, as the late Robin Williams detailed during his final HBO stand-up special Weapons of Self Destruction. A clip of Williams' Weapons of Self Destruction bit about Ellis' infamous no-no (that's baseball slang for a no-hitter, by the way) is very briefly featured at the start of No No.



But Ellis' heavy drug use eventually spiraled out of control--due to grief over the 1972 death of his friend and Pirates teammate Roberto Clemente--and it ruined his career and marriages, so after his retirement, he got sober and became a drug counselor. While No No isn't exactly an anti-drug piece--the Radice doc mocks the clumsiest tactics of the anti-drug contingent by frequently cutting away to unintentionally silly footage from Dugout, a poorly acted 1981 educational filmstrip produced by the Kroc Foundation (the charitable group founded by Joan Kroc, wife of '70s and '80s Padres owner Ray Kroc, the McDonald's tycoon) to warn kid athletes against drug use--the doc's tough-minded exploration of the consequences of addiction would have pleased Ellis, who came to view the addicts he helped get clean as an achievement that was more important to him than any of his past feats on the pitcher's mound.

The other part of No No I looked forward to the most before its debut on VOD last week--besides the discussion of the LSD no-hitter--was its original score by Beastie Boys member Adam Horovitz, who made his debut as a film composer when he scored The Truth About Lies, an as-of-yet unreleased Odette Annable indie comedy that was first shot in 2012. Ad-Rock's funky No No score is reminiscent of the Beasties' instrumental interludes during Check Your Head and Ill Communication (which were compiled in the first Beasties album I bought, as well as one of the earliest CDs I bought, 1996's The In Sound from Way Out). It perfectly suits the doc's segments about the brashly attired, politically conscious pitcher's '70s heyday.

The No No score is also the closest we'll ever get to a second Beasties all-instrumental album, because I doubt Ad-Rock and Mike D will continue recording as the Beasties without the late MCA (and I wouldn't blame them). Horovitz's score is used judiciously too: thankfully, there's no score cue during the doc's most emotional moment, when Radice plays archival audio of Ellis tearing up and sobbing while re-reading aloud a letter of support he received from Jackie Robinson, the legend who paved the way for Ellis' accomplishments as both a pitcher and an athlete fighting discrimination.

Outside of the doc, the Horovitz score isn't available anywhere. The closest thing to the score's wordless soulfulness is, of course, the Beasties' first and last album of original instrumentals, 2007's The Mix-Up, particularly the lava lamp swagger of "Off the Grid." To borrow the words of an old Impressions tune featured prominently during No No's appreciation of the 1971 Pirates' predominantly black roster, The Mix-Up is a winner--just like Horovitz's new score and No No: A Dockumentary itself.

"The Whitest Block Ever," a new AFOS weekday block, begins Monday, April 29

The start of Asian Pacific American Heritage Month is the perfect time to introduce AFOS' new late morning block, which will consist of original themes and score cues from films done by Asian American directors and other filmmakers of color (like Spike Lee, pictured above with frequent musical collaborator Terence Blanchard during a Miracle at St. Anna scoring session) who have worked on films or TV series episodes I've admired or enjoyed. I'm calling this block "The Whitest Block Ever."

Justin Lin, a co-founder of the much-buzzed-about YOMYOMF Network and director of the upcoming Fast & Furious 6 (which was scored by Lucas Vidal instead of Brian Tyler, who's pictured above with Lin), will be represented on the "Whitest Block Ever" playlist by Tyler's scores from Finishing the Game and Fast Five and Akiko Carver and DJ Ropstyle's original music from Better Luck Tomorrow, particularly "Eat with Your Eyes."

And if you tune in to "The Whitest Block Ever" and wonder why hip-hop producer CHOPS' "Chinese School" is on the playlist, "Chinese School," the opening title theme for the 2007 sports comedy Ping Pong Playa, is on there to represent the work of Jessica Yu, who directed Ping Pong Playa and is best remembered for her 1997 Oscar acceptance speech, in which she joked about her Oscar outfit costing more than the documentary she won for. The decision to censor characters' F-bombs with basketball dribble sound FX in Ping Pong Playa sort of ruined that film for me. (Remember the original Bad News Bears? Now imagine that flick with some of the shit-talking covered up by baseball bat crack sound FX--that's how dumb the decision to self-censor the dialogue in Ping Pong Playa was.) But I enjoyed both CHOPS' original tunes during Ping Pong Playa and a lot of Yu's other works, like the West Wing episodes she directed, the 1992 short film Sour Death Balls and the 2012 short doc Meet Mr. Toilet.

The current generation of Asian American YouTube content producers will also be represented during "The Whitest Block Ever" by some of George Shaw's score from the 2010 Wong Fu Productions/Ryan Higa collabo Agents of Secret Stuff. "The Whitest Block Ever," which celebrates the efforts of both these YouTube stars and the filmmakers of color who must have inspired them (and in the case of Lin, are now partnering up with them as part of YOMYOMF), airs at 10am-noon on AFOS every weekday, starting Monday.

Here's one more little taste of "The Whitest Block Ever": the Robert Rodriguez/Tito & Tarantula theme from both Grindhouse's fake Machete trailer and Rodriguez's first Machete movie (Machete returns to entertainingly piss off much of the far right again in Machete Kills on September 13).

The amount of Olympic movies--and Olympic movie scores--is as small as my desire to watch tape-delayed Olympic events

Cool Runnings

"I have to begin by noting this is a fairly small genre," warned Talk of the Nation host Neal Conan on NPR before he discussed with a colleague their favorite movies about the Olympics last week, as American viewers reached the tail end of their first week of mostly tape-delayed (bleh!) Olympic fever. Conan wondered why there aren't so many Olympic movies. You would think with their cinematic scale and dramatic stories of struggle and uplift that the Olympics would be as frequent a subject in film as baseball, but that hasn't been the case.

"One reason may have to do with the international aspect of the Olympics and the fact that sometimes we think of sports movies as coming to a climax of the big game, with the good guys versus the bad guys. But with this whole Olympic ideal of a world community of sport, there are theoretically no bad guys in the Olympics," theorized Talk of the Nation film commentator Murray Horwitz, who also mentioned the International Olympic Committee's tight leash on the Olympic brand as another possible reason for the small amount of Olympic movies.

Tokyo Olympiad (Photo source: DVD Beaver)

It's also a genre that hasn't yielded a film I could consider a masterpiece. (I've never seen the Toshiro Mayuzumi-scored Tokyo Olympiad, Kon Ichikawa's 1965 documentary about the 1964 games, One Day in September, the 1999 doc about the massacre at the 1972 Munich Olympics, and Munich, Steven Spielberg's take on the 1972 tragedy, but I'm aware those three films are highly respected.) I haven't seen Chariots of Fire since the '80s, but I remember being kind of bored by the film, so its trouncing of Raiders of the Lost Ark in the 1981 Best Picture Oscar race has always been absurd to me.

The NPR guys are fans of Miracle and Cool Runnings, which both happen to be Disney movies. Miracle is a good but not great sports movie, bolstered by Kurt Russell's compelling performance as 1980 U.S. Hockey Team coach Herb Brooks. As for Cool Runnings, the late John Candy killed it in a change-of-pace dramatic turn, and if you're not moved by the Jamaican bobsledders' emergence from their accident in the film's climax, you're a goddamn robot (report back to your leader Mitt Romney for instructions on how to better relate to the carbon units because he's such an expert).

But Cool Runnings diverges so much from what actually happened to the Jamaican team (for instance, Candy's disgraced coach character never existed), and the fish-out-of-water shtick that was written for Cosby and Where I Live star Doug E. Doug borders on Stepin Fetchit-y. Doug was so good in his breakout role as the wanna-be militant in Hangin' with the Homeboys. I always wanted to see the cameras follow his Homeboys character to a theater where Cool Runnings was playing just so I could see his reaction to that Rasta who's so damn scared all the time like a butler in some '30s movie.

"They've pulled down the Berlin Wall. The Palestinians and the Israelis are talking peace. But they're still making comedies like Cool Runnings, in which cartoonish natives scratch their heads and try to make sense of the white world," complained then-Washington Post film critic Desson Thomson in 1993.

What about the music in these Olympic movies? Do their original scores make you scratch your head like a Disneyfied Rasta? Or like Kerri Walsh Jennings and Misty May-Treanor's threepeat or Gabby Douglas and her coach Liang Chow's success story or the standing ovation Saudi runner Sarah Attar received while making history despite finishing last, do they make your spirit soar?

Because there aren't a lot of Olympic movies, the "Feeling Very Olympic Today" playlist I assembled from the highlights of those movies' original scores isn't a lengthy one. That's why I padded the playlist with John Williams' Olympic compositions. The playlist kicks off with Vangelis' overplayed but rousing Chariots of Fire main title theme, which Rowan Atkinson amusingly poked fun at during his appearance as Mr. Bean in the London opening ceremonies. Hans Zimmer's Cool Runnings score and the catchy "Jamaican Bobsledding Chant"--penned by Yul Brenner himself, Malik Yoba--aren't on Spotify, so Cool Runnings is represented by the cover of Johnny Nash's "I Can See Clearly Now" that Jimmy Cliff recorded for the movie.

Slap Shot, Shaolin Soccer, the original Longest Yard, the original Bad News Bears, Diggstown, Breaking Away and White Men Can't Jump are my favorite sports movies. It's too bad the Olympic movie genre hasn't given us a movie as subversive or clever as those works.

Nothing but net: Favorite basketball movie scores

Basketball fans are currently swept up in NBA Finals Fever, so it's the perfect time to look back at how film and TV composers have musically interpreted the game in three of the best basketball movie scores.

Hoosiers (Jerry Goldsmith)

I'm waiting for Superbad soundtrack musicians Bootsy Collins, Bernie Worrell, Clyde Stubblefield, John "Jab'o" Starks and Phelps "Catfish" Collins to reunite for that great funktastic basketball comedy score that hasn't been written yet. I doubt the funk legends will collaborate again for a movie score, but if this dream team did so for my dream basketball flick score, the result would probably end up going neck-and-neck with Jerry Goldsmith's beloved work from 1986's Hoosiers for the spot of greatest b'ball score.

Goldsmith preferred to approach period pieces like Hoosiers (known as Best Shot outside America), Chinatown and L.A. Confidential as if they were contemporary. On paper, a partially synthesized, anachronistic score for a movie set in the early '50s reads like an epic fail. Somehow, Goldsmith made it work. His musical vision of basketball-as-Americana, which combined a full orchestra with drum machines, doesn't sound dated.

(On the other hand, the completely synthesized "Theme from Hoosiers" concert arrangement that Goldsmith and his son Joel created specially for the soundtrack album is on the dated side. When I first heard that track several years ago, I thought it sounded like theme music for a huffing and puffing T.J. Hooker in an LCPD gym, attempting to block a shot with his beer gut.)

I always dug how Goldsmith's percussion, like in "The Coach Stays" and the Aaron Copland-esque "The Pivot," imitated the sound of a basketball being dribbled.

Goldsmith and Hoosiers director David Anspaugh later reteamed for Rudy, another rousing sports flick that turns grown men into teary-eyed Oprah's Favorite Things audience members. The Goldsmith/Anspaugh partnership produced two powerful and rich scores that even someone who's not a sports fan can appreciate.

Back to that unwritten funkdafied basketball flick score. If I composed it, it would probably sound like "Sportscaster," which Freaks and Geeks and Donnie Darko composer Michael Andrews (a.k.a. Elgin Park) wrote for his band, the Greyboy Allstars.

Cornbread, Earl and Me (Donald Byrd)

Below CBSSports.com's Movie Madness list of Top 10 Basketball Movies, a commenter says the early Laurence Fishburne movie Cornbread, Earl and Me belongs on the list simply because of the Blackbyrds theme song ("He's a man with the plan/He's got a basketball in his hand!").

Cornbread contains the only film score written by jazz-funk legend Donald Byrd. The Blaxploitation.com review of the Cornbread soundtrack says "it's not up to the standard of their early studio LPs," but I'll take the Byrd & the Blackbyrds sound any day over a James Horner interpretation of the drama both on and off the court.

Glory Road (Trevor Rabin featuring Alicia Keys)

The only Bruckheimer movie scores I've liked are from Beverly Hills Cop (Harold Faltermeyer), Bad Boys (Mark Mancina), Crimson Tide (Hans Zimmer), The Rock (the Media Ventures Mafia) and Remember the Titans (Trevor Rabin). The score from Bruckheimer's basketball flick about the first integrated NCAA team, the 1965-66 Texas Western Miners, which unites Titans' Rabin with Alicia Keys, isn't too shabby either.

The former Yes-man was no stranger to the sport. He wrote both the NBA on TNT theme and the Coach Carter score.



Other noteworthy basketball movie scores: Hoop Dreams (Ben Sidran), White Men Can't Jump (Bennie Wallace), Love & Basketball (Terence Blanchard), Coach Carter (Rabin), Inside Moves (John Barry), The Fish That Saved Pittsburgh (Thom Bell) and Fast Break (David Shire and James Di Pasquale).

He Got Game doesn't count because other than a theme tune performed by Public Enemy, there's no original music during the movie. Spike Lee used Copland pieces for the score to reflect his Goldsmith-like vision of hoops-as-Americana.

(Is Theodore Shapiro's Semi-Pro score any good? I haven't watched Semi-Pro yet.)

On the small screen, inner-city high school basketball served as the backdrop for The White Shadow, which featured a theme from Rockford Files and A-Team composers Mike Post and Pete Carpenter at the height of their partnership.

No discussion of basketball-related original score music would be complete without the most famous tune of them all, "Roundball Rock," the now-retired NBA on NBC theme. Forget the Gatorade "Be Like Mike" jingle that's synonymous with Michael Jordan. "Roundball Rock" is the theme for His Airness. It was composed by New Age musician and frequent Late Night with Conan O'Brien punching bag John Tesh, who didn't have access to a piano at the time he wrote it, so he had to sing it into his own answering machine.

Related links:
Hoosiers score CD review and release history [Filmtracks]
"THE 'REEL' DREAM TEAM" [High Socks Legend]
"That Guy Salute: The Coach in Teen Wolf" [Intensities in Ten Suburbs]

Paul Newman (1925-2008)

If you've never seen the Newman cult favorite Slap Shot, you're missing out on one of the 10 greatest sports flicks of all time. After reading about the death of Newman, whose performances I've always enjoyed watching because of what Alan Sepinwall calls Newman's "anti-vanity," I immediately popped into my DVD player the only Newman movie in my DVD collection, Slap Shot. (I wish I had a copy of Nobody's Fool in my collection, but Slap Shot sufficed.)

Every time someone posts a list of their favorite sports movies, they tend to pick the earnest ones (Rocky, Rudy, Field of Dreams, The Pride of the Yankees) as their favorites. You know, movies that make grown men cry? To borrow a classic Kay Howard line from Homicide: Life on the Street, "Oh, make me puke!" I prefer the more off-kilter and humorous sports flicks like Slap Shot, Diggstown, Breaking Away and Shaolin Soccer.

Nobody's Fool may be my favorite Newman movie, but Slap Shot contains my favorite Newman character, Reggie Dunlop, the aging hockey coach with a rather relaxed attitude towards on-the-rink behavior. Dunlop's insults are so delightfully foul-mouthed and politically incorrect that I'd hate to see what this movie is like when it airs on basic cable ("You know, your son looks like a fuddy-duddy to me. You better get married again 'cause he's gonna wind up with somebody's sock in his mouth before you can say Jack Robinson.").

I doubt TCM will include Slap Shot in its inevitable Newman marathon tribute. Even though TCM never censors its movies, I don't think they've ever aired a movie that's filled to the brim with F-bombs like Slap Shot.

Moviegoers in 1959 winced when they saw Jimmy Stewart discuss panties and sperm in the courtroom in Anatomy of a Murder. They probably had a coronary when they heard Newman curse up a storm in Slap Shot.

No wonder Newman considered Dunlop to be his favorite character and called Slap Shot the most fun movie shoot he ever did. I guess he didn't mind wearing what has to be some of the ugliest pants in movie history. (Plaid trousers? That pair of bell-bottom leather pants Newman tried to rock later in the film? Not even someone as cool as Newman in Slap Shot, Kurt Russell in Escape from New York or Eddie Murphy in his concert movies could persuade me to slip into a pair of leather pants. There are two things I'll never wear: leather pants and open-toed shoes. They're the least manly-looking pieces of fashion ever invented.)

It's interesting that Newman's final role was in another sports movie (and an animated one too!), Cars. I'm glad he went out as a talking Hudson Hornet instead of a planet-eating lardass.