I'd like to see a more realistic sports movie. See, basically, every single sports movies, even a lot of the parodies, all work exactly the same. The team sucks. A new coach or something is brought in. The team starts to suck less. The coach does something stupid. The team hates him for awhile. The coach makes up for it somehow. The team loves him again. The team goes on to the finals. Whether or not they win is pretty much a crapshoot, but it's always sort of fun when they don't. Now, Dodgeball* parodied this whole formula with their ridiculously saccharine ending, but that's not what I'm thinking about. I want to see a movie where the team of failures CONTINUES to be a team of failures. Oh, but I don't want it to be a comedy. I want it to be deeply, depressingly dramatic. I want to see how much their incredible lack of talent is crushing the hopes and dreams of the players. Psychological turmoil. THAT would be an interesting movie.
And just for fun, I think it'd be great to advertise it as an incredibly inspirational film about the "triumph of the human spirit" and all that generic critic bull. Just to screw with people. In fact, just make the whole movie seem like it's like that for like, the first half hour. Have the kid with the unsupportive father, but his dad never actually learns to appreciate him. Have the kid with polio or something, and then he dies. Have the kid who starts out as a jackass, and have him remain a jackass. Have the girl that all the other kids say can't play, because she's a girl, and then have it turn out that she's completely awful. And of course, the kid who doesn't want to play because he thinks he won't be any good? He sucks. Hard.
It's not so much that I want to see this kind of depressing movie like this, I just want to see some goddamn originality in this genre. When it's gotten to the point where even the comedies are trite and cliche, something has gone horribly wrong.
*Apparently, the original ending to Dodgeball involved the team losing spectacularly. I would've liked to see that.
There were two endings to dodgeball, the alternate is on the dvd.
ReplyDeleteThe peewee hockey episode of southpark is pretty much this, just, depressing sports, no inspiration or nuthin.
Yeah, that episode WAS pretty depressing. It was still slightly comedic, of course, but that ending was TRAUMATIC. But they still stuck to the cliche of the team making it to the finals, so I'm not counting it.
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