Burl here again! It’s time for me to review a sports picture
for you, I think! It’s not my very favourite genre out there, but there are
some good ones for sure! I think if I had to choose the one I like best, it
would be Slap Shot! Ha ha, what a
great movie! And The Bad News Bears
is a pretty good one too, don’t forget!
Fastbreak, which I’ll
review for you today, is no Slap Shot!
It’s not even a hockey movie in fact, but a basketball picture! Basketball is a
game I appreciate more than actually like – for example, I can really get
behind the idea that, unlike other sports, in basketball possession of the ball
is a bad thing unless you do something with it right away; and that, in direct
opposition to football, a lummox’s sport, territoriality on the court is a
non-issue, and basketball’s model is what writer Dave Hickey calls “the
polyglot choreography of urban sidewalks” rather than the bullish clashing of
armies at war!
And I guess Mr. Kotter feels the same way! He – or perhaps I
should say Gabe Kaplan – plays a New York deli counterman who loves basketball
even more than pastrami, and his fondest dream is to one day coach a college
team of his own! Well, when pokey little Cadwallader University of Nevada comes
calling, he gets his chance! But his wife doesn’t want to leave the Big Apple,
so he packs up his things, says goodbye, shanghais a quartet of ringers and
drives his station wagon to Nevada!
The university campus is no stately, ivied institution of
learning, but rather looks like the set of Hogan’s
Heroes after a decade of abandonment! Kotter’s ringers are a bit disappointed!
This group of youths is the real core of the movie, Kotter excepted, and they
each have their own conflicts with which to deal as the season progresses!
Preacher is being stalked by the homicidal father of a fifteen year-old girl he
seduced; D.C. (played by Harold Sylvester from Innerspace) is dealing with rage issues and a fear of becoming
homosexual, and is wanted by police; Hustler is – well, Hustler doesn’t have
much of a story, actually; and Swish, whom the rest of the players take to be a simple
homosexual, is actually a girl in disguise!
Mr. Kotter is doing his best to coach the team, and the
movie presents him as a very good coach indeed, except when he acts like kind
of a jerk! It eventually comes down to the Big Game, which is to be played
against Nevada State, coached by the fearsome Bert “Lies” Remsen! Ha ha, I won’t spoil things by telling you who wins,
but I’d be lying if I said it was Nevada State!
The plain fact is that I enjoyed watching this picture, but
it’s hard to say exactly why! Lately I’ve been slightly fixated on
comedy/dramas from the years 1979-80, because of some undefinable flavour they
have! There’s an appealing grottiness to them, maybe! Also they’re not all that
funny, and, strange as it sounds, that’s a quality I like in a comedy! At times
the movie strains to be Welcome Back
Kotter with four Freddie “Boom Boom” Washingtons instead of the usual
Sweathogs, but mostly it sits in some strange limbo between comedy and pathos,
with each quality cancelling out the other and leaving nothing in particular
but Mr. Kotter’s rosy, bearded lips! These are lovingly filmed by the director,
Jack “Damnation Alley” Smight!
I liked Kotter’s performance though, and the basketball
players were all good, even though they weren’t all professional actors, and
Bert Remsen is always fine, and there’s even an appearance from Yor, Hunter From the Future himself, Reb
Brown! I give Fastbreak two and a
half enormous bags of pot!
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