From the Friday, June 27 Oregonian....
"Gunnin' for That #1 Spot" is a basketball documentary where the climactic game looks like a Hong Kong wire-fu epic.
Director (and Beastie Boy) Adam Yauch builds his doc around the 2006 Boost Mobile Elite 24 all-star event, in which the best high-school hoopsters in the country compete in Harlem's Rucker Park -- the legendary street-ball playground where Wilt Chamberlain and other legends cut their teeth on an outdoor court.
Yauch follows eight media-anointed "phenom" players to Rucker -- including Lake Oswego's own Kevin Love (who left UCLA this year for the NBA) and Medford, Ore. son Kyle Singler (now rocking the fundamentals at Duke). We meet all eight kids in their respective hometowns, surrounded by varying amounts of love and financial security. We see the players travel to New York and dance uneasily around one another as they're lectured by coaches. We see jaw-dropping home-movie game highlights and clips of Rucker in the '60s and '70s. We learn how mind-warping the expectations on these kids can be -- shoe companies start courting talent at age 12, media coverage starts in the 8th grade, and agents text-message so relentlessly that the teens are actually sick of their cell phones.
By the time Yauch gets to Rucker Park, it's a little suspenseful, because as player Jerryd Bayless puts it, "you can break your reputation or you can help your reputation going there and playing."
The game itself is a staggering set piece. Over trash-talking commentary by the on-site announcers (who give the players nicknames), these megatalented workhorses creatively sink basket after basket after basket. The score gets so high into the three figures, they might as well be playing pinball. Meanwhile, Yauch layers in hip-hop tracks and whooshing martial-arts sound effects and shows you every highlight twice. I found it just a little ironic that the movie touches on the dangers of what happens "when you're treated like a star before you're really a star," because Yauch films and sound-mixes the game so it feels like you're watching Greek gods bat around a lightning ball.
If I have one beef with "Gunnin'" -- and this is one of those lame "he didn't make the movie I wanted to see!" beefs -- it's that Yauch spends most of his time in (understandable) awe of his subjects, and (respectfully) doesn't dig too deeply into the lives of any of the players. (I suspect he could have built a whole doc around the backstory of one of them, a rambunctious, school-switching, trash-talking and ridiculously skilled man-child from Maryland named Michael Beasley.) Rather than actually hearing the players talk to each other, we see music-driven montages of them walking around. And rather than directly witnessing much media/agent/sponsor pressure, we're just told by experts that it exists.
Also, there's no "Where are they now?" postscript that tells you where all the kids are nearly two years later (though you can find this info online at www.GunninMovie.com). After what we see on the court, maybe that's not really necessary; they'll all be in various magazine and TV ads in a few years, anyway.
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B; 90 minutes; rated PG-13; playing in Portland at the Fox Tower.
'Gunnin' for That #1 Spot' (The Oregonian, June 27, 2008)
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