#LOVE AND BASKETBALL MOVIE#
#LOVE AND BASKETBALL PRO#

I'm not sure I quite believe the final shot, though. Like Robert Towne's ' Personal Best,' it's about the pressures of being a star athlete-the whole life, not the game highlights.

#LOVE AND BASKETBALL MOVIE#

The movie is not as taut as it could have been, but I prefer its emotional perception to the pumped-up sports cliches I was sort of expecting.

#LOVE AND BASKETBALL PRO#

His dad retires from pro ball and is socked with a paternity suit, and Quincy has to re-evaluate how he feels about both parents in a couple of strong truth-telling scenes. She has some wonderful scenes with her mother ( Alfre Woodard), a housewife who defends her choices in life against her daughter's half-formed feminist notions.Įpps has effective scenes, too, with his parents. This is her sixth movie (she was in the lookalike films ' The Wood' and 'The Best Man') and her chance to flower, and she does, with a combination of tomboy stubbornness and womanly pride. Omar Epps is an accomplished actor, effective here if a little too old (27) to be playing a high-schooler. Meeting at about the age 11, the film traces their lives as they run parallel and run apart from childhood, to high school, to college, and just after. The movie is divided into the quarters of a basketball game and tells the story of a boy and a girl. The movie sees basketball as something the characters do as a skill and a living, not as an excuse for audience-pleasing jump shots at the buzzer. Love & Basketball is deceivingly simple in its structure. The big game scenes involve behavior and attitude, not scoring. And here's the most amazing thing: It considers sports in terms of career, training, motivation and strategy. It's honest and perceptive about love and sex, with no phony drama and a certain quiet maturity. Written and directed by first-timer Gina Prince-Bythewood (and produced by Spike Lee), it is a sports film seen mostly from the woman's point of view.

The ending reunites them a little too neatly.īut these bare bones of the plot don't convey the movie's special appeal. Their romance has its ups and downs, and eventually they're both playing in the pros-he in America, she in Spain. They're both recruited by USC, and both turn into college basketball stars, although Monica, on the women's team, feels she's penalized for an aggression that would be rewarded on the men's team. Starring Omar Epps, Sanaa Lathan, Dennis Haysbert and Alfre Woodard. They dance with their dates but they keep looking at each other. Love and Basketball (6,524) 7.2 2 h X-Ray 16+ A young African-American couple navigates the tricky paths of romance and athletics in this drama. In a sequence of surprising effectiveness, she takes the advice of her mom and sister to 'do something' with her hair and goes to a school dance with a blind date. They're not dating but they're friends, and when Quincy's parents ( Dennis Haysbert and Debbi Morgan) start fighting, he slips out his bedroom window and sleeps on the floor of her room. Monica, now played by Sanaa Lathan, and Quincy ( Omar Epps) are high school stars. This will be the pattern of a lifetime.įlash forward to 1988. But she kisses him (they count to five), and the next day he wants her to ride to school on the handlebars of his bike. 'We can play ball and ride to school together and when you get mad I gotta buy you flowers.' She doesn't like flowers, she says. Monica goes for a score, Quincy pushes her, and she gets a little scar that will be on her right cheek for the rest of her life. The first time the kids meet, they play a pickup game. Next door lives an NBA star and his son, Quincy. In 1981, when she's about 12, her family moves into a new house in Baldwin Hills, a good Los Angeles neighborhood. Her parents and older sister despair of getting her to act like a girl.

Love and basketball