Scoring at the Movies
Join Ryan and Chris every other Thursday as they talk about sports films. Prepare to sweep the leg of critics, revel in the fine art of training montages, have pedantic arguments over romantic sub-plots, and discuss which sports movies had us at hello or ended up juuuust a bit outside.
Episodes
June 7, 2023 • 78 mins
We've arrived at the series finale of Scoring At The Movies!
We're wrapping up this every-other-Thursday chat show about sports films by digging into Rocky...again. Rocky Balboa is filled with emotion, nostalgia (oh, is it nostalgic!) and many references to previous films in the franchise, not to mention a slew of quirky, Rocky-specific details. It's one of the best of the first 5 sequels as it highlights the lonely ex-boxer stru...
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May 25, 2023 • 63 mins
We're talking about baseball for the last time as Kevin Costner plays a Detroit Tigers pitcher in For Love Of The Game. The film spends about an equal amount of time between the Costner/Kelly Preston love story and him trying to achieve something monumental: throw a perfect game.
We thought the romance had too many tonal problems to take it seriously, although you can't say it was shoehorned in. It's essential to the way director...
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May 11, 2023 • 50 mins
In our 3rd-last episode, we're talking about a cynical, sci-fi movie about a made-up sport called Rollerball. Norman Jewison's dour 1975 film juggles a lot of balls and comments on many social issues (as Jewison often did in the films he directed), but he didn't draw either of us into his take on a dystopian future. James Caan mostly just mutters and sulks. He's not at his tough-guy best, although at least he and the stunt performe...
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April 27, 2023 • 61 mins
Since we're counting down to our final podcast on June 7th, this represents both our final basketball movie and our final documentary. More Than A Game shows a remarkable amount of archival footage and plenty of behind-the-scenes home videos of LeBron James and his high-school teammates, but did Kristopher Belman ask them any truly hard questions? For instance, were the other 4 guys in the Fab Five jealous about just how rich and s...
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April 13, 2023 • 50 mins
Chariots Of Fire is one of the most-respected movies we will ever cover, what with all the critical & financial success, not to mention the Oscar for Best Picture. It's just a shame we didn't care more about this true story. All the religious talk definitely didn't help us connect with the material. Ian Charleson runs blissfully for God (except when he won't) while the Jewish character played by Ben Cross runs his heart out, even t...
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March 30, 2023 • 57 mins
On the day the 2023 MLB season begins, we're discussing the sequel to one of our favourite baseball movies. Of course, Major League II is pretty much the same film, as the Cleveland Redacteds bicker, stink, bond, then strive to win it all, even though nobody believes in them...again. It doesn't help that David Ward's follow-up to his iconic original doesn't have much new up its sleeve and it's rated PG to appeal/pander to kids. The...
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March 16, 2023 • 47 mins
We haven't reviewed very many MMA movies and we certainly haven't talked specifically about a Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu film before, but writer/director David Mamet was the right guy to focus on that in Redbelt.
He's a practitioner of Jiu-Jitsu, which also means he might not have always explained the sport as well as he could have. Maybe he was too close to it? While the first half is terrific, Redbelt is overstuffed with plot and has ...
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March 2, 2023 • 58 mins
Once Creed III is released on March 3rd, there will be 9 entries in the Rocky universe...and we will have covered 5 of them.
We're obviously huge fans of Balboa & friends, but one of us was a bigger Rocky V apologist than the other one was. This is, after all, universally acknowledged as the worst in the franchise. Even Sylvester Stallone hates it.
His script creates major problems with the scenarios, the characters and even o...
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February 16, 2023 • 47 mins
Not all sports movies are made the same. For instance, Logan Lucky isn't one.
The car racing is at a minimum in Steven Soderbergh's well-reviewed, but under-seen heist comedy. On the very bright side though, there are plenty of stars and character actors who delighted us. The movie is snappy and funny in an Ocean's Eleven kind of way, which makes sense because Steven Soderbergh directed that series too.
Just like the robberies ...
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February 2, 2023 • 51 mins
As the Eagles & Chiefs prepare for the Super Bowl and since this is Groundhog Day, we thought we'd repeat ourselves and cover a football movie all over again: The Longest Yard.
Okay, the 1974 version of The Longest Yard was 115 podcasts ago, while we're talking about the Adam Sandler remake today. Critics don't like this take on the Mean Machine very much, but we ranted about the way they often turn up their nose at comedies and ...
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January 19, 2023 • 40 mins
You can throw a pillow at our face or hit us with a knock-out dart (why?!), but also listen to us when we say that The Naked Gun really is a sports movie. About 1/3rd of the film is set at the ballpark with Leslie Nielsen doing what he does best: bumbling his way through somehow solving a tough case. Nielsen plays it straight through all the gags and jokes (often double jokes) that only work if you deliver them the way that he does...
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January 5, 2023 • 50 mins
This 1980's relic was the hockey movie we could never find on DVD or streaming, but YouTube to the rescue and we finally get to cover Youngblood.
Rob Lowe and Patrick Swayze are convincing on skates and, man, are they handsome. Both play talented scorers who also have to fight their own battles on the ice. On that note, we didn't like the last 5 minutes of this movie, partly because we didn't buy almost anything about the post-ga...
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December 22, 2022 • 48 mins
Sometimes the title of a movie tells you everything you need to know about it, but the biggest problem with Sylvester Stallone's arm-wrestling opus isn't that it's Over The Top. Sly underplays, if anything. He's not even as bad as you might expect, nor is David Mendenhall truly deserving of the Razzie he won for playing the estranged "I love you, now I hate you" son. The editing, the direction by Menahem Golan and the screenplay (c...
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December 8, 2022 • 44 mins
Walter Hill's Undisputed is a gritty boxing movie in which the big fight takes place in prison. There's potential in that concept, right? Wesley Snipes and Ving Rhames play the 2 main characters. Hey, that HAS to amount to something cool, doesn't it?
Well, this film could have and should have been vivid and dynamic, but instead it's a disjointed, unsatisfying, anti-Rocky. We couldn't even figure out who we were supposed to root f...
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November 24, 2022 • 44 mins
Sometimes we cover obscure sports films on this channel. The Winning Season is a prime example. It barely even played in theatres 12 years ago. Since it's another in our recent run of "pleasant experience" movies, it probably deserved at least a little more attention back then. Sam Rockwell is the ne'er-do-well coach of a girls' basketball team in this dramedy that co-stars pre-stardom youngsters Emma Roberts and Rooney Mara. Even ...
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November 10, 2022 • 36 mins
Six Pack is a racing movie starring a half-dozen kids and a popular country singer who had never really acted before. What should've been an obnoxious failure is actually a genial experience with Kenny Rogers doing pretty solid work alongside a young Diane Lane and an even-younger Anthony Michael Hall. All 7 of the main characters get in trouble with the law at one time or another, so this road movie is filled with getaways and cle...
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October 27, 2022 • 20 mins
Rather than covering Six Pack this week as we had advertised, Ryan got caught monologuing about Harold Lloyd's 1925 classic The Freshman. While Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin remain legends a century after the height of their stardom, Lloyd is the sometimes-forgotten clown of the silent era. He's cheerful oblivious in this football farce, a "young" college kid who doesn't realize other students are always bullying him. Lloyd him...
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October 13, 2022 • 61 mins
Even though George Herman Ruth is arguably the greatest baseball player of all time, The Babe is not even a good movie, never mind a great one. The problems start with John Goodman, who's a terrific actor, but he's miscast in the titular role of the man-child who started as a pitcher with the Red Sox and then became an outfielder with the Yankees. It also doesn't help that this gregarious, larger-than-life baseball legend is depict...
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September 29, 2022 • 58 mins
While the satire in North Dallas Forty didn't make us laugh, Ted Kotcheff's well-regarded film was ahead of its time with how it shows the brutality of football and the price players pay to do something they love.
This is also a movie about cold, hard analytics...and it beat Moneyball to the punch with that theme by more than 30 years. Despite ingratiating performances by Mac Davis and the (supposed) rebel Nick Nolte, Chris could...
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September 15, 2022 • 42 mins
It must be hard work to have this much fun surfing enormous waves in Maui, but have you tried also working as a maid at a posh hotel?
In Blue Crush, Kate Bosworth, Michelle Rodriguez and Sanoe Lake get to do both and, rumour has it, hijinks ensue! At least that's the theory. Director John Stockwell's film has tonal problems and it's also hard to figure out who he made it for. No one can deny though that the surfing is shot very w...
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