Take Two

Capturing a rough time for Clough in "Damned United"

There’s an advantage to being an insulated American when watching The Damned United and its dramatization of an important part of the life of British coaching legend Brian Clough. Since the States likes its football with helmets and shoulder pads and a ridiculous amount of commercial breaks, most Americans are likely not to know how things pan out for Clough, allowing The Damned United to offer the English football novice viewer complete discovery. The unknown unknowns were part of the pleasure in watching this film for me—but I will take your continued reading of this piece as permission to partly spoil that particular pleasure.

Brian Clough is a man known for many things by English football fans, but this film focuses on the 44 days he managed the Leeds United football club.

topics: british cinema, directors, sports film

Experience

YBCA's "Beyond ESPN" series brings together fans of all stripes

I once got the brush-off when I mentioned to a fellow filmgoer in a theater lobby that the only festival missing from San Francisco’s international film landscape was a sports film festival. (I had just seen Bruce Beresford’s 1976 film The Club and Paul Goodman’s 2002 film Australian Rules—both involving that unique Aussie creation, Australian Rules Football.) Luckily, SF Bay Guardian Arts Editor Johnny Ray Huston did not get the same response when he brought the idea for a sports film series to Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Film/Video Curator Joel Shepard. The result, Beyond ESPN: An Offbeat Look at the Sports Film, is a film series that may do for the cinema of sport what the MLS is trying to achieve in the realm of soccer: Build audiences for a beloved pastime by screening/playing them in altogether new territory. Beginning August 6 and running through August 30 at YBCA, Beyond ESPN puts the sporting genre in a new context.

topics: art film, bay area, directors, documentary, genre films, hollywood, sports film, world cinema, yerba buena center for the arts

In Production

Corr swings for fences with baseball doc

The baseball season semi-officially begins in a little over two weeks, when pitchers and catchers report to spring training. While well-paid professional ballplayers were relaxing in the off-season, Eugene Corr plowed ahead with his bi-national baseball documentary From Ghost Town to Havana.

The veteran Berkeley filmmaker was turned on a few years ago to the Havana baseball scene by a friend who organizes tours to Cuba. Corr visited the bubbling Sports City complex, where he met a coach who’d once played in the St. Louis Cardinals system and had a shot at the major leagues, but chose instead to return to his homeland because he believed in the revolution.

topics: bay area, documentary, san francisco film society, sports film, sundance

Take Two

Review: "Surfwise"

The Bradys and Partridges. Cowsills, Osmonds, Jacksons. The old-school Von Trapps. There’s a certain fascination to family acts, heightening the interest that inevitably occurs when a performer’s professional and personal lives blur. While the above-named might all be musical acts—both real and fictive—nuclear units surface occasionally in other arenas of public life. Almost inevitably, some dynastic dirt is sure to emerge, because sooner or later the family that works, plays, competes and cohabits together is going to experience some cracks in the household-unity foundation.

There’s plenty o’ such juicy stuff on display in Surfwise, the latest documentary from Doug Pray (Hype!, Scratch). His subject here is the Paskowitz clan, whose patriarch and nine count ‘em nine children have been legends in the surfing world for decades. It’s an eccentric real-life saga that’s compelling whether you’re a wave rider yourself or couldn’t care less about the sport.

topics: documentary, sports film