Spike Lee would appear to have been watching too much television. Or anyway, to have not yet settled on which of its dizzying array of styles he wants to emulate: athletic-shoe ad, music video, ESPN highlight reel, or issues-oriented Afterschool Special. This fidgety channel surfing will not be stabilized simply by planking down on the soundtrack some selected "hits" from the collected works of Aaron Copland. (Copland, d. 1990, did not "compose" this score in the same sense that he composed those of The Heiress and The Red Pony.) This restless trendiness, to say it another way, will not so easily achieve the status of classic Americana. The resulting culture clash -- streetwise Brooklynese speech against a musical backdrop of nostalgic folksiness -- is often a riot. On the face of it, the basic subject matter -- basketball -- seems a perfect fit for Lee, a courtside fixture at the home games of the New York Knicks. And he dishes out some authentic tastes of the pertinent people and places: the coach, the agent, the playground, the big-time college arena. There is an especially strong scene of a father-as-coach driving his young son to ball-heaving rebellion; and there is a rousing climax, not for its intended drama but for its unavoidable absurdity, of Denzel Washington going one-on-one against pro basketballer Ray Allen: a bit like George Plimpton quarterbacking the Detroit Lions. At the same time, there is a plot to be gotten through -- or rather, dawdled through, skimpy as it is -- and there is the intermittent "movie moment" at which Lee seems to lose all will and all common sense of his own: bouquets of fireworks sprouting behind a ferris-wheel sex scene, a widower embracing the tombstone of his late wife, and the like. (1998) — Duncan Shepherd
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