Let May 17th forever be known as the day you failed me.
“Me? What did I do? I don’t even know you.”
Good point. By “you” I mean the collective audience of people reading this blog, people that write blogs, and the general hooposphere (and I will never use “hooposphere” again).
Let me explain. This weekend I flew home to hang out with some family and friends for a long weekend. On Friday my brother says “want to go see a movie about basketball”? My response, of course, was yes.
So we go to a nearby theatre, one of those places where you can eat pizza and drink beer while sitting in comfy chairs watching a movie. And watch a movie I did. This movie:
It’s a documentary about pickup basketball, the trailer came out a year ago, AND I HAD NEVER EVEN HEARD OF IT! You could choose to blame the film’s marketing efforts, but I choose to blame you, member of the “hooposphere”, for letting this trailer pass by without me noticing.
The actual movie was pretty entertaining. I’ve played a fair amount of pickup ball in my life, but it is nothing like the New York City pickup ball experience it seems. From NYC pickup legends to NBA legends, the courts of New York City have played host to hundreds of thousands of players, and if this documentary is a representative sample (it’s not), they’re all pretty damn interesting characters.
The best thing about the movie is that it is somehow simultaneously about a very micro-locale and Anytown, USA. It is very clearly a New York phenomenon, whether hearing the accents or the scenes at Rucker Park, but the aspect of meeting some random people at a basketball, setting out the court ground rules and getting into stupid arguments about whether something was a foul or not is familiar to anybody who has ever played the game.
If you’re in Oakland you still have two days to get over to the New Parkway Theater and check Doin’ It in the Park out. The rest of you can buy it online.
