{"id":32866,"date":"2024-07-11T10:01:14","date_gmt":"2024-07-11T15:01:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/?p=32866"},"modified":"2024-07-08T16:00:06","modified_gmt":"2024-07-08T21:00:06","slug":"movie-report-white-men-cant-jump-1992","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/2024\/07\/11\/movie-report-white-men-cant-jump-1992\/","title":{"rendered":"Movie Report: White Men Can’t Jump<\/i> (1992)"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"BookLike Friday<\/a><\/em>, I watched this film when it was fresh on videocassette and I was visiting Milwaukee and staying with my friend the Elvis impersonator. And I’m not sure that I’ve seen it since, but my boys are big into basketball these days, so I watched it with my youngest so that he could pick up some pointers, more on smack talking than actual basketball fundamentals.<\/p>\n

In it, Woody Harrelson, still relatively young, plays Billy Hoyle who comes to LA to make some money hustling basketball. He’s staying in a variety of cheap apartments and motels with his girlfriend, played by Rosie Perez, a step ahead of a couple of toughs who are following him around the country, apparently, seeking repayment of a relatively small loan that the girlfriend took out and could not repay, and they asked Hoyle to throw a college basketball game, but he did not. Hoyle runs into and teams up with a local hooper, played by Wesley Snipes, and they hustle some, but Snipes’ character hustles Hoyle out of his share of their winnings, so their respective women decide that they should enter a tournament with a $5000 prize. <\/p>\n

Basically, it’s a series of basketball games and some trash talk. It’s a fine film, amusing and not without depth in the characters and story. It has a bit of a downbeat end as Rosie Perez’s character realizes her dream of appearing on Jeopardy!<\/em> and does very well, but she leaves Hoyle who continues to gamble and does not seem ready to give up his hustling ways–even though the end makes clear to us that he has grown up enough to do so.<\/p>\n

So of all the films I report on, this one fits into the tier of those that I might watch again, and probably not after thirty years have passed. After all, it has Rosie Perez.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

I thought Rosie Perez was everywhere when I was in college, but I guess that I only saw her in Untamed Heart<\/em> with Christian Slater and Marisa Tomei (in the theater when I was in college) and this film. She got her start on In Living Color<\/em>, broke out in Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing<\/em>, and has had a steady career since, although I’ve only seen her intermittently (she was in The Other Guys<\/a><\/em>, but not in the Eva Mendes role). But I remember her most from this film and Untamed Heart<\/em>.<\/p>\n

\n\t
\n\t
\n\t
\n\t
\n\t\n<\/p>\n

She is and was a cutie.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Like Friday, I watched this film when it was fresh on videocassette and I was visiting Milwaukee and staying with my friend the Elvis impersonator. And I’m not sure that I’ve seen it since, but my boys are big into basketball these days, so I watched it with my youngest so that he could pick […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3334,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[24],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-32866","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-movies"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32866","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3334"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=32866"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32866\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":32872,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32866\/revisions\/32872"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=32866"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=32866"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=32866"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}