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 Pure Sport
A slew of inquisitive adults have made it clear that there’s more to high school sports than acne-anxious athletes. We found out why. By Jenna Schnuer
High school sports. The subject has become a genre all its own. While H.G. “Buzz” Bissinger’s 1990 book Friday Night Lights (later a movie and now, as if you hadn’t heard, a TV show) and the 1994 documentary Hoop Dreams laid a solid foundation for the category, several new authors and directors have picked up the ball and — you know what’s coming here — run with it. Some recent additions to the category’s MVP lineup include, on the small screen, Two-a-Days, MTV’s oddly addictive reality series about the Hoover, Alabama, football team; and the books Four Days to Glory: Wrestling with the Soul of the American Heartland by Mark Kreidler (HarperCollins), about high school wrestlers in Iowa, and Eagle Blue: A Team, a Tribe, and a High School Basketball Season in Arctic Alaska by Michael D’Orso (Bloomsbury USA), about basketball in the bush village of Fort Yukon, Alaska. We talked to Kreidler and D’Orso to find out why they wanted to go back to high school.
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 Mark Kreidler, author of Four Days to Glory, is a columnist for theSacramento Bee and contributes regularly to ESPN.com and ESPN the Magazine.
So, why high school sports? I’ve written so much about professional sports over the last 10 or 15 years, and over the last decade, almost exclusively. There’s nothing like watching people do something at an elite level, whatever that is. The problem is that [pro athletes] really are so insulated from the world we live in that they become, as subjects, as people to write about, brittle. I really loved sports in the beginning, at the high school level, and I think a lot of people got their connection with sports at that level because it’s where towns are identified. I found myself looking for some story that would illustrate that that connection is still there.
Why focus on wrestling? I had read a story somewhere … of this wrestling tournament in Iowa. I found myself thinking, This is something I want to see. [The] arena was filled with 11,000 people, all in groups of about 150 because they all came from tiny towns around Iowa. [T]here are eight different events going on at one time. There’s this sort of cacophony of cheers going on at odd times, because the people at one end of the arena suddenly realize their kid at the other end of the arena just did something great. I remember hearing that described and thinking it would be so great to go back to a place where that’s still possible, where [there’s] genuine enthusiasm.
What was it like to interview high schoolers after all your time with pro athletes? I’m used to dealing with pretty slick operators. Most of the people I interview have been interviewed hundreds of times. This was different in that the kids were so unguarded.
Did it worry you? A little. I just found that if I’m making a fair effort to draw them fully, then I don’t have to worry about any one thing. Kids are contradictory just like adults are. They have contradictory impulses. They want to be seen for not just who they are but who they think they are. That’s all apparent in the book.
What did you learn? [The] connection between sports and small towns is as strong as it was when I was a kid and, I’m sure, when my parents were kids. At the high school level, it’s still completely possible, completely, to be a hero in your hometown for nothing other than being good at a sport.
 Michael D’Orso has written books on topics ranging from politics to race to spinal-cord injuries. The idea for Eagle Blue, his 15th book, started with a magazine article he wrote for Sports Illustrated in 1993.
Why the interest in high school sports? [It’s] a way to connect to something that is being lost in America: a sense of community. Another aspect to it is that the game is, relatively speaking, pure.
Why is basketball so important in Alaska’s bush villages? [When] the pipeline was put in [in the 1970s], almost every village got at least a very small school, and almost every one of those schools had at least a very small gymnasium. They became the de facto community centers for every village. They were multipurpose, but, along with that, they brought this game. Here are these gyms, these clean, well-lighted places, and here’s this game you can play in them. So basketball just became like a drug. Basketball — which [the kids] love as much as any inner-city kids do, and there are a lot of analogies with inner cities because of the social context of poverty, no future, a horrible education system, life looking pretty grim, lots of drugs and alcohol, lots of teenage pregnancy, suicide — is one thing that they just rally around.
What does the game mean to kids in the villages? Kids who play basketball anywhere in the lower 48 have so many other options and … things to do, from malls to whatever. Up in these villages, still, there is absolutely nothing else going on. It is literally the only game in town.
 The Show I’ll Never Forget:
50 Writers Relive Their Most
Memorable Concertgoing Experience
Edited by Sean Manning (Da Capo, $17)
Taking the cue from other entertainment essay anthologies like Stranded: Rock and Roll for a Desert Island and O.K. You Mugs: Writers on Movie Actors, New York City–based editor Sean Manning rounds up a varied and fascinating crew of scribes to recount their most unforgettable live-music experiences. The bulk of the project’s contributors work in the field of fiction — though a handful of notable rock and jazz writers (Gary Giddins, Charles R. Cross, etc.) do offer their memories as well. The prominent names checking in include Lemony Snicket author Daniel Handler, Brokeback Mountain screenwriter Diana Ossana, novelist Rick Moody, and pop-culture commentator Chuck Klosterman. The approaches to each essay are as varied and distinctive as the authors themselves; the pieces range from personal memoir to artistic interpretation, detailed reportage to broad cultural analysis. Mostly, though, the stories are simply good old-fashioned yarns: Kevin Canty recalls a chance sighting of legendary soulman Clarence Carter in a seedy Florida backwater; Robert Polito recounts how he took members of the Pogues, Irish folk-punks, to a Red Sox game and tried to explain, with considerable difficulty, the rules of baseball; and comic-book creator Harvey Pekar tells how free-jazz giant Joe Maneri came to perform in his Cleveland living room. Elsewhere, husband and wife team Robert Burke Warren and Holly George-Warren pen separate accounts of the same performance by Van Morrison, whose music remains an integral part of their romance and relationship. The best and funniest effort, however, comes courtesy of Carl Newman of Canadian indie-pop group the New Pornographers. Newman recounts how a concert and postshow encounter with retro-pop fetishists Redd Kross set him on the path to his own musical career, and the upshot of the story offers a brilliant left-hook punchline. Interestingly, no matter what artist or show, the universal, almost tribal quality of the concertgoing experience — and the significance and memories attached to that experience — is bound to echo a bit of your own personal feelings, as well, making for an engrossing and thought-provoking read. — Bob Bozorgmehr
 My Country Roots: The Ultimate
MP3 Guide to America’s Original
Outsider Music
By Alice Randall with Carter and Courtney Little (Naked Ink, $15)
Though there haven’t been any empirical studies to support the idea, it’s a safe bet that country-music fans are among the last segment of the population to tap into the downloading phenomenon. Given that, My Country Roots serves a dual purpose: to function as a handy guide for tech newbies and as a road map for MP3-savvy music fans looking to take their first steps into twang territory. Compiled by a trio of Nashville songwriters and featuring a foreword by George Jones — which is funny in itself, as it’s hard to imagine the Possum firing up an iPod and donning a set of headphones, thus disturbing his perfect silver coif — the book is thorough, tapping into mainstream tastes while also getting into the more obscure corners of country-music history. Reading through the book, you also get a sense of the range of what constitutes country — after all, what other genre can legitimately claim artists as diverse as Ray Price, the Rolling Stones, Tina Turner, and Toby Keith under its banner? Broken down into six overarching sections (“Who We Are,” “What We Do,” “How We Feel,” etc.) and 100 different categories divided along musical, stylistic, lyrical, and even geographic lines, the selection offers well-thought-out playlists that feel like personalized mix tapes from a friend with a great record collection. — B.B.
 Johann Sebastian Bach:
Life and Work
By Martin Geck (Harcourt, $40)
Johann Sebastian Bach may have died over 250 years ago, but the critical and academic analysis of his work has continued unabated since then. Yet somehow Martin Geck’s Johann Sebastian Bach: Life and Work offers, if not an entirely new perspective, perhaps the best understanding to date of what we know about the man widely regarded as the greatest composer of all time. Geck, a professor at the University of Dortmund, originally published the book in his native Germany in 2000. This English-language edition (heroically translated by John Hargraves) is, at a dense 752 pages, quite a staggering work. Chock-full of minute details and offering a well-rounded look at the man, this is not a tome for the fainthearted. While it will certainly engage classical music aficionados, it makes for a difficult read for the uninitiated. Yet those willing to slough through the tougher passages will ultimately be rewarded, as Geck pins down the various motivations — personal, musical, and historical — that shaped Bach’s oeuvre. Bach made his way from being a humble traveling organ tuner to becoming a key influence on the work of future titans like Mozart and Beethoven. Along the way, he clashed with the church and the aristocracy, but he managed to completely change the definition of a composer’s role, from technician to true artist. Like Shakespeare’s, much of Bach’s life remains shrouded in mystery, and Geck is forced to rely on speculation at various points to fill in the gaps. But as recent efforts on the subject have proven, the composer remains a fertile subject matter for biographers and musicologists, and Geck’s effort certainly ranks among the best pieces of Bach scholarship in recent memory. — B.B.
FROM AN AMERICAN WAY CONTRIBUTOR
 Celebrated Weekends: The Stars’ Guide to the Most Exciting Destinations
in the World
By Mark Seal
(Rutledge Hill Press, $25)
The Celebrated Weekend feature in American Way, wherein a bold-faced name lets readers in on a few of his or her favorite things about a particular city, is almost always the most-read story in each issue. The brainchild of Mark Seal, Celebrated Weekend (which got its start in December 1990 under the banner of Celebrated Places, with Jackie Collins’s Hollywood) has long offered a unique peek behind the curtain and into the lives of the rich and famous, without stooping to the “They’re Just Like Us!” theatrics of Us Weekly. More than 300 celebrity interviews later, Seal has compiled about 60 of them into a best-of that ably covers a sizable chunk of the globe, from Denzel Washington’s New York City to Harrison Ford’s Jackson Hole to Jodie Foster’s Berlin to Anthony Hopkins’s Florence and on and on. The result is a travel guide that might not be quite as thorough as a Frommer’s guidebook but that is certainly more entertaining. Unfortunately for Seal, the example he used to get the idea the green light, Jack Nicholson’s Los Angeles, has become his white whale. Maybe he’ll be in the next book. — Zac Crain
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Chick Flicks That Click
These movies are made for a woman but are strong enough for a man. By Bryan Reesman
What does chick flick really mean? Some view it as a derogatory term to describe any movie, particularly a tearjerker, that appeals to the female psyche — i.e., it explores emotions and relationships on a deeper level than typical Hollywood fare and is not crammed with action, effects, hot babes, and blowing stuff up. Of course, that is a positive in an era of low-calorie movies that could use more of a balance. Let’s face it, plenty of women enjoy checking out event movies like Pirates of the Caribbean as much as men do, if for slightly different reasons. And while many men fear the notion of watching a soul-searching ensemble movie like Steel Magnolias or Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood as much as some women cringe at the thought of seeing the next James Bond movie, there are plenty of alleged chick flicks out there that tread a middle ground that couples can enjoy. With V-Day just in the rearview mirror, I thought I’d roll out some titles that will halt the battle of the sexes at the video store and easily solve the problem of what to watch.
Bend It Like Beckham (2002) British teenager Jess (ER’s Parminder Nagra) was born into a traditional Indian family. While her older sister is going to follow the route of marrying and settling down, Jess wants to chase her dreams of being a soccer player, which worries her disapproving parents. When a big soccer tournament is scheduled for the same day as her sister’s wedding, the tension rises. This vivacious movie works on multiple levels: as a feel-good flick, a sports movie, a culture-clash tale, and a romantic comedy. It also costars a prestardom Keira Knightley.
Bridget Jones’s Diary (2001) Renée Zellweger stars as the titular character, a publishing assistant who’s cute, spunky, socially awkward, and caught between two men (Colin Firth and Hugh Grant) who have plenty of character flaws and a bitter feud that killed their friendship. There was an alleged controversy over Zellweger’s having gained weight for the role, which was ridiculous because she looks gorgeous here. The film shines with its lively characters, saucy dialogue, and amusing fistfight between Bridget’s suitors in an Italian café.
Chocolat (2000) Mmmm, chocolate. A chocolatier (Juliette Binoche) and her daughter innocently open a confectionery in a repressed French town, but their succulent temptations and associations with a band of gypsies (including the suave Johnny Depp) turn everything upside down for the leery locals. Part food movie, part love story, part comedy of errors, Chocolat is one sweet flick. You’ll laugh; you’ll cry; you’ll crave dessert.
Fried Green Tomatoes (1991) An insecure middle-aged woman with a failing marriage (Kathy Bates) becomes empowered when she befriends a spunky elderly woman at a retirement home (Jessica Tandy) who tells her a tale of a loving friendship between two strong Southern women (Mary-Louise Parker and Mary Stuart Masterson) that survives childhood death, domestic violence, and murder. There’s even a deliciously shocking revelation at the film’s end. See? Just your average chick flick.
Somewhere in Time (1980) After the stunning success of Superman, Christopher Reeve avoided going the action-hero route and dove into this story of a modern-day playwright who falls in love with an early-twentieth-century actress (Jane Seymour) through a photo and then journeys back in time to meet her. This is the only movie I’ve seen that equates time travel with lucid dreaming, and while the narrative logic is a bit thin, it’s a charming concept that’s played out well and has an unexpected ending. The film was directed by Jeannot Szwarc (Jaws 2), written by Richard Matheson (The Twilight Zone series), and scored by John Barry (of James Bond fame), but there’s just a hint of testosterone present.
What Dreams May Come (1998) Directed by Vincent Ward and inspired by a book by Richard Matheson (Somewhere in Time), this visually dazzling film stars Robin Williams and Annabella Sciorra as Chris and Annie, a couple who magically meet in Europe. But after the untimely death of their two children, later followed by Chris’s early departure from this mortal coil, Annie is left alone and ultimately commits suicide. Told in the hereafter that a damned soul can never be rescued, Chris relentlessly searches through heaven and hell to find Annie and reunite his family. What Dreams May Come is an enchanting and sometimes dark ride that will blow your mind.
What Women Want (2000) It’s surprising that macho Mel “Braveheart” Gibson starred in this feminist romantic comedy about a chauvinistic, freewheeling ad executive who, through near electrocution, gains the ability to hear women’s thoughts. Overwhelmed by all this new information, he first uses it to seduce a coffee-shop hottie (Marisa Tomei) and then learns to better understand his teenage daughter, his coworkers, and a rival (Helen Hunt) who nabbed the position he wanted. It’s a hilarious and touching story, although it now comes with unintentional humor when Gibson tells one young man, “Thanks for the yarmulke.”
When Harry Met Sally (1989) Can men and women be just friends? Director Rob Reiner and writer Nora Ephron pondered that very idea in this classic romantic comedy starring Billy Crystal and Meg Ryan as the titular friends/potential lovers. What would be completely pedestrian material in lesser hands is elevated by fine comedic performances from the cast and by some snappy dialogue. The scene in a Manhattan deli is legendary, and for good reason. Ryan is incredibly hot with her clothes on.
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Running on Empty
A history of lame car chases on film. By Bryan Reesman
Crazy car chases rule, but low-octane pursuits make for excruciating viewing. Derrick Hopkins, editor of Varaces.com, a site devoted to more than 700 movie car chases, and co-owner of DTMMovies.com, looks for quality car matchups, sizzling stunts and action, and story context, but he disdains most computer effects. Here, he analyzes scenes that never upshift.
Driven (2001)
The movie’s bad guy inexplicably flees a car show in a Formula One and races down Chicago streets before Sylvester Stallone follows him. “And why would Stallone jump in another to chase after him?” gripes Hopkins. “What are these guys doing? That whole movie just [ticked] me off. None of it makes sense.”
Gone in 60 Seconds (2000)
Hopkins calls the 1974 original “the greatest chase movie ever,” but the sequel blows the climactic car jump on a bridge with CGI chicanery. “In the original, the director drove the car himself, and the car got almost completely destroyed. But these guys got $90 million to make a movie, and they couldn’t even crash a car. It’s not even a good CGI jump.”
I, Robot (2004)
Great car, lame usage. Will Smith is driving a futuristic Audi in a straight tunnel, changing lanes really fast to avoid pursuing robots. “At one point, the car does a 360-degree spin. He couldn’t be controlling it, and what you’re watching on-screen doesn’t even look like a real car at certain points.”
I Spy (2002)
Eddie Murphy and Owen Wilson flee pursuers while their car is stuck on a truck, only returning to street level at the end. “The entire chase, they were just sitting in their car,” says Hopkins. We fell asleep before we noticed.
Maximum Overdrive (1986)
After a possessed 18-wheeler fails to run down a clunky midsize car (as if), the truck swerves off a hillside and blows up! “[It’s like] every truck is just packed with napalm or something, so as soon as it does anything, it automatically explodes,” quips Hopkins.
A View to a Kill (1985)
Even James Bond has his off days. When Roger Moore races a taxicab through Paris, “all of a sudden, the back half gets cut off, and he’s driving half a cab. That makes no sense.” But it looked cool (in 1985).
XXX: State of the Union (2005)
At the beginning, audiences are teased with Mustangs, Bentleys, Porsches, Ferraris, and the prototype for a Cobra. The Cobra gets minimal use in a low-speed pursuit of a train by star Ice Cube. Blah.
MISFIRES Even the greatest cinematic chase ever has its flaws. In Bullitt, aside from a green VW that keeps popping up in shot after shot, the black Charger that Steve McQueen’s Mustang is chasing loses as many as eight hubcaps during the chase. At the climax, the Charger crashes into a gas station and blows it up. “But the driver was going so fast, he couldn’t control the car and missed the building altogether,” reveals Hopkins. “If you watch in slow motion, you can see him drive behind the building and come out the other side, and then the building blows up.” Still, we didn’t notice. This one rules because it has no CGI or cheap effects and was probably pretty dangerous to pull off.
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