Shared Darkness

The Heart of the Game is a documentary that charts a
seven-year span in the life of Seattle’s
Roosevelt High School
women’s basketball coach, Bill Resler (above right). Initially, filmmaker Ward Serrill had
intended to produce a modest film documenting a single season. The team that
year had a talented roster, but the main draw was their eccentric new head
coach. Still, while it was a successful year, Serrill didn’t feel he had quite enough
material for a full-length documentary, and so he continued chronicling the girls
into the following year, a decision that paid off when incoming freshman
Darnellia Russell joined the team.

The majority of the film is dedicated to star Russell’s
tumultuous five-year high school career. There are several highlights on the
court, but Russell’s off-the-court problems nearly sidetrack her aspirations. Though supremely talented, Russell’s quick temper, inattentiveness and other self-destructive behavior threatens to compromise her athletic eligibility. Ever
passionate, Resler continually reaches at working and inspiring his players on what
is, apart from Russell, otherwise a fairly mediocre team. He uses Russell as an instrument of sorts, and as she responds, so too do those around her.

Since it pulls at heartstrings and concerns basketball, the
obvious comparison is to Hoop Dreams, but while The Heart of the
Game is an inspirational look at what perseverance and dedication can
accomplish, it isn’t tempered with quite as many salient secondary storylines,
and neither does it feel like a snapshot of an untainted moment, as that
aforementioned film now does in a world where high school recruiting
information is disseminated on the Internet in the blink of an eye. Interestingly,
the movie glancingly recalls Ryan Gosling’s Half
Nelson, insomuch as
it presents a somewhat atypical mentor-mentee relationship. The pitiless muddied
absolutes of that movie, though, are traded in for more familiar uplift, making
The Heart of the Game a movie certainly
as much for habitual viewers of ABC’s Extreme
Makeover as regular sports fans.

Housed in a regular Amray case, the movie is presented in
1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen, with an English language Dolby digital 5.1
surround sound track and a Spanish language Dolby digital 2.0 track. Optional
subtitles in English and French are also available. Hearteningly, though
perhaps not surprisingly, The Heart of
the Game also includes a slate of supplemental extras which play up
audience reaction to and interaction with the film, including footage of
promotional screenings from around the country, attended by Russell and Resler.
Director Serrill, meanwhile, provides an informative audio commentary track
full of information on bit players and supporting characters in the movie, and
there are also around a dozen or so of the many, many scenes that Serrill hacked his way through in trimming down several hundred hours of footage to a 97-minute running time. B (Movie) B+ (Disc)

An Inconvenient Truth
surely had some folks casting their minds back to the election year of
2000, and wondering what might have been. For Gore, though — who
good-naturedly poked fun at rumors of a presidential bid launch in
front of a worldwide audience of more than one billion in a staged bit
in which his mock announcement was interrupted by the Oscar orchestra —
it’s the future that’s on his mind, not the past. And in this regard, An Inconvenient Truth delivers a mightily damning indictment of our collective stasis on the issue of global warming. For the full DVD review, from IGN, click here.