A List Of Things Thrown Five Minutes Ago

I WAS SOBBING LIKE A BABY WHO'D JUST BEEN HIT IN THE NUTS AND WATCHED HIS FAVORITE CHESS PLAYER LOSE THE CHESS-PERSON SUPER BOWL: The AV Club's Nathan Rabin had never seen Hoop Dreams -- until now:

So why did it take me 15 years to see one of the most acclaimed movies of the 1990s? I certainly wasn’t too busy not getting laid during my high-school years to watch Hoop Dreams. I guess I just thought 170 minutes was an awful lot of time to invest in any film.

Sweet blessed Lord, was I ever wrong. Hoop Dreams tells an intimate story on an epic scale. It needs to be 170 minutes long just to do justice to the depth and richness of its subject. Hoop Dreams only appears to be about a pair of basketball players from the Chicago projects; it’s really about everything. It’s less about hoop dreams than about the myriad soul-shattering ways the American Dream can fall apart. It’s less a sports movie than an American tragedy.

Yes, we'll play Humiliation again tomorrow on other topics, but this is a movie you should have seen already.