Delayed Reaction: Love & Basketball

Premise: Two next door neighbors grow up with dreams of basketball glory, even as their lives bring them in and out of relationships with each other and others.

 

One of the subtle benefits of my obsessive movie documentation is that I rarely have the sensation of feeling like I've seen a movie. I have a list. I've assembled it painstakingly for over a decade. I've poured over thousands of movies I've potentially seen and forgotten about to get me a list that's as accurate as possible, so I can go into any movie certain about if it's new to me.

If I didn't have this, Love & Basketball is 100% a movie I would've never seen because I'd've thought I'd already seen it. I remember seeing TV spots for it. It came out in a peak HBO era of my teen years. The story is generic enough that I'd read the summary and say "I'm pretty sure I remember that". There's every reason for me to believe that I've seen this movie before. I have, in fact, never seen this movie though.

 

And, Love & Basketball is pretty much the movie I needed it to be. I like Sanaa Lathan and Omar Epps. I like basketball. I'm all about coming-of-age stories. It's got a severely over-credentialed Alfre Woodard and Dennis Haysbert before his career was overtaken by Allstate notoriety. It even has one of my most specific film delights: a cameo from an actual college basketball personality. In this case, it's Dick Vitale. As a lifelong fan of college basketball, I love being like "Oh, there's a younger version of that guy I know of as an older guy now". It's the small things that get me through the day.

 

There isn't all that much to say about this movie. Most of it relies on Lathan and Epps having scintillating chemistry, which they do. Some of the complications are dumb, like why they break up in college. I like that it's covertly more Lathan's movie, by the end following her to her overseas career. It's cool that the movie ends with her in the WNBA and him presumably going back to school. It's a nice mix of "follow your dreams" and "make the best of things when your dream doesn't pan out".

 

Verdict: Weakly Recommend