2 posts tagged “sports”
Considered too old for a professional ice-skating career, 16-year-old Alexis (Lynn-Holly Johnson) nonetheless triumphs to become a champion. Tragically, she falls and suffers a brain injury that leaves her nearly blind. With the help of her father (Tom Skeritt) and her boyfriend, Nick (Robby Benson), Alexis attempts, against all odds, to again become a top-ranked skater in director Donald Wry's Oscar-nominated romantic drama.
The only good thing about this movie was Lynn-Holly Johnson. Seriously. Colleen Dewhurst and Tom Skeritt were at their usual worst, and Robby Benson's character just made me want to barf. But Lynn-Holly Johnson, who is apparently a professional ice skater, is also a pretty darn fine actress. Her blindness was believable - how often does that happen?!
The story itself, frankly, sucked. If I had a dollar for every hokey minute in that movie, I'd be buying a new iPod Shuffle. It just wasn't enjoyable...a sense of glurge permeated the whole thing. (Which, again, was quite apparent in the description.)
Oh, there was one other good thing - all the funny 70's hairstyles on all the girl skaters. Ha!
I rented the three-hour Japanese film Tokyo Olympiad primarily because I was interested in seeing Larissa Latynina, Vera Caslavska, and other gymnasts. Here's what the white sleeve summary said:
Fans of Bud Greenspan's Olympic Diaries will love this DVD. Director Kon Ichikawa used more than 150 cameramen to capture the indelible artistry, passion, beauty and competition during the 1964 SummerOlympics in Tokyo, Japan. Ichikawa's stunning images put poetry into the phrase "the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat."
So I was really hoping that it would be good, and indeed the first part was not bad. The editing done on the track and field events was very cool, and it was neat to see the Olympic torch's journey and the funny outfits everybody wore for the opening ceremonies. But the gymnastics section was dreadfully short - it showed Latynina, Caslavska, and Polina Astakhova from the women's competition, and all the men shown were Japanese except for Boris Shakhlin. I did recognize a couple of clips that were shown on a gymnastics retrospective during the 1988 Olympics in Seoul, so now I know where those were from.
But shortly after the gymnastics was swimming, which was pretty boring because the editing was nowhere near as good as the track and field events. After that came weightlifting, and then wrestling...so I ended up turning it off. The movie is almost three hours long, so it might indeed have gotten more interesting, but I'd seen what I wanted to see and didn't feel like bothering with the rest.
