Hacker Cinema
Hoop Dreams
1994 · Film · documentary · 174 min
Directed by Steve James
Every school day, African-American teenagers William Gates and Arthur Agee travel 90 minutes each way from inner-city Chicago to St. Joseph High School in Westchester, Illinois, a predominately white suburban school well-known for the excellence of its basketball program. Gates and Agee dream of NBA stardom, and with the support of their close-knit families, they battle the social and physical obstacles that stand in their way. This acclaimed documentary was shot over the course of five years.
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15 comments on Hacker News
Hoop Dreams is not on a list of the 50+ best documentaries?
There's Something Wrong with Aunt Diane - investigation of a car crash that killed 8 people
Art of the Steal - walks through the back-room negotiations and money resulting in the move of the Barnes Foundation (one of the world's greatest private art collections) from Main Line to Center City Philadelphia, which was specifically against the patron's wishes.
Roger & Me - I don't love Michael Moore's politics or his later movies but his breakthrough film, where he looks at everything gone wrong in his hometown of Flint Michigan, is very good.
June 17th, 1994 - this is an ESPN 30 For 30, splices together TV clips covering multiple historic sporting events of that particular day, most famously, the O.J. Simpson car chase. If you weren't alive on that date (and even if you were) it's utterly fascinating.
> But this is an issue with any identification problem, there are false positives and false negatives. If we have a bunch of laws mistakes will be made.
So be cautious when adding yet another imperfect system onto all of the rest. Especially one with such disparate weightings attached to it.
> It seems to be pretty confused about how kids get their political opinions.
It's not confused. Most children get their political opinions based on:
A) Whether or not they felt they had supportive parents.
B) What they think their parent's political opinions are.
It is thus up to parents to both be supportive of their children, and to affirmatively communicate to their children what their political opinions are. If this happens much more than 70% of children will mimic their parents' politics.
> This is part of skin-in-the-game, right?
It's not your skin in the game, it's your children's skin in the game. Some persons do indeed see people as cliques and tribes, which have interests in lock-step, and believe it is just to have them vote in sync. But I believe that most people are more nuanced.
> For instance how will you form an opinion about whether schools are well run?
You made the mistake of triggering one of my hobby-horses. :D
The way I do this is by knowing what policies helped and hindered me, my spouse, and our siblings while going through school. And then reading the policies promulgated by those running for office (especially of the local school board), and of the school proposals submitted to the voting population as initiatives or referendums. And reading criticisms by teachers, parents, students, other politicians, etcetera. And then weighing all of this data to determine what I think is best, for students like me, my spouse, and our siblings.
Let's say that all of your kids are still in primary school. How are you, as a parent, supposed to form an opinion about whether the secondary schools are well run? How are you supposed to form an opinion based solely on your own kids? Kids are not identical. My wife thrived in a particular pre-school, while her brother later said he thought it wasn't good for him. The schooling choices you make for the eldest of your kids may turn out to be bad decisions for your younger kids. Now factor in that your kids are only a tiny proportion of the school-attending population.
I, at least, have spent a couple of decades researching these schooling subjects. I've watched documentaries on it (specifically Waiting for Superman, and Hoop Dreams). I've seen the movies Stand and Deliver and The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. I know a bit about the differences between schooling in Scotland, England, Australia, and my home country the USA. I've read Miraca Gross's books on gifted education. I've read John Taylor Gatto's critiques of the education system for regular kids. You're telling me that with all of my knowledge my political power should be much less than your own?
You gain knowledge I cannot by dint of having your kids in the system. I have knowledge that you do not by dint of having gone through a system, as well as having done my own research. Let us both have an equal vote. If you don't like how I vote you can always home school your kids, or send them to a private school (or "public" as they call them in England).
> but social factors are also a thing
Why are black people disproportionately in pro basketball? "It must be genetics!". It couldn't possibly be the fact that basketball courts are easier to build in the inner city than baseball fields. It couldn't be the fact that many poor black kids see the salaries that sports stars make, see the accessibility of a basketball court, and think "that's my ticket out.". (A neat documentary about this is "Hoop Dreams")
For some reason people find it easiest to default to looking at personal characteristics, which in the alt-right online spaces is genetics (in the regular right it's culture). If I had to guess a reason I'd guess that we're evolutionarily used to living in small tribes, sharing the same environment with everyone we meet, so we look to personal factors to explain preferences and abilities. But we no longer live in those homogeneous environments.
A little late to the thread, but two come to mind:
Hoop Dreams (1994) - Explores inner-city poverty through the eyes of two young boys in Chicago who want to use basketball as a way to escape their environment. I haven't seen it in a long time, but my biggest takeaway from it is how narrow the bridge to "success" can be for some. If you grow up in a well-to-do upper middle class environment, you can make a shocking number of youthful mistakes, yet still get saved by your parents, school, society. Others really only have one or two chances to make things work.
The Kingdom of Dreams and Madness (2013) - A must-watch if you're an admirer of Hayao Miyazaki movies. Goes into his creative processes; how he thinks about his work, the world at-large, etc.; and his long-standing friendship with his producer, Toshio Suzuki.
It's not mentioned because OP asked for documentaries from the last 4 years, and Hoop Dreams must be over a quarter century old at this point.
Great film though.
I love documentaries, and these are my favourites. All very worth a watch.
- The Crash Reel
- McConkey
- Buck
- Apollo 11
- Carts of Darkness
- The Wild and Wonderful Whites of West Virginia
- Samsara
- Baraka
- Brooklyn Castle
- Spellbound
- Drew: The Man Behind the Poster
- Crumb
- The Jinx
- The Art of Flight
- King of Kong
- Indie Game: The Movie
- Capturing the Friedmans
- OJ: Made in America
- The Barkley Marathons
- The Seven Five
- Murderball
- Unbranded
- Gringo: The Dangerous Life of John McAfee
- Big River Man
- Hoop Dreams
- Word Wars
- Free Solo
- Long Shot
- Meru
- Being Elmo
- All This Mayhem
- Jiro Dreams of Sushi
- The Cove
- Project Nim
- Alone in the Wilderness
- Behind the Curve
- The Dawn Wall
- Grizzly Man
- 13th
- Winnebago Man
- Man vs Snake: The Long and Twisted Tale of Nibbler
- Get Me Roger Stone
- Icarus
- 13th
- Koyaanisqatsi
- The Thin Blue Line
- An Inconvenient Truth
- Oklahoma City
- Virunga
- The Staircase
- Evil Genius
- Undefeated
- Betting on zero
One of the finest movies ever made about sport is a documentary called "Hoop Dreams," it follows the fortunes of two high-school basketball players attempting to make it into the NBA:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoop_Dreams
It's well worth a watch.
Hoop Dreams (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoop_Dreams) - 1994.
This is a long basketball documentary following two youngsters from the housing projects of Chicago. I was lucky enough to visit Chicago for a week with work just a couple of months after seeing this; it led me to learning so much more about the struggles of people living in the housing projects of Cabrini Green, Robert Taylor Homes etc. Whether you're a fan of basketball or not, this is an eye opener into much wider issues.
Lots of good ones already mentioned, but here's a few nobody's brought up yet:
Orson Welles' F for Fake: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0072962/
Robert X. Cringely's Triumph of the Nerds: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triumph_of_the_Nerds
The Maysles Brothers' Gimme Shelter: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0065780/
Randy Olson's Flock of Dodos: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0800334/
Les Blank's Burden of Dreams: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0083702/
Steve James' Hoop Dreams: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0110057/
Chris Hegedus and D.A. Pennebaker's The War Room: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0108515/
>The Century of the Self: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJ3RzGoQC4s
I think all of Adam Curtis' documentaries are worth a watch:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL617BE1DB723DB1D6
Some others favourites off the top of my head:
808 (about the drum machine): https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2268622/
Scratch: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0143861/
Hoop Dreams: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0110057/
Startup.com (a classic!) : https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0256408/
The Fog of War: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0317910/
The documentary, Hoop Dreams by Steve James and Frederick Marx captures the mania around startups just as well as it does for getting into the NBA. It's well worth watching.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoop_Dreams
“Many are called but few are chosen”, Matthew 22:14
I highly recommend the 1994 film Hoop Dreams[1]. It provides a look into the world where school meets sport.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoop_Dreams
You won't find many documentaries as revealing, hopeful, sad, and full of wisdom about the world of black kids in the American inner city than the documentary "Hoop Dreams". It's so much more than a story about kinds playing basketball.
It's almost 3 hours long but it will grab your attention and you'll forget about time. When I watched it at the movie theatre in the mid-90s I was blown away by it's depth. I have never watched a better documentary since.
It's free online: http://www.hulu.com/watch/249576/hoop-dreams
Hoop Dreams. It's a documentary, but it is both inspirational and feel-good.
(For anyone with a US IP address and 3 hours to kill, Hoop Dreams is available on Hulu and it's really an incredible movie. http://www.hulu.com/watch/28514/hoop-dreams)