Cheap Hoop Dreams (Video) (Arthur Agee, William Gates) Price

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Customer Reviews of Hoop Dreams

Hoop Dreams - a life and career.
I was entertained during Hoop Dreams, not a lot, but I was. I think it's also a fairly important film. We're told it's the best film of the 90's by Roger Ebert, who, for the record, loved 'Crash'. If it wasn't brutally passed over for an Oscar nom, would it be held up nearly as often? <
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>It's strictly concerned with one story - how a young black person can make it in an area where there aren't a lot of opportunities and a lot of his friends get to live adulthood behind bars. <
>The indoor basketball scenes are the most boring parts of the movie. I didn't rent it to see basketball but when a film runs 3 hours, more energy from the main subject would help. <
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>You also don't find out much about what the two guys are thinking... when one switches to a white school, you see his concern but you never find out if he made any white friends or not. You see him repeating the lines to a paranoid track about how white people want you to 'go the f--- back to Africa'. And it raised the question of who pushed who away - and why? <
>But the film isn't interested in answering that, or in critically analyzing its two leads. We know from the beginning that the coaches are the bad guys and it strikes me as bad directing that everything follows what the lead subjects say. Did the family really get kicked off welfare for missing an appointment? How did they make ends meet on that?? <
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>At the end, when they go on to college and change their minds about their careers you never see what the family and Curtis thought about it - after they put all that energy into helping and supporting him. I think Hoop Dreams is one of the best films about growing up with a dream, but it's soft, completely predictable, and is in no way the last word on the subject. <
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bad movie
we saw this movie in Gym class and it is the worest movie any one has ever seen

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Perhaps the best documentary ever.
Hoop Dreams was one of the most powerful films I've ever seen. For one, it is an almost five year documentary on the lives of two young Chicago basketball players, Arthur Agee and William Gates, and the worlds they live in - on and off the basketball court. I came to find myself rooting them on, not necessarily on the court (although I did that too), but I desperately wanted them to succeed off the court. The obstacles are there for both of them. <
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>For William, it's two surgeries that jeopardize his prospects as the "next Isaiah Thomas." For Arthur, his greatest difficulty is trusting his newly released con-man father. In fact, both boys find themselves trying to trust their distant fathers. William's dad shows up after the colleges start calling and talk of NBA stardom begins to drift in across the Windy City. <
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>As we watch Hoop Dreams, we see the boys begin to see life as it is and not as what they imagined it would be. They half-heartedly welcome the praise of coaches who would otherwise treat them like vagabonds if not for their talent. We see them battle the temptations of the streets and the nightmare of domestic abuse. When they speak to the camera in their quiet moments, we feel the rage and despair that ring through their voices. No script could ever duplicate such honesty of the human condition. <
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>Hoop Dreams is three hours long but it is worth every moment. Even if you hate sports, you will likely find yourself swayed by the lives of these two young men as they struggle with life.