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Basketball Diaries

Frayed Knot Sep 15 2009 07:07 AM

So it probably shouldn't take the death of Jim Carroll to make me sit up and realize that I never got around to seeing (or reading for that matter) 'Basketball Diaries', but it is. All of which leads me to the question; is it worth seeing?

metirish Sep 15 2009 07:23 AM Re: Basketball Diaries

Di Caprio was good but the movie itself wasn't that good , that's my memory of it anyway.

TransMonk Sep 15 2009 07:28 AM Re: Basketball Diaries

I think it has merit. I've never read the book so I don't know how true to the story it is. I saw half of it a year or two ago and found it to be dated as far as the filming is concerned. It looks like it was made in the 90s. Leo DiCaprio gives a good performance. It features Marky Mark in his first true acting role, which is as good as any he's done. Jim Carroll makes a cameo. I remember really enjoying it when it first came out. Kind of a bummer film, but I would watch it again...and probably will. Edgy doesn't like it.

John Cougar Lunchbucket Sep 15 2009 07:36 AM Re: Basketball Diaries

I don;t remember much of the film myself, other than the impression that it was OK and not really my cup of meat. I should probably reread the book sometime.

Edgy MD Sep 15 2009 08:06 AM Re: Basketball Diaries

The thing about the book is that it was very much a snapshot of it's time. The city, the drugs, the inner city Catholic Church desperately trying to hold on to its influence as Vatican II reforms are being put in place. By resetting the story in then contemporary times, a lot of that seems silly, and romanticizes the degradation of it all. The oppressive school is anachronistic, and the two chiseled young actors come off less like neglected poor kids than like spoiled brats slumming in an affected streety lifestyle. After the Columbine massacre, the attack was reported as being inspired in part by a scene in the film in which DiCaprio fantasizes about walking through the classroom in a cool black trenchcoat blowing people away http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9gK_ktLOau8 Carroll was pretty shocked and appeared on a few TV shows clarifying that the scene was a gross distortion of a scene in his diary where he fantasized about firing a gun in class to break up the boredom, and admitted that the scene seemed pretty irresponsible in retrospect --- an admission that surprised me, considering that he had cooperated with the film-makers, appeared in the film, and profited well from his book being re-issued with Leo Dio on the cover.

LeiterWagnerFasterStrongr Sep 17 2009 09:52 AM Re: Basketball Diaries

The oppressive school is anachronistic, and the two chiseled young actors come off less like neglected poor kids than like spoiled brats slumming in an affected streety lifestyle. Edgy nails the crux of the problem here. Moving its setting to the present dynamites any promise the movie had. In a way, the movie ends up being very much of its time-- it's edited like a 90s music video, and the screenplay ends up sounding like a copy of a copy of something someone heard in a Nine Inch Nails song. Whether it's the trappings, the edits, the cinematography, the whole thing takes on an ethos that's less like genuine teenage squall-- discovering natural gifts and tits and drugs and not knowing what to do with any of it-- and more like a hack video director trying to make a James Toback/Larry Clark flick, or-- at times-- an extended gritty, New Yorky arc on "90210." I'm not generally a stodgy, fuck-the-movie-read-the-book guy... but fuck the movie, read the book. TransMonk wrote: It features Marky Mark in his first true acting role, which is as good as any he's done. "Boogie Nights" is holding for you on Line 1, TM. It sounds pissed.

TransMonk Sep 17 2009 10:04 AM Re: Basketball Diaries

LeiterWagnerFasterStrongr wrote: "Boogie Nights" is holding for you on Line 1, TM. It sounds pissed. I'm not convinced his performance in "Boogie Nights" is anywhere near stellar. It was decent, but certainly not anything a heaping handful of other actors his age could have done given the script and direction. My point was more that if you can appriciate Mark Wahlberg, the actor (as one-dimensional as that may or may not be), this was his first role in which he appears as a mediocre actor...which is far more than I would have given him credit for following his Funky Bunch days before seeing him in this film.