Tribeca - Gunnin’ for that #1 Spot
Another sports documentary and another relatively mediocre effort. The ESPN portion of the Tribeca Film Festival has turned out to be something of a disappointment because it played host to a lot of subpar efforts. Now most of them haven’t been particularly bad; I gave both the Bobby V documentary and the Iranian soccer movie fours because they did do a decent job of addressing an interesting subject. Gunnin’ for that #1 Spot was a look at the Elite All-Star game played by the top 24 high school students in the country on a famous streetball court in Manhattan.
The first part of the film consists of profiles of eight of the players, from different backgrounds and different parts of the country, which is then followed by footage of the game. I was left wondering why I was really supposed to care about the player profiles. There wasn’t any sort of arc or narrative tying it together, so it was just a bunch of people talking about the pressures of being a high school athlete these days. And that is certainly an interesting subject, but it wasn’t really the subject of this documentary, so while it was tangentially addressed, it was not the focus. The actual game footage was amazingly shot and edited, so that was a lot of fun to watch. But overall there was little point to this film. It didn’t inform enough to be a serious doc or entertain enough to just be fun. It gets a three.