Word: arthur
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...when Presley was still in high school and the family was still living at Lauderdale Courts, he had a record on the radio. Nothing about icy fingers this time. That's All Right, Mama was a butane-bright and street-nasty version of an old blues number by Arthur ("Big Boy") Crudup; the flip side, Blue Moon of Kentucky, was a wild and beautiful version of a bluegrass waltz popularized by the country star Bill Monroe in 1946. No one had ever heard anything quite like...
...Hoop Dreams" is a tragedy of bad advice. Bad advice begins with bad fathers, or more aptly, absent fathers. Both Arthur Age and William Gates, the two young players whose high school careers this film traces, grow up in single-parent homes. This fact becomes central to the narrative of their lives as time and time again they are manipulated by would-be fathers--be they coaches, recruiters, or corporations...
...evanescent fame. There are moments of extraordinary grace along the way, some intimations of hope and the occasional tremendous jam. But these moments are fleeting. As long as these cycles keep on spinning and these misguided dreams are dreamt, there can be little hope for William Gates and Arthur Agee--of, for that matter...
...unrelenting commodification of William and Arthur starts here. Aggressive and patronizing, St. Joseph's coach Gene Pingatore incessantly waxes nostalgic about Isaiah, as if to pound constantly into each boy's mind that Thomas was the one recruit that did what St. Joseph's wanted: he made it to the the NBA. In Pingatore's eyes, Thomas' fame and fortune lend testimony to St. Joseph's High School's everlasting committment to the underprivileged, untapped talent of Chicago's inner-city African-American population. Read the message from St. Joseph's administration to all basketball recruits...
...pressure is on Gates and Agee to perform, and the pressure comes from all sides. In addition to the constant upbraiding from coach Pingatore, Arthur's father Bo ("I could've played the pros") reminds Arthur that he represents the family's last chance for success, and William's brother Curtis ("I almost played the pros") imposes his own lost dreams on William. It is no wonder that Bo Agee and Curtis Gates invest so much interest in their younger kin: they don't see much of a future for themselves. Bo Agee gets laid off work at various factories...