# Love & Basketball (2000)

### reviewed by
Jon Popick

    PLANET SICK-BOY: http://www.sick-boy.com
    "We Put the SIN in Cinema"

Financed by Spike Lee's Forty Acres and a Mule production company, Love & Basketball is too much like Spike's recent flicks - excessively long, agonizingly self-indulgent and full of nails-across-a-blackboard music from Terence Blanchard (Summer of Sam). And that's really a shame – there's a nice little film in there somewhere, if you pare away about thirty-five minutes.

Basketball is divided into four uneven segments labeled `First Quarter,' `Second Quarter,' etc. The first takes place in 1981, where the world of eleven-year-old Crenshaw kid Quincy McCall (Glenndon Chatman) is rocked to its alpha-male foundation by the fact that he may no longer be the best basketball player on his street. Q's new neighbor – like him, a wannabe point guard – has silky-smooth moves, a killer jump shot and, more importantly, is actually a tomboy named Monica Wright (Kyla Pratt).

Hey – haven't we already seen a girl move to a new town and dress like a boy this year?

Flash to 1988, where both Q (Omar Epps, In Too Deep) and Monica (Sanaa Lathan, The Best Man) are star playmakers for their respective Crenshaw High teams. She loves Magic Johnson and wears his #32, while his idol is his dad, who sports #22 for the L.A. Clippers. They're still neighbors (their bedroom windows are only about ten feet apart) and they bicker like an old, married couple. It's sweet to watch Q and Monica pretend that they don't care a lick about each other when it's obvious that they do. A romance eventually blossoms after a spring dance.

Basketball's third (and longest) quarter sees Q effortlessly making the move from high school to the starting line-up at USC, while Monica struggles just to make her Lady Trojan team. This is where Basketball is at its best - contrasting Q's red carpet journey to instant college fame and adulation with Monica's sweaty workouts featuring teammates that hate her and a coach that rides her ass raw every day. According to Dick Vitale (who makes a cameo performance along with fellow ESPNer Robin Roberts), Q is a real P.T.P. Diaper Dandy (meaning – I think - that he's a freshman with incredible potential).

The last chapter of the film is set in 1993, and what little faith I had remaining for Basketball's denouement was ripped out from under me. There is entirely too much time spent on the relationship between each set of parents and their talented little ballplayers. You know when Q's moms (Debbi Morgan, The Hurricane) warns him about money-grubbing hoes trying to `trap' him that she's probably done the same to his NBA star pop (Dennis Haysbert, Random Hearts), while Monica's prissy parents (Harry J. Lennix, Titus and Alfre Woodard, Mumford) just don't understand how important basketball is to their daughter.

Basketball was written and directed by Gina Prince-Bythewood, who made two unseen Dave Chappelle comedic shorts called Damn Whitey and Bowl of Pork, the latter of which a black take on Forrest Gump (`Life is like a bowl of pork' – get it?). Until now, Prince-Bythewood was probably best known for being the daughter of accomplished television director Stan Lathan. She even adds a clip of Pop's latest sitcom The Steve Harvey Show. Prince-Bythewood's script is heartwarming at times, but as a whole is unfocused and uneven. If there was more of the relationship between Q and Monica (like the priceless look of shock when he unfurls his package before they git wit' each other for the first time), the film would have been a lot more enjoyable. There are a couple of pretty cool shots through Monica's eyes while she's on the court in the middle of a game.

There are other mildly endearing qualities to Basketball, like the use of different music from each period of the film. First you hear Bobby Brown singing `Candy Girl' with New Edition, and then `My Prerogative' on his own seven years later. It's funny, but not nearly as funny as hearing people use the word `fresh' repeatedly. There are other minor problems with the film as well. Like why would these people live in Crenshaw? Isn't that supposed to be a bad area? Wouldn't an NBA star live somewhere else? Their houses are huge and one even has a giant in-ground pool. Maybe I'm just ignorant (I already have plenty of e-mail supporting this point, so save your typing fingers), but Crenshaw is always portrayed as a gang war zone in films set in south central Los Angeles.

In addition to not having opening credits (a growing trend in mainstream film), there is another interesting event that happens early in the film. Woodard's character coughs in her first scene, which is usually the first sign of a character developing lung cancer in the last reel. But that doesn't happen here, which almost makes me think that this story was originally intended to drag out even longer than it already did, and the whole cancer angle (thankfully) ended up on the cutting room floor. Or, then again, maybe Woodard just coughed and the director didn't feel like reshooting the scene.

2:04 - PG-13 for strong sexual content and adult language

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