30 for 30 running thread

A commenter on the AV Club said it better than I could:

Fantastic documentary - probably my favorite 30 For 30 yet, with the possible exception of the Two Escobars (although I dug the Len Bias one an awful lot, too). I haven't seen the O.J. or Ricky Williams ones yet, and people really liked those a lot.

 

Excellent film on Terry Fox.

I was born the same month he died. I had heard of him but knew next to nothing about him. I resisted going to Wikipedia before turning the TiVo on, so I learned his entire story during the film. I was captivated.

Very well done. This series is great, great television.

 

Bruce Arthur, who's quickly turning into one of my favourite columnists, wrote a review of the Fox documentary the other day

http://www.nationalpost.com/sports/story+hope/3564699/story.html

 

The Fox 30 for 30 was incredibly compelling. Not going to lie, I was choked up for a good portion of it. Really well done.

 

No need to be emberassed that you found the story of Terry Fox emotional, I almost cried like a little girl at some points.

It was amazing,

 

I liked it, but I thought it focused too much on the run and not enough on the man. Maybe it's because I volunteer to work with kids with cancer at times, but it's way too easy to boil these people down to their disease and reactions to it.

I wanted to know why the run across Canada (other than just "to raise money" - what about that particular task struck him? There are a million ways to raise money that will do a lot better than he did at the start of his run). I wanted to know how the fight changed his personality, if at all. I wanted to hear from friends who weren't involved in the race - what was their reaction when he told them, when they saw him on television. And I wanted to know more about the tipping point of when this became important to the Canadian people. It seemed like "entering Ontario" was cited as the biggest thing, but that's too simple for me and has uncomfortable implications when you consider the sometimes tense relationships between Quebec and the rest of the country.

That said, it was obviously a very good documentary because it left me hungry for more information, and it did do a good job of not lionizing his personality. People with cancer are still people. We are all amazingly resilient if we need to be, but we are also all highly flawed. I'm glad they took the time to show that he was still impatient, pig-headed and a little bratty like any 22 year old instead of deifying him. And the footage of the run itself was amazing, though repetitive at times (and perhaps that was the point).

 

He started in Newfoundland, the Maritimes and Quebec and it barely registered on the radar. Remember, this was pre-internet days so it took quite a while for the news of his run to build. And Toronto is when it really took off because, like it or not, Toronto is the media centre of Canada.

 

Spare me the "sent away to military school" tears. Culver is basically just an Ivy League prep school that lets rich kids pretend to be "military" for a few years. And I'm not sure what's fascinating about how the Yankees fell to Hal. Owner dies, leaves control to privileged entitled sons. Doesn't that shit happen every day in this country?

I've thought most of these 30 for 30 docs have been very well done, and a couple of them tremendous, but the Steinbrenner one was utter crap, the worst I've seen by far. The degree to which it glossed over the dark (and more accurate) side of the King George, and exaggerated the bright side, was beyond egregious. Pure schlock.

 

Yeah, going over the same well-trodden ground, the same low-hanging fruit. Yeah, that would have been inspired.

 

By missing my point, you proved it for me.

Hal got choked up talking about how he was a "mamma's boy." NOTE: Not a "daddy's boy." And yet, he ends up with this team that Daddy loved above all else.

At boarding school, he missed his mother so much he had to fight himself not to call her everyday. He got choked up discussing how he was forced to be separated from her.

That bite got me emotional.

And guess what? It drew emotion out of you, too. Your reaction is visceral: You think Hal is a spoiled brat. Boo-hoo, spare me the tears.

Don't you get it, Stoney? That's what filmmaking is all about-- eliciting an emotional response from the viewer. Nobody says it has to be the same response.

I didn't see the whole thing, so I can speak to the 'reach around' aspect of this... But I do wonder why the son-in-law was going to get the team before Hank or Hal. Then I wonder why it didn't ultimately go to the older Hank, and instead went to a kid who was clearly not Dad's favorite-- a kid who refers to his father by his first name. Not exactly warm fuzzies.

My point was that the filmmaker had something there-- a damn good interview with a guy who doesn't do sit-downs. If you don't see the value in that, why are you on this website?

And yet, the real story seemed to get away from her.

 

I respectfully disagree on this point. Fox was 22. There's only so much man one can be at that age. They went back to who he was growing up, kind of a jokester, not a serious kid at all, and described a lot of the petulance and brattiness that went on between him and his best friend on the early part of the ride, described how they got together in the first place. And just when Terry was getting a little too big headed as the run went along, they bring along the 10-year-old kid, and it rockets him back to Earth, reminding him of the reason why he is doing this to begin with. When you're 22 and you've had a leg amputated because of cancer, that pretty much defines who you are as a person.

I agree, and I lost a parent to cancer, so I can empathize with this.

I think they addressed this early on. He was a runt, a kid who had no business playing competitive sports, and once they told him that, he used that as motivation to get better, and eventually become a team captain on the basketball team by the time he was a senior in high school. My thought was that athletics were wired into his brain, and the cross country run seemed like some sort of impossible task, much like his ability to make the basketball team as a kid. He seemed to have had a chip on his shoulder his whole life, and this was just another challenge.

Good point. I wonder if they just ran out of time with this aspect of things. Or if he had many friends outside of his tight-knit circle.

JR handled this better than I can, with his knowledge of Canada. I imagine if he had started the run in northern Maine and dipped through New Hampshire that the run would have little publicity at that time until it hit Boston. Apples and oranges, though, of course because we don't have a state that as a whole speaks an entirely different language from the rest of the country. (Except for West Virginia -- I KEED).