“Love and Basketball”/@New Line Cinema
With Tampa’s Amalie Arena hosting the NCAA Women’s Final Four, we can’t help but have hoop dreams.
Not the renowned 1994 documentary of that name, specifically, but basketball films in general. Like other sports, basketball inspires its share of dramatic underdog stories, but it also dribbles into rambunctious comedy, pivots into sci-fi and even picks up romance.
Disappointingly, films about women’s basketball are in short supply outside the documentary world. Still, if you don’t have a courtside seat for the action on April 5 and 7, why not substitute one of the options in my Friday Extra story featured in The Tampa Tribune?
I highlight “The Mighty Macs,” which has a tie to the Bay area; “Love and Basketball” (one of my favorite romances); “Hoosiers,” of course; “White Men Can’t Jump”; “Space Jam”; “Scooby-Doo Meets the Harlem Globetrotters”; and the so-bad-it’s-good “The Fish That Saved Pittsburgh,” which I saw as a kid growing up outside Philadelphia. It stars Julius Erving from the Philadelphia 76ers, Jonathan Winters in a dual role, Flip Wilson as the coach, Stockard Channing as an astrologist, Harlem Globetrotter Meadowlark Lemon as a minister, and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar as himself.