sport
Simon Munk
Shiny cars, going fast. In real life, obsessing over gravel-crunching oversteer or the downforce your rear spoiler exerts is one for Jeremy Clarkson fans or pimply youths in suburban retail car parks, late at night. But there's something about the mix of sheer muscularity and precision strategy that appeals when racing is on TV or in videogame form. It's a spectacle, meant partly in the situationist sense.Project CARS doesn't start out spectacularly, though. Perhaps because it's come not funded by a big publisher, but as a crowd-funded developer project, Project CARS comes in with a menu and Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
As he died in 2010, we can never know what John du Pont was like in person, but if Steve Carell’s rendering of the maniacal American multi-millionaire with a wrestling fixation is even close to the real thing, the experience must have been disturbing. Foxcatcher, the story of du Pont’s immersion in wrestling, is disquieting but Carell stands out. Creepiness defines every moment he is on screen.Foxcatcher draws from the real-life story of du Pont, the heir to his family’s fortune. He wrote books on ornithology, donated money to good causes and was also increasingly consumed by an interest in Read more ...
theartsdesk
Basketball doesn’t often stray onto the arts pages. Cinema pays the occasional visit. White Men Can’t Jump starred Wesley Snipes and Woody Harrelson as a pair of slamdunking hustlers. Hoop Dreams followed two inner-city college kids in Chicago as they tried to turn pro. The hero of Almodovar’s Live Flesh was a wheelchair-bound basketball player embodied by Javier Bardem. But what about theatre?A bouncing ball is an unruly prop, so basketball (like other ball games) tends not to trespass onto the stage. A new play by spoken word artist Inua Ellams changes all that. The Spalding Suite explores Read more ...
Simon Munk
Skateboarding, in games and in movies, has always been presented as quite a laidback sport. This couldn't be further from that idea – it's a "twitch" arcade stick-and-button mangler that adeptly balances risk and reward and will wring hardened players for beads of sweat.Like the original, its name an apparent mangling of the skateboarding term for a jump, "Ollie", and perhaps the cycling spectator's imperative "Allez! Allez!", OlliOlli 2 is a side-scrolling arcade blast. Your diminutive skater speeds through levels covered in increasingly unlikely hazards, the concept being you're ripping Read more ...
Gary Raymond
For many the story of Welsh rugby star Gareth Thomas will be familiar. It has been told in many forms, and powerful and inspirational as it is, many times too. Thomas (known to all bar his mam as “Alfie”) is now not just a totemic figure in the sport he graced for 16 years, but a symbol of courage and hope for the LGBT community and indeed anyone who has at some point in their lives felt the walls closing in.The story of the first man in world sport to come out as gay is one that does not lose its power in the retelling, and National Theatre Wales’s much anticipated staging of it – in Read more ...
Katherine McLaughlin
Steve Carell makes the move from the light comedy of the American workplace to the dark side of that country as delusional blue-blood John Eleuthère du Pont in a transformative and creepy performance that borders on the grotesque.Foxcatcher is based on a shocking true story set in the wrestling world. Though some of the events occurred in the 1990s and over a longer time period, director Bennett Miller sets his film towards the end of the 1980s. Miller’s previous feature, Moneyball, was also set in the sports world but instead of focusing on the players he chose to look at the maths behind Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Ireland has had not just an economic meltdown in the past few years, but also a social one. The country that thought it had seen the back of emigration going back several generations has had to deal with its young people once again leaving in droves – albeit this time to staff schools, hospitals and television programmes with teachers, doctors and presenters, rather than men and women to build roads or clean floors, as so many of my parents' generation did.This very painful ending of the Celtic Tiger period of modern Irish history is the starting point for Fiona Doyle's first full-length play Read more ...
Karen Krizanovich
Draft Day should have been a contenda. As it stands, it's a football film for people who like football but who hate film. Sure, you may like “movies”, but you sure as hell don’t like film. It’s also the kind of film a rookie film reviewer will gleefully shred.In his fourth go at the sports genre, Kevin Costner looks better in the actual film than in the horribly photoshopped movie poster. This is fortunate as he plays Sonny Weaver, the manager of – gee, what team was it again? If you don’t follow football it doesn’t matter. If you do, it’s the Cleveland Browns – anyway, it’s the team we’re Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Disney's latest is a film which must have itself represented a hell of a pitch. Based on a true story, it's basically Slumdog Millionaire meets Jerry Maguire - two films that attracted ample awards-interest and that prompted cascades of cash, like crunchy autumn leaves to be raked up by the sackful. Million Dollar Arm finds a hard-nosed sports agent travelling to India in search of the next baseball sensation, his method of selection - the titular talent contest.Jon Hamm makes the transition to the big screen lead look easy, usefully channelling his televisual alter-ego Don Draper to play JB Read more ...
Veronica Lee
It says something about your status in broadcasting when you inspire not only a Spitting Image puppet, but also have a Private Eye column named after you. Presenter, commentator, interviewer and quizmaster David Coleman, as the title says, really was quite remarkable, a broadcaster as well known as the sportsmen and women whose achievements he commented on for four decades, and celebrated for his distinctive style in front of a microphone.He died in December and this tribute, an updated version of Carl Doran's film aired in 2011 to celebrate Coleman's 85th birthday, was an affectionate run- Read more ...
Simon Munk
With Wii Sports even elderly relatives could suddenly play videogames. The addition of motion control to Nintendo's console exPanded its audience far beyond traditional gamers. But then... nothing. Can Kinect Sports Rivals on the new Xbox One rekindle the excitement in waving your arms to control games?Videogames and technology companies go through fads. Right now, with Facebook buying Occulus Rift and Sony announcing Project Morpheus for the PS4, the trend is "virtual reality". Strap on goggles and as you turn your head, your virtual, in-game head turns to match. Except virtual reality Read more ...
Veronica Lee
The programme blurb says: “Dan Snow looks back at 90 years of the Winter Olympics and shows how the political upheaval of the 20th and 21st centuries has impacted on the Games". Instead we got a mish-mash of archive clips, a potted history of the Games, a nod to some of the politics surrounding them, and a tale of how one chap's derring-do impacted on them.The programme went all over the place – as did Snow, who travelled to several countries, most of them unnecessarily, to tell his story. The rugged historian, an amenable presenter, was, as ever, keen to show his action-man credentials by Read more ...