Thursday, April 12, 2007
Look for this film in theaters next week, Friday, April 27th.
Something To Cheer About is a short hour-long documentary that reunites the 1955 Crispus Attucks High School basketball team, the first all-black team to win the Indiana state championship. It was a brief history lesson about the boys, the dilapidated neighborhood they lived in, and the racial injustices they faced at the time, but it was too nostalgic about those racially tense times to take at face value. The biggest problem for me (which will be expanded upon in my review in Four Magazine next week) is how the central subject (i.e. racism) is so blatantly smoothed over as if it's not an issue anymore. The film features the players now full grown and elderly, but never addresses their class and social status in present times--and a good guess is because it hasn't changed much at all. I found it increasingly frustrating to take the film seriously, to turn a shining smile at the story on-screen, because at the end of the day, these guys who were discriminated against fifty years ago still are today. The climax of the story was a half-time honorarium at an Indiana Pacers game, but you could see the confused faces in the stadium that were unsure of who exactly these people were, and accordingly watched their perfunctory applause.
The film was labor of love for its director Betsy Blankenbaker, and she says that the remaining players are currently "security guards, doormen...some were just unemployed." On the other hand, one is the dean of a school, and another is the legendary Oscar Robertson. So let's hear about that story---where are these guys? How have they worked through discrimination? How do they continue to? How have some succeeded, and others not? In short, based on the history Blankenbaker gives us, there are much greater social ramifications for these players, but we never hear it, and unfortunately, that's what's going to make this history relevant to our time now.
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