On the Big Screen: Movies about Tennis
As often happens following a big tennis tournament, the things to talk about kind of dwindle until there’s nothing to discuss except rankings (boring!), previews for upcoming tourneys (that’d be okay, but then I end up talking about the same thing fooooreever) or the players’ antics off-court (this isn’t a tabloid!).
So I went on a quest to find something to write about and I found something: movies about tennis! I also found something else out. They are woefully few. Or maybe not so woeful - the majority of the tennis movies I have seen do a poor job of depicting such a wonderful sport.
You’ve got Wimbledon, Break, Nobody’s Perfect, Jocks, Second Serve and Players. ..actually, now that I think about it, I haven’t seen most of these movies. Maybe that’s my point. Really good movies about tennis are either a) never shoved into the spotlight or b) they don’t exist.
I did see Wimbledon a few times, and I tried hard to be impressed with what they’d done but I just wasn’t. The depiction of the game was weak, and the characters were mediocre at best. I did like the mental dialogue they did with, what was the main character’s name - Peter Colt?, I liked the mental anguish that character was going through on court. The I’m screwed. Just a few more points until I can escape the blistering heat of the sun opponent’s serve. That part was nicely done, I thought.
Maybe I’m being too harsh. Maybe I should take an afternoon to watch more of these tennis movies as torturous as it probably would be. (I was going to say a weekend, but I honestly think it only would take an afternoon!) But the bottom line about Wimbledon is that the movie poster and the cover of the DVD box was too white. The background was white. The tennis outfits on the players were white (how cliche!), everything was white.
Last time I checked, tennis was a grind-it-out slugfest, not Mary Poppins’ wedding!
Tags: tennis movies, WimbledonRelated Stories
POSTED IN: Just for Fun
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