One Of The Greatest Movies Ever Made Turns 21 Today
Damn, if this doesn’t make you feel old as shit I’m not sure what will. Yesterday I talked about how weird it was to start to see the legends of the game begin to retire and how old it makes me feel, and honestly this is 10x worse. It’s really been 21 years since He Got Game came out? This has me feeling a similar way to the 19 year anniversary of Love & Basketball that happened a few weeks ago. It’s very hard for me to think of two movies that were more instrumental to my youth than those two. Every “date night” aka come over and watch a VHS tape while we wait for my parents to fall asleep upstairs that I had as a kid/teenager incluided one of these two movies. I’m pretty sure the old movie rental place in Tatnuck Square (RIP) just let me keep them because I was renting them so much. Christ, now talking about renting movies has me feeling even older.
As far as I’m concerned, He Got Game is one of the greatest movies ever made. It has an 80% on Rotten Tomatoes and I feel like even that’s a little low. Denzel Washington was incredible and honestly Ray Allen was a billion times better than you would think a professional athlete would be in this type of role. The Undefeated did a whole story on the casting of Ray’s role, and it talks about some of the other guys that were considered
Of that list I think T-Mac would have been an interesting choice, and I guess Kobe too because they were both young phenoms. I can’t really see KG in that role, but considering this movie was basically Marbury’s life he would have been intriguing as well. But like I said, I think we can all agree Ray Allen nailed it.
The more I think about it, instead of remaking Space Jam which is without a doubt going to be terrible, I’d love to see a sequel to He Got Game or hell even a complete remake. Tell me this movie isn’t made for Zion or some shit? I feel like there’s a studio out there that should be willing to give Spike Lee whatever he wants in order to make this happen.
P.S.
The threesome scene will forever be one of the biggest moments of my adolescence. I know how ridiculous that sounds, but that’s how much I loved this movie. Given what we now know about Ray Allen thanks to some accidental tweeting, I can only imagine what went on behind the scenes.