a surprising technical detail

Rating: 5/10 (28 December 2006)

Full disclosure: I have not seen this movie, though from the splendid reviews I would like to. But I watched them filming this just off Bourbon Street in New Orleans in the summer of 2005, not long before Hurricane Katrina destroyed most of the city. We were staying at a hotel on Bourbon, and one fine evening I looked out the window of our room to see a white globe floating over the buildings across the street.
Hokay, it's a UFO. Or something. But it didn't fly around or drop off aliens, so I went out to investigate. The fellow sitting on a folding chair guarding some cables said that indeed, they were shooting a movie named 'Glory Road.' The great globe turned out to be a helium-filled balloon worthy of space exploration. They had it tethered in the parking lot of a tire store with dozens of helium tanks and a generator to run the lights inside. It was, said the fellow, an artificial moon. So if you see a scene with the moon on the horizon in this movie, that's what it was. The balloon undulated slightly in the wind, but I suppose it's okay to have rubbery-looking astronomical objects in a basketball movie.