A movie about leadership and teamwork

Rating: 8/10 (24 December 2010)

If not for a Leadership workshop, I would not have known about this movie. About 10 years ago I went to a one week leadership workshop. The instructor showed us half of this movie as an example of a leadership style (Coach Norman Dale's). It was so interesting that we asked to see the rest of the movie. It did not disappoint. Recently I watched the DVD, and paid attention to other aspects of the movie- like acting, which was superb. Cinematography, score all very good. Since this is an old movie (1986, but seems older), you don't see some of the technical advances in movie making, but the story is straightforward, and the movie focuses on the story and the characters. Gene Hackman is great as the coach. Others support him well. The sound is not very good, and the DVD did not have the English subtitles (only French and Spanish, which did not help, obviously). It was hard to hear the dialog clearly at times. I had to watch the movie for the second time on the DVD to fully understand it. Other than that, this is a very good sports movie about small town folks in Indiana in the 1950s, and their kids in high school, with their dreams of winning basketball games.
If you don't expect to see some fancy technical things that are now being used in movie making, this is definitely worth seeing if you enjoy sports, and stories focused on characters.