joflo11
As a die hard North Carolina Tar Heel fan, I cringe at some of the things in this movie. For example: - Michael and his roommate, Buzz Peterson, walk into their first day of practice at North Carolina and say, "Hey look, there's James Worthy, there's Al Wood, there's Sam Perkins." College basketball practice starts on October 15 (it is an NCAA violation to start earlier). They would have been in school 6 or 7 weeks at that point and would have met and befriended all of their teammates long before then. Also, Al Wood graduated the year before MJ came to Carolina so they never played together.At MJ's first practice, Dean Smith looks at one of his assistants and says, "I think we've got a player here, Pete." A tiny bit of research would show the assistants that year (and actually from 78-86) were Bill Guthridge, Eddie Fogler, and Roy Williams. Dean Smith never had an assistant named Pete.After Carolina wins the NCAA championship, Dean Smith stands at mid-court with a mic and says, "This is our first national championship in 24 years and we owe it all to Michael." Please! For starters, it had been 25 years, not 24. And Dean Smith would never give all the credit to one player, no matter what they did. And, heck, it was James Worthy who scored 28 points in that game and was named MVP of the final four. If they owed it to anyone, it was him.MJ has been in the NBA for several years when he tells his mother he is going back to school to get his degree. He never stopped going to school. He took classes all summer in 1985 and graduated in 1986 - only one year late.
taylr41
An over dramatized and partially fictional account of the life of his airness. This is one of those cheesy, before it's time, yarns that could've waited a few years until it was picked up by a director with the expertise and resources to sign believable and talented actors and to treat the story with the reverence and dignity that it will deserve in time.( see The Greatest). the fast food type environment in which this film is presented, complete with cheesy, fake NBA uniforms, Stadiums that look like your local high school gym, and just a general appearance of lookalikeness that borders on condescending, just adds to the tedious nature of the proceedings. I'll admit that the storyline, all the familiar Jordanesque tales, and following this "Michael" mimic the life of the real MJ, will hold your attention. But as you watch, you keep shaking your head at the overall quality and cheesiness of the whole affair. Don't fool with this one unless you're an MJ junkie, and even then, only if you can stand sports themed flicks with actors with little to no athletic skill.
monarch-5
Rating: 2 out of 10; 1/2 StarPart IThis television movie ("Michael Jordan: An American Hero") is a perfect example of an idea that should have gone no further than lunch conversation.First, I'll address the general task of making average to below-average basketball players look like great players on film. Usually, this fails miserably. Filmmakers like to employ cutaways, basketball doubles, trampolines, 8 foot rims, and the like, to try to make actors look like basketball legends, and it just doesn't come off. This is especially true of film depictions of NBA basketball. The game has a fluid look on television. There are no cutaways for dunks and shots. We see most of the action in continuous shots. Filmmakers, on the other hand, like to show an actor leap into the air or shoot the ball, then cutaway to a low shot of that actor in mid-air or a shot of the ball in the air, then cutaway to the actor throwing the ball through the basket or a shot of the ball going through the basket. All this editing magic does is bring home the reality that we are watching some actor, who is probably an average athlete at best, try to convince us that he is one of the greatest athletes of all-time (in this case, Michael Jordan). It doesn't work. However, that is not to say that films cannot convincingly portray great athletes on screen. It's just easier with most other sports. Football and hockey players play in uniforms that obscure facial details, so real players can double for actors in game scenes. Baseball is televised in the visual cutaway style often employed in film, so filmmakers can use cutaways to make up for athletic shortcomings of actors. Basketball is different. At its highest level, it is a game played by big men in three dimensions, and players do not wear masks or helmets. Audiences can tell when a 6-foot-three actor playing 6-foot-six is dunking on a 9-foot-rim doubling as a 10-foot-rim. It's a matter of scale. So the task of having actor, Michael Jace (6-foot-three)convincingly re-enact playing career moments of Michael Jordan (6-foot-six) had built in problems. As it happens, Michael Jace bears a reasonable physical resemblance to Michael Jordan, when Jace is playing the bald, late 20s, early 30s, Michael Jordan. However, Jace makes a poor late teens, early 20s, Michael Jordan, and the makeup department gives Jace an awful wig (about an inch too long) to play the younger Jordan.As for the rest of the cast, the familiar faces are all fine actors in their own right (Ernie Hudson as James Jordan, Debbie Allen as Delores Jordan, and Robin Givens as Juanita Jordan). However, they are all completely wrong for their roles, as each bears almost no resemblance to their real-life counterparts. Albert Hall ("Apocalypse Now") would have made a much better James Jordan, JoMarie Payton ("Family Matters") would have made a much better Delores Jordan, and Cynda Williams ("One False Move", "Mo' Better Blues") would have made a much better Juanita Jordan. However, the filmmakers were more concerned with getting higher profile actors to portray Michael Jordan's close family members than with getting good actors who bore some physical resemblance to these family members. The filmmakers probably could have saved money with actors who were better choices for these roles.As for this film's version of Michael Jordan's life, it's awful. At times, it's unclear as to what event is being depicted, at other times, it inappropriately changes key moments of events for dramatic purposes, and at other times, it's just bad. I shall address some of these problems in the order that they occurred in the film: (1) Jordan's March 1995 comeback game - in real life, it was vs. the Indiana Pacers, at Market Square Arena in Indiana; in the film, it appears to be vs. the New York Knicks in Chicago. (2) Michael Jace takes over the Jordan role as Jordan prepares to head to North Carolina for his freshman year of college; Jace looks at least 10 years older, at this point in the story, than the actor who portrayed Jordan in Jordan's last two years of high school. (3) Dean Smith - some chubby guy with brown hair appears to portray North Carolina's men's basketball team head coach; he looks nothing like Dean Smith; the film doesn't even mention the name "Dean Smith", probably because the filmmakers didn't bother to cast an actor who looked anything like Dean Smith; this seems a major oversight for the role of such an important figure in Jordan's basketball development. (4) Player resemblance - there is not a player depicted in this film who is portrayed by an actor who looks more than remotely like that player, except for Jace as Michael Jordan. (5) No official NBA team logos, court logos, stadium logos - kills reality.(more later)
