The Summer Olympic Games 2024 are underway, and from now until August 11th, all eyes will be on Paris.
The Olympics provide the opportunity to discover some incredible athletes, watch some exciting sports, and witness some true human drama and spectacle.
Many people love the Olympics, and will watch it obsessively from beginning to end, taking in all of the splendor. Others will catch things here and there (that's me), some will not watch at all.
I thought I'd dedicate this post to ALL of those types of people, by picking my five favorite Olympic Movies. Now, these are movies that either take place at the Olympics, or have the Olympics as a major part of the story.
Although there have been many made, only one of the films is a documentary. Three of them are based on true stories, and one is a work of complete fiction. I thought these movies covered the gambit of style and substance, and, yes, I purposely left out "Chariots of Fire" because it's an obvious choice, and, frankly, I'm still angry that is won the Best Picture Oscar over "Reds" forty-something years ago.
Anyway....here are 5 pretty great Olympic Movies:
1) PERSONAL BEST
One of the best screenwriters of all time, Robert Towne (who, sadly, passed away recently) made his directorial debut with this outstanding drama about two women training for the 1980 Olympics.
After their dreams of glory were dashed because of the boycott, they strive for their "personal best" scores, and make that their achievement.
This is a strong film that is notable for many things, including the fact that is was the first major Hollywood movie to feature a bisexual love triangle, that was handled with sensitivity and respect. The great cast includes an outstanding Mariel Hemingway, and the always good Scott Glenn.
2) MIRACLE
Maybe the best "feel-good underdog" sports movie ever made, Gavin O'Connor's outstanding portrait of the U.S. men's hockey team, and their unimaginable winning of the Gold in the 1980 Winter Olympics, is truly an astounding piece of work.
Brilliantly directed and structured, and smartly cast with a group of unknown actors as the players, this film not only does a great job of evoking the times and the unbelievable joy of the events, but it also creates a wonderful portrait of community and friendship, and gives Kurt Russell a role of a lifetime as coach Herb Brooks.
I remember watching that game against the Russians live, and losing my mind when the U.S. won, and all of that is recreated perfectly here. It was dubbed the "Miracle on Ice," and this movie does it justice.
3) FOXCATCHER
Bennett Miller, the director of another great sports film, "Moneyball," brings this very, very dark film about medal winning wrestling brothers (Channing Tatum and Mark Ruffalo) who, after they are recruited by a rich weirdo (an unrecognizable and brilliant Steve Carell), dive into a scary rivalry that goes far beyond normal brotherly competition.
This is a true story that is truly creepy, and gets under your skin while complexly dissecting the American Dream about sports, class, and success...at any cost. A great film.
4) VISIONS OF EIGHT
This is the only documentary I've chosen, and it's because it's a very unusual one, that kind of flies under the radar.
Producer David L. Wolper recruited eight directors from around the world to document their visions of the events of the 1972 Summer Olympics. Each director selected their own crew, topic, and style to capture some aspect of the Munich Games. The directors were Yuri Ozerov, Mai Zetterling, Arthur Penn, Michael Pfleghar, Kon Ichikawa, Milos Foreman, Claude Lelouch, and John Schlesinger.
Each film is completely different in tone and approach (some work, some don't) and only one (Schlesinger's) fully acknowledges, and overtly deals with the terrorist attacks in which the Israeli athletes were murdered, while the others are fascinating experiments that are certainly worthy of your time.
Foreman's is a flat-out wacky farce. Pfleghar's is a drama that concentrates on female athletes. But, my favorite, by far, is Lelouch's film, which, refreshingly, is all about the losers in the games, NOT the winners. It captures with remarkable candidness, the stunning, maddening and sometimes heartbreaking feelings and actions of athletes whose hopes, dreams, and years of training go up in smoke in an instant.
This is a unique and remarkable set of films, adding up to a great documentary. It's the most difficult film to find on this list, but The Criterion Collection released a very nice package of this film a few years back.
5) I, TONYA
I saved my favorite for last. Craig Gillespie's brutally funny, Goodfellas-like, take on the whole Tonya Harding/Nancy Kerrigan story, is one of my favorite films of the past 10 years.
Flashy, filled with incredible camerawork and music, this movie is a true stick of dynamite that explodes gorgeously (and tastelessly) across the screen. It is a brilliant dissection of middle class values, ugly pop culture, tabloid journalism, white trash life, and the beloved American hunger for all things salacious, inappropriate, embarrassing, and destructive.
The cast is uniformly incredible, with Margot Robbie as Harding, Allison Janney (who won an Oscar) as her mother, and a supporting cast that includes stunning, hilarious and brilliant work from Sebastian Stan, Paul Walter Hauser, Bobby Cannavale, McKenna Grace, and Julianne Nicholson, among others.
Gillespie, the director of such terrific work as "Lars and the Real Girl," "Fright Night," "Cruella," "Pam and Tommy," and last year's amazing and criminally underrated "Dumb Money," has become The Hero of the White Trash, The Spokesman for the Weirdos, and The Destructor of the Elite. I love the guy's movies, and his message of underdog triumph in a world that has no taste...and that's totally OK.
"I, Tonya" rules.