Breaking Away Tagged Articles at Cinematical

I must have had too many cups of coffee when I agreed to take on a Cinematical Seven covering the hunks of sports films. (Erik had the easy job, picking the Hottest Sports Girls.) Trying to pick the studs is like having hundreds of 4-star, wonderful movies thrown on your desk and being asked to pick the 7 best. Yeah, right! No problem! To make the task easier, I decided to pick a range of sports, and never double up on one particular type. That cut out a whole slew of possibilities, and what I came up with is what you see below.

What have I learned from picking the Seven Sexy Sporting Studs from cinema? The best of the best (pun intended) were in the '80s and '90s. I also learned that you should never share the list with a friend beforehand -- they'll remind you who you're forgetting, and that's why you'll find one tie down below. Enjoy!

The Eight Men Out Team

The only thing I knew when I took on this assignment was that Eight Men Out was going to be featured. Bull Durham is great and all, but this is the baseball movie. It's John Sayles, and it has the best baseball team to ever make it on the screen. They might have let their morals loosen a little, but they still kept their looks. Foolishly, I tried to pick between John Cusack, Charlie Sheen, D.B. Sweeney, and David Strathairn. Forget that! I'm taking the easy way out. Cusack's Buck Weaver was super cute as a "future jailbird," Charlie was always tasty in those days, and it's beyond me why women weren't falling all over David Strathairn the minute he jumped into film with Return of the Secaucus Seven, or any of the bigger movies that were soon to come. And Sweeney was cute, too, in that dorky way.

If you're someone who grew up in the 1970s and early '80s, then you definitely know who Jackie Earle Haley is. If only for his performance as Kelly Leak in the Bad News Bears trilogy (and his great turn as Moocher in Peter Yates' Breaking Away), Jack Haley made for a memorable little character actor. After co-starring with a then-unknown actor named Tom Cruise in 1983's Losin' It (which was directed by none other than Curtis Hanson), Haley kind of fell off the Hollywood radar -- in a big way. Aside from a few quick moments in Murder, She Wrote and MacGyver episodes, Jackie Earle Haley could be seen in titles like Dollman, Nemesis and Maniac Cop 3. And unfortunately he didn't work often enough to gain much of a Campbell-type cult following.

So imagine my pleasant surprise when I sat down to watch All the King's Men and noticed that -- hey, isn't that Jackie Earle Haley playing Sean Penn's ultra-tough bodyguard dude?!? How cool to see him back in a movie again! Granted, he didn't have many lines, but it was still great to see an old pal after so many years. And then I headed off to see a dark comedy / suburban drama called Little Children ... and there was Jackie again, this time with a much meatier role: He plays a convicted sex offender who moves into a cushy suburban neighborhood that most definitely doesn't want him around. And the guy gives a great performance in a really difficult role.

So who knows what's next for Mr. Haley? This New York Times article does a fine job of summing up the guy's comeback, and I think that both of the directors involved (Steven Zaillian and Todd Field) deserve a hearty round of praise for pulling Jackie Earle out of obscurity and giving him another shot in the spotlight. Based on the two performances I just witnessed, I suspect Haley will be popping up a lot more frequently in the near future.

One thing leads to another, sometimes with odd results: I was rereading Harlan Ellison after referencing him in my Meet the Bloggers profile, which led me to look up some TV shows on IMDb, which somehow led me to the Seventies PBS kids' show Electric Company, where I found out that one of the show's head writers was character actor Paul Dooley. Dooley has a special nostalgic place in my heart because he played the dad in the 1979 film Breaking Away, one of my all-time favorite films. Just writing about it now, I am fighting the temptation to go grab my old VHS copy (why haven't I bought the DVD yet?) and watch it again.

My family bought our first VCR in 1979 so my parents could tape and watch the 1980 Summer Olympics. One of the first movies we taped off the TV and watched repeatedly together was Breaking Away -- it was clean enough and charming enough for everyone in the family to enjoy. My boyfriend does not understand my love for this movie at all: we usually despise what we call "triumph of the human spirit" movies and the movie's big competition finale is the sort I usually deride for predictability (see my Take the Lead review as an example). Maybe it's because I grew up with this movie, but I don't think that's the only reason. Breaking Away won a well-deserved Oscar for Best Original Screenplay; it's not a typical sports movie by any means. I especially like the sequence in which Dave (Dennis Christopher) and Cyril (Daniel Stern) serenade Dave's sorority crush, which is intercut with shots of Dave's parents having dinner together.

The cast includes an impossibly young Dennis Quaid; Jackie Earle Haley, who played bad-boy Kelly in The Bad News Bears; Daniel Stern, in the days before he got sucked into the Home Alone franchise; and P.J. Soles, who also appeared that year as Riff Randell in Rock 'n' Roll High School. It's a lovely little film, and I can only recommend you gather your own family around and watch it together.