Silver Screen Shows LeBron Is More Than A Superstar

his movie is called "More than a game"....hmmm, interesting how he or his crew anyway, borrow things from others instead of getting something original...he's taken the chalk throwing thing from KG who did it for years in MN...as if it's Lebron's personal trademark gesture and Cavs fans get all geeked up about it...clearly they don't get out much...as for the movie...well you might remember the book on basketball by Phil Jackson called hmmm oh yes...MOre Than a Game...and it talks about how basketball has more meaning than just the play on the court...what do you bet that's the movie's message too...and lastly, but not the least arrogant of all is the whole "witness" thing which is borrowed from the religious folk about testifying about whom??? oh yes...that long haired hippie type...Jesus...

Hey Lebron, get something original won't you and maybe make a statement of your own instead of needing others to co-opt their greatness...and BTW speaking of co-opting...yeah, well getting Shaq...not a good idea unless you want him to take credit for a ring if you get one...he's the king of co-opting credit for stuff that others do...

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jesus christ I've had enough of people latching onto the whole "he's not King James until he wins a title" bullshit.

its a f-ing nickname that someone gave to him, its not like he asked to be called King James.

its a wordplay moniker thats it. you look like an idiot trying to make this an issue calling him a prince.

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Blackistone is one of the few guys who still thinks Kobe is better. Well KB you are wrong. Look at any poll (ESPN was the latest) 57% think the King is the best in the game.
Also, you have to remember what Barkley said "If LeBron played for the Lakers, they would never lose a game"

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Mr. B, isn't it a little disingenuous to take racial offense at Kevin Harlan's use of what you call "hyperbole" (which could more accurately be described as the kind of "semantic reversal" that I shouldn't have to explain to a brotha), especially from someone who's already charged the PGA Tour with overt discrimination and institutionalized racism analogous to "segregation's last stand" at the University of Albama...for the offense you describe as including "no sons of African American families" in this year's Masters, even though Tiger was in the hunt.

Mr. B, In another era, you would have been considered a member of the Talented Tenth; the middle-class folks for whom merely advancing in one's work equalled advancing the cause. But that didn't fly after the class-conscious 1960s at which time the "authenticity" of former Tenthers was now contingent upon their ability to negotiate the emotional and physical "realities" of racial "identity politics." Only in that sense are you empowered to criticize athletes like Tiger Woods and Julius Erving as not being as "conscious" as you about the sport (or more accurately the identity politics) of golf.

It's worth remembering that paradox, something that seems contradictory but may be true (like a man giving up a successful business in order to coach high school basketball), is not irony, which requires an opposing meaning between what's said and what's intended. Success in sports is by definition Bookerite rather than Du Boisian, i.e. requiring hard work and discipline to attain a high level of skill as opposed to being political in nature, which is probably why most former athletes who end up in electoral politics do so as Republicans or conservatives --Lynn Swann, Julius Caesar Watts, Jim Bunning, Jack Kemp, and even Jesse Ventura --with Bill Bradley as my favorite exception.

You've already called this LeBron James documentary "stereotypical," so by comparison Spike Lee's "Kobe Doin' Work" is already the filmic equivalent of the Giants rolling over the undefeated Patriots in the Super Bowl or Vince Carter dunking on the 7'2" Frederic Weiss (whose name I just learned) in the Olympics. It's not surprising that Kobe and LeBron have traded places on the recently-published Forbes Celeberity 100 index (and Jay-Z has fallen off the map from last year).

Metafiction, or fiction about fiction, originated in literature. A good example would be a 1968 John Fowles novel, a romance set in Victorian England in 1868, a year that also saw the publication of important works by Karl Marx and Charles Darwin. Fowles's characters include a fictional author/narrator who is writing the novel a century later in 1968, a year when the theories of Marx and Darwin had a different resonance. So it's a novel about making a novel. There was no way to adapt it to the movies until Harold Pinter came up with the idea of making it a film about making a film, which is not a part of Fowles's book, but it approximates the postmodern self-consciousness of the novel about writing a novel.

Since then we've had television shows about the making of television shows and commercials about the making of commercials. This approach is well-suited to the television age. Spectators have learned from watching a lot of television that the people who appear on TV are more "watchable" than ordinary folks like themselves. So these self-referential shows make spectators think that they're critiquing something rather than passively consuming entertainment.

"Kobe Doin' Work" may look like a "documentary" but it's actually closer to a reality show or an advertisement or a brilliant piece of image manipulation. In other words, it depicts Kobe interacting with his teammates the way Spike intends it to appear. It shows him joking in Italian to Vujacic, conferring with the elder "Fish" on strategery, and not least of all interacting lovingly with his long-suffering wife, who he just happens to meet in the tunnel during the very game in which "Kobe Doin' Work" is premiering. So the spectator feels like they know him. To all this they add a voice-over of Kobe and Spike at a later date, viewing and commenting on the video they made, in which Kobe veritably gushes about how much he loves the game of basketball. No mention of anything as crass wanting to become a global icon. So I would assume that it's on a different order than what you've described using the retroironic term "Silver Screen."

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Hey Jzzzzzzzzzz3skys....get over yourself. I don't think you even understand what Kevin said in his article. AND, it does not take me 7 paragraphs and 20,000 words to say it. Geeeeeeeeze!

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J(zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz)3skys. I think the zzzzzzzzzzzz say it all.

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