Play It To the Bone
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Play It to the Bone, New Titles from Warner Archive and More: Jim Hemphill’s Weekend Viewing Recommendations
Back in October 2015, I interviewed writer-director Ron Shelton for this site about the making of his immensely entertaining Play It to the Bone, a 1999 boxing picture that subverted sports movie clichés to its commercial detriment but artistic triumph. A deftly balanced work that is as smart and violent as it is sweet and funny, Bone is one of Shelton’s best films, and certainly his most underrated – something I’ve always found mysterious given how obvious and pleasurable its virtues are. It’s now available in a new Blu-ray edition along with Shelton’s Bull Durham follow-up Blaze (1989), which finds the director […]
by Jim Hemphill on May 4, 2018 -
Director Ron Shelton on Making Play It to the Bone, Fighting Gratuitous Insert Shots and Why White Men Can’t Jump Tested Well
How many filmmakers are capable of writing a script that not only invites comparison with Casablanca but earns it – and then surpasses its source on nearly every level? That’s what Ron Shelton did with his first produced screenplay, Under Fire (1983), which riffs on Casablanca’s combination of romance and international intrigue but strips it of all sentimentality and gives it a concrete political context (the 1979 Nicaraguan Revolution) that intersects seamlessly with the film’s intimate character studies and relationships. The love triangle between the journalists played by Nick Nolte, Joanna Cassidy, and Gene Hackman is as mature, complex, and […]
by Jim Hemphill on Oct 20, 2015
