Ron Shelton
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Tin Cup, Picnic at Hanging Rock and Mikey and Nicky: Jim Hemphill’s Home Viewing Recommendations
One of the best American comedies of the 1990s hits Blu-ray this week with Warner Archive’s release of Tin Cup, director Ron Shelton’s deliriously romantic and sharply observed meditation on the blurry line between self-sabotage and greatness. Kevin Costner, in the loosest and most engaging performance of his career, plays golfer Roy “Tin Cup” McAvoy, a driving range pro whose self-described inner demons have kept him from achieving his potential while old rival David Simms (Don Johnson) has risen to the top of the profession. When David’s girlfriend Molly Griswold (Rene Russo) comes to Roy for golf lessons and Roy […]
by Jim Hemphill on Apr 17, 2020 -
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 -
“You Gotta Know the Chord Changes Before You Can do the Improvisation”: Ron Shelton on the 25th Anniversary of White Men Can’t Jump“
Growing up in the basketball-crazy early ’90s, Ron Shelton’s White Men Can’t Jump was iconic long before I took the time to actually sit down and watch it: the title (that font stretching!), the baggy tanks and starched casquettes, the deadpan visages of Woody Harrelson and Wesley Snipes all but daring me to rent the movie every time I saw the VHS. Starring the duo as pickup basketball players who combine forces in an uneasy con-alliance, Shelton’s followup to Bull Durham is a stone cold classic: a big-hearted buddy comedy of dazzling cinematographic musculature, the camera bobbing and weaving cross-court […]
by Steve Macfarlane on Mar 31, 2017 -
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
