Skip to main content

Documentary Corner: Broad Street Bullies

A review by Brooks Rich

We like to sometimes learn new things here at Cinema Basement. In fact over there in the corner of said basement we have our corner for documentaries. There's something about a good documentary. Whether it tells it's story well, teaches you something you didn't know, or hits you in the gut due to it's subject matter, a good documentary can really impact you. There are some tough and hard hitting we will get to but today I want to explore one of the best companies at making documentaries, HBO Sports. In honor of the Stanley Cup Finals let's take a look at the 2010 film, Broad Street Bullies.

A good sports documentary should make you care about the story it's telling, whether or not you know the sport or like the team. I'm not into baseball all that much but the documentary Dem Bums, about the Brooklyn Dodgers, is fantastic. I'll get to that one day. I am big hockey fan though so I always watch the hockey documentaries. I'm not the worlds biggest Flyers fan but I find the story of their expansion into the league in 1967, evolution into the bullies of the league and eventually claiming of two back to back Stanley Cups I 1974 and 1975 to be fascinating. Think of the sports team you hate the most. Now imagine them cheating and fighting and bulldozing to two straight championships. Yeah that was the Flyers back then. They were like the old joke, I went to a fight and a hockey game broke out.

Broad Street Bullies is a fun entertaining look at the Flyers history, especially the Broad Street Bullies years. These guys were the villains of the league. They even admit it. They started with one guy who will go out on the ice and fight others. Eventually the whole team decided to just throw their weight around. Yeah. They were nasty to play against. The film perfectly shows how much they were hated by the rest of the league. But they're the heroes in this film. It's free on youtube and I'm sure it's also available if you have HBO Go. It's a quick watch and it is entertaining, even if you don't like or know hockey.



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Forgotten Film Friday: Absolute Power

Clint Eastwood stars as Luther Whitney, a jewel thief who works in the Washington DC area. One night while he is stealing from a mansion he is forced to hide in a secret compartment with a two way mirror. From there he observes a sexual rezendevous with the wife of a powerful man and the President of the United States Alan Richmond (Gene Hackman) Suddenly the president gets aggressive and while defending herself the woman is shot to death by two Secret Service agents. Luther manages to get away with a letter opener the woman stabbed the president with. At first Luther plans to flee the country. But when he is disgusted by a statement the president makes, Luther decides to expose the crime. I miss these kind of films. The nineties was a great time for thrillers exactly like this. They are not the flashiest films but they are also not obsessed with big action scenes. It's all plot and character with them. Sure this plot might be a little out there but Eastwood makes it work. He's...
1 comment
Read more

John Candy month

 What can you say about John Candy? He was a comic genius who was taken from us too soon. There were a lot of comedic heavyweights of the eighties and nineties but Candy stood above most of them. If there is a Mount Rushmore of comedy I imagine John Candy would be on it. For the month of July we are honoring this comic genius. 
Post a Comment
Read more

Oscar bait month

 The Academy Awards. That time of the year when everyone debates what movies are truly the best and there is never a consensus and no one is ever happy. A movie can be incredibly popular and then it wins a bunch of Oscars and suddenly it's overrated and not very good or downright bad. It happens every year. But for the month of April let's take a look at those films that had Oscars on their mind and instead fell flat on their faces. Now Oscar Bait is a term that can also be applied to winners or films that did score a bunch of nominations. For example Bradley Cooper's film Maestro is very much an Oscar Bait movie even though it had a decent awards season. I want to talk about the films that did nothing. That were early contenders then either faded away eventually or just plain crashed and burned. Oscar Bait's biggest failures. What wrong here with these? Was the movie poor? Did something else just have a dominant run? Or were politics involved? Maybe all of the above. S...
Post a Comment
Read more