I saw a list of best-reviewed sports movies

Context
Rotten Tomatoes is a website that compiles movie reviews and gives each film a score base on the number of negative and positive reviews. Lately they have taken to compiling Best and Worst lists including the recently-published Top Sports Movies.

Commentary
This Rotten Tomates feature appealed to me immediately because I like both sports and movies. However, I was puzzled by the fact that even though these were the best-reviewed sports movies, the critics took great pains to point out on several of them that the plot was not very original. I find this a bizarre standard to use for any kind of storytelling. I believe movies are made and books are written to illustrate universal human truths and frankly, there's a limited number of those to go around. I think it's particularly unfair to judge sports movies this way because most sports movies have the exact same plot: underdog overcomes enormous odds and triumphs. It's why we go see a sports movie, for crying out loud!

I think the critics are looking for originality in the wrong place: what makes a great sports movie is using that same timeworn plot and still creating an unexpected reaction in the viewer. For example, I love the movie Remember the Titans. One of the reasons is because I find the Denzel Washington character is admirable, but not particularly likable. I'm not used to thinking the hero of a piece is kind of a jerk, and this is a pretty brave choice in a film that contains exactly one bankable star. Or take Field of Dreams. Every time I sit down to watch that movie, it looks like it's about baseball, and yet I end up thinking about something besides baseball when it's over. Now any movie that gets my brain moving gets a plus in my book, but Field of Dreams usually makes me consider something different every single time!

My favorite sports movie, beating out Remember the Titans by just a hair, is Major League. OK, silly slapstick comedy, same old sports movie plot, where's the surprise reaction there? Just this: every time I see the formerly-isolated "Wild Thing" come on the field to the adulation of thousands, I cry. Buckets. You want to know what's worse? I've seen this movie five or six times and I still cry every single time. I know what's coming, I can probably quote a great deal of the surrounding dialogue to you, and I still react. That's movie magic!

So the moral of the story is, it's not what you show your moviegoing audience that matters (sorry ILM!), it's how you help them see it differently. Hmm, is there a recurring blog theme in there somewhere?

What did you see today?