A new documentary about women’s sport charts its painful climb from niche-sporting-subculture to the mainstream and prompts questions about the futureOn Tuesday, a new documentary about women’s sport, Game On, received its premiere, and the London screening was followed by a Q&A with some of its participants. When the former rugby union international Ugo Monye was asked what he felt on seeing it, he couldn’t speak for tears – it took a few attempts, and a hug from a fellow panel member, before he could fashion a response.Here was a fitting reminder of how emotive the subject of women’s sport can be. The provoking of a tear or two has always been the sign of a truly memorable moment in...
As off-field tensions reach new levels, you have to wonder if the modern international governing body is fit for purposeGot to say, I’m intrigued to see how the Netflix Six Nations documentary covers the Welsh rugby crisis. Given that the Wales team are refusing to cooperate with the Netflix crew, denying them access to team meetings and even turfing them out of Alun Wyn Jones’s press conference last week, you have to wonder what sort of material is going to be cobbled together. Perhaps Wales will simply be pixelated out of the final product: a ghostly apparition at the edges of the screen, implied but never physically present, which, you might argue, is a pretty good way of describing their...
The latest series from Julian Fellowes starts badly and barely improves but it is a reminder football has never stood stillYou can see how The English Game must have sounded in conception. It’s the birth of football. It’s toffs against proles, the rivalry of one of the great aristocrats of the early game, Lord Arthur Kinnaird, and the Glaswegian stonemason who was the first great professional, Fergus Suter. It’s about an idea going out into the world and being profoundly changed when it is taken up by the masses.But Netflix’s new series comes nowhere near what it might have been, and is little more than a mishmash of Downton Abbey stereotypes and trouble-at-mill cliches. The toffs are habitually awful, the...
In the absence of Ferrari and Mercedes, the new documentary allows characters like the acerbic Haas team principal, Guenther Steiner, to shine and show F1’s human faceSkill, drama, spectacle and of course entertainment are the elements that should drive Formula One with, hopefully, a fine narrative to push the show along. Netflix certainly believes the sport has a story to tell, even though the two biggest names involved – Ferrari and Mercedes – refused to play ball when their cameras roamed the paddock last season. The result, Formula 1: Drive To Survive, is released on Friday and as it turns out, Netflix perhaps achieved something even more intriguing in their absence.The 10-part series was made by executive producer James Gay-Rees,...
Steven Soderbergh’s basketball drama probes the fraying covenant between white power brokers and their mostly black labor forceSteven Soderbergh’s High Flying Bird, written by the playwright Tarell Alvin McCraney and available for streaming on Netflix, is the finest movie ever made about the business of professional sports, not for the answers it purports to give about a billion-dollar industry charged by undercurrents of race and politics but the questions it asks. Related: High Flying Bird review – Soderbergh scales new heights on Netflix Continue reading...