The Mighty Macs (2009)

It's 1971 at the all-girls Immaculata College outside of Philidelphia. Mother St. John (Ellen Burstyn) hires Cathy Rush (Carla Gugino) to be the basketball coach. There is no real money, the gym burnt down, and the college is threatened to be sold off. Cathy's NBA ref husband Ed Rush (David Boreanaz) wants her to be more of a housewife. The rules have recently changed to allow the girls play the men's game. Sister Sunday (Marley Shelton) becomes the assistant. The girls struggle with loss after loss until Cathy molds them into a championship team.This is formulaic but that's no problem for a formulaic sports movie. It's endearing in its own way. The major missing element is a bigger part for one of the players performed by a bright young star. The girls are more or less blanks except for a couple scenes. They are played by relative unknowns and they don't excel. On the other hand, Carla Gugino is great. The big emotional scene of the girl silently weeping in the van after a lost is very good. However, none of the games nor the story are terribly surprising or exciting. The story is fit for a sincere feel-good telling and this does it in a very standard way.

Although in relation to other modern films, it seems a clean and good film, there was one blasphemy that was meant as a joke: A man in a bar hits on the main character and the nun (without her veil), they both indicate that they are "taken" and not interested in him. The nun says her Man is a carpenter. "Good with his hands, is he?" "He works miracles," she responds with meaning. Of course, the literal reading is benign and true. But the innuendo or other meaning of her phrase and the way she delivers it is impure and, said of the God-Man, it is blasphemous. In another scene, the team is playing against men to improve its basketball skills. The nun pushes her fanny against the "front-end" of the man she is guarding in such a way that the man makes a face indicating something is inappropriate. She then spanks him on the bottom. After hearing how absolutely pure this movie was, I didn't appreciate watching this behavior and blasphemy in front of my 11-year-old daughter and her friends.

"It will take an act of God to save this school." Cathy Rush (Gugino)is a modern woman in the '70's. Her husband is not working and rather then staying home she decided to go out and get a job coaching at a local all girls catholic school. With no gym, uniforms, a school about to close and a lack of talent she does her best to make the team better then it ever thought it could. I should tell you right off that I am a sucker for sports movies. I will watch pretty much any movie about sports. Most of the sports movies that come out lately are true stories and to me that makes them better. This one is about a small catholic girls school that went from no gym to trying to win the national championship. Not only is this inspiring but it really makes you feel for what the girls had to go through to get there. This is one of the better sports movies I have seen and I highly recommend this to everyone...not just girls. Overall, a great family movie that any parent with a high school girl who is unsure of herself should watch. I give it an A.

I saw the Mighty Macs in a preview screening tonight, and came away impressed.First, the themes, or messages, of the movie are good ones. The movie is about a small, cash-strapped girls' school that hires a basketball coach who has visions of greatness. She tries to bring the team around to her vision. So the first theme explored is the theme of staying the course, overcoming obstacles and struggling through adversity. That theme is pretty standard fare for these underdog stories, but it is done well here, and it is all the more resonant because the movie is based on a true story.The second theme, as I see it, was about the emergence of women in sports and in life in general, and I liked the way that this theme was presented. Nowadays in movies and in the media I often see the raising up of a woman represented by radical cosmetic makeovers or some other reference to external appearance. In the Mighty Macs, the theater actually laughed when they first saw the girls' uniforms. And in one scene, one of the girls on the team who had very little money was called out by someone outside the team for her rundown clothing. Rather than gang up on her, the team rallied to that girl's help. And rather than getting new uniforms so they could be elevated by the clothes, it was the other way around – their inspired play elevated the uniforms, and now the dowdy uniforms are fondly recalled (I know because we got some nice literature from the school at the screening).Finally, and it's sort of a side note, I liked that there were nuns in the movie, lots of them, and they were not cartoon characters. The movie showed their different personalities; their individuality even amongst their identical appearance, not unlike the team itself. At one point, one of the nuns described her journey toward her vocation, and the treatment of it was entirely respectful. It dignified rather than ridiculed her choice. That should not be remarkable at all, but to me it was, as I almost now expect to see nuns ridiculed.A fine, fun movie for the whole family.