Latest news with #SpaceJam3
Toronto Star
24-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Toronto Star
Hamilton's Shai Gilgeous-Alexander now in exclusive club with Shaq, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Michael Jordan
If ever a movie is made about the life of new NBA heavyweight champ Shai Gilgeous-Alexander — at this point isn't anything possible? 'Space Jam 3?' Shai Jam? — it could open with a scene in the cavernous gym at Hamilton's downtown YMCA. Summer of 2013: a skinny 14-year old kid with oversized feet is grinding, working on his game at a basketball camp, displaying uncommon seriousness of purpose.
Hamilton Spectator
24-06-2025
- Sport
- Hamilton Spectator
Hamilton's Shai Gilgeous-Alexander now in exclusive club with Shaq, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Michael Jordan
If ever a movie is made about the life of new NBA heavyweight champ Shai Gilgeous-Alexander — at this point isn't anything possible? 'Space Jam 3?' Shai Jam? — it could open with a scene in the cavernous gym at Hamilton's downtown YMCA. Summer of 2013: a skinny 14-year old kid with oversized feet is grinding, working on his game at a basketball camp, displaying uncommon seriousness of purpose. Kenold Knight, one of the coaches, notes the kid's intensity. 'So what do you have going on?' Knight asks. 'What's your plan?' 'I'm going to the NBA,' replies Shai. Flash forward to the present, Sunday night, and the coach's eyes tear up in front of his TV, watching a player universally known as SGA hoist new trophies — National Basketball Association champion and Finals MVP — and dish credit to teammates and 'everyone that's helped me get here, and they know who they are.' 'When you have someone who dreams so big, and you see them achieve it on the biggest stage, it is just surreal,' said Knight. 'And hearing Shai give credit to the people who helped him — that is humility, embodied right there.' At the same moment he led his Oklahoma City Thunder to the NBA title in Game 7 against the Indiana Pacers — the second gut-check Game 7 victory for OKC in these playoffs — Gilgeous-Alexander placed Hamilton in a rarefied category, with San Antonio, New York City, and Wilmington, N.C. What do all four cities have in common? They are cities where a pantheon of NBA greats grew up, who — like Gilgeous-Alexander — achieved the sublime quad of winning the NBA scoring title, MVP, championship and finals MVP all in the same season: Shaquille O'Neal, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Michael Jordan (MJ did it four times.) A spokesperson with the City of Hamilton said 'plans to celebrate and honour Shai here in Hamilton are still being finalized.' Mayor Andrea Horwath posted a congratulatory post on social media: 'Your leadership, poise, and passion are unmatched!' Gilgeous-Alexander was born in Toronto, where his father, Vaughan Alexander, had been a star high school hoops player. Alexander was courtside in OKC for Game 7. He told The Spec that his son's accomplishment was the culmination of hard work and perseverance. 'I'm sure he has had a list of achievements he has checked off all his life,' he said. 'Has been checking them off one by one, and he's not done. He plans to get better. Players in their prime get better. I'm looking forward to that.' Gilgeous-Alexander, who attended St. Thomas More and Sir Allan MacNab high schools, has always talked up Hamilton as the place he developed his early basketball skills and where he 'became a man.' 'A blue collar, under the radar city,' he has told The Spec. He recalled that in youth basketball, GTA teams 'had all the hype. We played with a chip on our shoulder … An underdog mentality.' Chip? Perhaps it is a coincidence, but note that in Game 3, Gilgeous-Alexander uncharacteristically tussled with an Indiana player who had been harassing him on defence when he didn't have the ball. The player, Andrew Nembhard, went to high school in Vaughan, in the GTA. Six of Gilgeous-Alexander's old MacNab Lions buddies gathered at a restaurant in Ancaster to watch Game 7. In OKC, the Hamilton content courtside, in addition to Shai's wife, Hailey — they dated in their teens — was personal trainer, Nemanja (Nem) Ilic. He attended Westmount high school, and for six summers worked out Gilgeous-Alexander in the off-season in Ilic's garage/gym on the Mountain. Ilic was on the floor after the game with Gilgeous-Alexander and other family and friends, trying to 'feel the moment,' he told The Spec. 'I felt fortunate to witness history. All the hard work leading to this moment … I'm super proud of his growth as a basketball player and as a man and who he's becoming.' On social media, a few fans posted that they thought OKC players reacted happily — but also with oddly restrained enthusiasm — after winning the championship. Perhaps the players can't help but channel SGA, their calm and steady superstar who plays with a unique blend of fire and ice. And maybe the Thunder, and Gilgeous-Alexander, are already pondering new dreams. Ilic, for one, couldn't help it. Celebrating with his friend and client on the hardwood, he said to him: 'Now let's make it a repeat — why not?'
The Guardian
03-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Block-busted: why homemade Minecraft movies are the real hits
By any estimation, Minecraft is impossibly successful. The bestselling video game ever, as of last December it had 204 million monthly active players. Since it was first released in 2011, it has generated over $3bn (£2.3bn) in revenue. What's more, its players have always been eager to demonstrate their fandom outside the boundaries of the game itself. In 2021, YouTube calculated that videos related to the game – tutorials, walk-throughs, homages, parodies – had collectively been viewed 1tn times. In short, it is a phenomenon. The Guardian's journalism is independent. We will earn a commission if you buy something through an affiliate link. Learn more. Such is the strength of feeling, almost all of it positive, about Minecraft that it was only a matter of time before someone tried to turn it into a film. After all, you have a historically popular product and a highly engaged fanbase: what could possibly go wrong? Turns out, quite a lot. Last September, the first trailer for the film – titled A Minecraft Movie – was released, and the reaction was instant and violent. 'Minecraft fans devastated by 'awful' live-action trailer' read one headline the following day. Some called it 'a crime against humanity'; others 'a soulless neon abomination'. In less than 24 hours, the website GamingBible had called it 'a curse on my eyes' and 'pure nightmare fuel'. Within three days of its release, the trailer had been downvoted more than 1m times. If you're familiar with Minecraft, you can probably understand why. Minecraft is a game with a highly distinctive look; everything is made of square blocks, and there's a muted palette. The trailer, however, is insanely garish. Everything looks like it is made of Haribo and, worse, the blocks have slightly rounded edges. Worse still, there are humans in it. Heightened, ironic-looking humans. Jason Momoa is in it, in an unflattering blond wig and hot-pink leather jacket. In other words, it looks like a film made by people who don't understand Minecraft. 'This is Jumanji but with a Minecraft skin,' was the first reaction of Argentinian YouTuber ElVitt0ri0 on seeing the teaser. 'Minecraft offers an infinite number of narrative possibilities. And yet they decided to go with the 'we go to another universe and learn about it' storyline? What is this? Space Jam 3?' ElVitt0ri0's response was to create A Movie About Minecraft (That Doesn't Exist), a version of what the film should have been. The trailer was created with the open-source animation software Blender that was used to make Flow, which won best animated feature at this year's Oscars; it's a fully animated trailer that retains the look of the original game and features characters recognisable to players. Underneath the video is the comment: 'This is everything the Minecraft movie should have been, the game elements, the history, the community … it's so perfect.' And ElVitt0ri0 is not alone. Dozens, maybe even hundreds, of fan-made Minecraft trailers have sprung up online since the official teaser went live, each trying to find their own way to undo the damage it caused. Vicky Fernandes, who runs the channel Gloomy Animations, made one entitled Minecraft Movie Trailer But It's Actually Good. Her video is explicitly a fix rather than a reimagining; a shot-for-shot remake where everything is animated in a more immediately recognisable Minecraft style. And it is good; so good that the comments beneath the video are full of relieved now-that's-what-I-expected sentiment. 'I think the movie should have been animated, not live action,' Fernandes says over email. 'Mixing CGI cube-looking characters with real humans looks very weird. The CGI characters also look oddly realistic while keeping the cube proportions, making it look creepy. Overall, the film does not have an appealing art style.' What ElVitt0ri0 and Fernandes have in common is that they are Minecraft fans first and foremost. Fernandes first started playing the game in 2014, when she was eight years old, and began making fan videos four years later. ElVitt0ri0 started playing at age 11, and quickly got swept up in its peripheral YouTube content. 'One thing fans have proved again and again is that Minecraft can function as an amazing platform to tell a story,' ElVitt0ri0 says. 'Not just through animation either – you can look at whole series and movies that were made in-game.' Both YouTubers lament that this sense of history and appreciation seems to have been lost in the official movie. But perhaps that is to be expected, since Warner Bros has been trying to get a Minecraft movie off the ground for over a decade now. In 2014, when the studio first announced a film, it hired Shawn Levy to direct it. But that fell through, so Rob McElhenney stepped in to replace him. When he too stepped away shortly afterwards, Peter Sollett – best known for 2008's Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist – briefly took his place. It was only in 2022 that the film found all of its pieces, with Napoleon Dynamite's Jared Hess stepping in to direct a script from Masterminds writers Chris Bowman and Hubbel Palmer. In truth, Hess had his work cut out for him. Minecraft is a game without a traditional narrative. A sandbox game, where players are plunged into a procedurally generated landscape and are free to do whatever they like. If they want to extract raw materials from their surroundings to craft tools, they can. If they want to start fights with hostile creatures, they can. If they want to spend four days using the game to build a giant chicken (as my 10-year-old did this week), then that's up to them. The film nods to this with its title – it's A Minecraft Movie, not The Minecraft Movie, because it would be reductive to be so definitive – and, yet, Hess does appear to have taken the easy path, padding the bones of a Jumanji-style offering with blockier skin. Worse still, Hess has a distinctive visual style (he is essentially the Wes Anderson of ironic haircuts) that doesn't intuitively mesh with the Minecraft look. And for a certain type of fan, that look is not only gospel, but in part fan led. For instance, Element Animation, a YouTube outfit that made its name with lushly animated, absurd Minecraft spoofs were so successful that they ended up being hired by game developer Mojang to make official Minecraft videos. Minecraft is now ultimately a feedback loop between the game and the people who play it, and the movie needed to reflect that. However, the story goes that Hess basically stumbled into making the film – when another project he was working on for Legendary fell through, they asked him to pitch for Minecraft – and perhaps this lack of familiarity shows. After all, Phil Lord and Chris Miller went out of their way to reassure people that they'd played with Lego all of their lives before making 2014's rigorously faithful The Lego Movie. Aaron Horvath and Michael Jelenic went as far as saying that Super Mario Bros was their main source of entertainment as children when they were announced as directors for 2023's Super Mario Bros Movie. This is the level of familiarity that fans have come to expect, and things have a habit of going wrong whenever directors try to impose themselves too forcefully on a beloved property. The first live-action Mario movie fell apart when it replaced Bowser (a gigantic muscular turtle) with Dennis Hopper in a shiny blazer. Paramount was forced to spend $5m redesigning Sonic the Hedgehog after his appearance in a movie trailer, all tiny eyes and human teeth, horrified viewers. But Minecraft is still a relatively new game. People like Fernandes and ElVitt0ri0, who have been playing the game for long enough to truly understand it, are still only in their early 20s. Maybe one day they'll make a perfectly faithful Minecraft movie that satisfies the fans, but it won't be for years. But, again, this is A Minecraft Movie, not The Minecraft Movie. Warner Bros may have done enough to prevent this one from completely flopping – there is wall-to-wall promotion, both in-game and in the real world, plus a second trailer that seems slightly more faithful to the source material. But hardcore devotees may still feel that it's time to put the fans in charge of any future big-screen offerings. An Element Animation Minecraft film is exactly what my children want to see, but perhaps the reins will be passed to someone else with an innate understanding of the game. As ElVitt0ri0 says, a film based on something as beloved as Minecraft should be 'an actual piece of love towards the fans by fans, not just some corpo-vomited product by a big company'. A Minecraft Movie is out on 3 April in Australia and on 4 April in the UK and US
