I recently got the chance to screen the new film Church Ball, the latest movie by HaleStorm Entertainment, which has a growing list of films with themes related to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Past films have included Singles Ward and The Best Two Years, a flick about newly returned Mormon missionaries readjusting to the old scene.Church Ball, which began showing in a few Valley theaters on April 14, including Gilbert Stadium 14 in Gilbert and Superstition Springs 25 in Mesa, has several well-known actors, including Fred Willard, playing a ward bishop, and Gary Coleman (Different Strokes), who is a member of the Mud Lake church basketball team.
Unlike past HaleStorm films I have seen, Church Ball strikingly lacks the Mormon cultural flavor of the past films. The misfits and cutups who make up the Mud Lake team do some pretty mean things in the course of the story. Promoters say Church Ball was written and filmed in a way that would be inclusive of all audiences, and they liken it to the past hit My Big Fat Greek Wedding that gave insight about a specific culture in a way thats inclusive and funny, not alienating and esoteric.
In the 91-minute films story, Dennis Buckstead is called on to coach a group of non-athletic players of his church and told by the soon-to-retire bishop that the team must win the basketball league championship after 20-years of bleak play. Not to mentioned that it would be the last season of church basketball and the last time to snag a title.
What follows is a lot of bending and breaking rules to make a championship follow. Bishop Linderman himself had been suspended from coaching early on for violent behavior and that guilt has been a heavy weight on the Mud Lakers for most of two decades.
Much of the film is dealing with the flaws and behaviors of the team. Theres lots of twisting arms to get people to play or and just plain get coordinated even if they dont like each other.
The HaleStorm media kit offers some interesting facts about church basketball. The Mormon leagues began early in the 1900s as recreation for members. In 1922, the first church basketball tournament was organized in Salt Lake City.
Tournaments were a huge part of church basketball, said Paul Eagleston, a script writer. Winning teams would play first in stake tournaments, then go on to regional tournaments and finally to the all-church basketball basketball tournament that was televised and heavily attended by church members.
It notes how important it has been for church meetinghouses to be designed to include a full-size basketball court next to the chapel to support games for the church-sponsored teams.
Basketball was a viewed as an effective way to cultivate fellowship among members of the church, and a natural way to reach out to potential converts, Eagleston notes, adding that the church has been mindful in dispatching missionaries on special assignments in other nations to play basketball to build such goodwill and provide common ground for evangelizing.
Stephen Rose, another co-writer, notes, however, that church ball drifted way from what it was originally intended to be, and all-church tournaments were disbanded in the early 1970s. Basketball is, and was, a very competitive sport that often brought out the worst in good, strong LDS members, he said. And the fact that this kind of unnecessary aggression and violence happened right next to the chapel where members worshipped is what makes the film humorous — and ironic.
If you like church brawl — I mean church ball — take a look.
I am afraid that church ball is the sort of movie that after watching it you think “I took the risk of keaving the dog in the house for that!”
Don’t waste your money!