Never Give Up (#457)


I love tennis.  I played tennis and pickle ball until I was almost 90, and I had a subscription to all the matches at the US Open for many years until I gave it to one of my daughters.  And I still watch it avidly on television. including yesterday when I decided to watch my new favorite player, Carlos Alcaraz, play instead of going to a movie.  I also believed theaters would be jammed on a Labor Day weekend and before school started here. I went today, and found the theaters empty, to see the rare tennis movie NEVER GIVE UP.  It intrigued me because it was allegedly a true story about a deaf tennis player , a sport I was totally ignorant of.  It was obviously intended as a feel good movie; it was also a faith-based one, but unfortunately, it appeared as though it was written, produced and directed and acted by amateurs.  The dialogue was stilted; some actors sounded as though they were reading ineptly from a  teleprompter.  And there were endless scenes of men hitting a tennis ball aimlessly and meaninglessly.  The star was a young msn who lost virtually all of his hearing at the age of three but who could talk snd whose parents rejected his going to a school for deaf children and instead got him expensive hearing aids and taught him to read lips.  There are, unfortunately very predictable moments of his being picked on in school by fellow students and verbally abused by an insensitive teacher.  Most surprising to me was his treatment by students at  Gallaudet University, a school for the deaf in Washington, DC, where he was competing in the world championships of tennis for deaf players.  The students were rude and shunned him because they were unaware that he was deaf but didn’t know signing.  The move was okay, if you got through my comments earlier.  For some reason, there were no critical or audience reviews for this film on Rotten Tomatoes.


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