Out of print for more than 30 years, now available for the first time as an eBook, this is the controversial story of John Wooden's first 25 years and first 8 NCAA Championships as UCLA Head Basketball Coach. Notre Dame Coach Digger Phelps said, "I used this book as an inspiration for the biggest win of my career when we ended UCLA's all-time 88-game winning streak in 1974."

Compiled with more than 40 hours of interviews with Coach Wooden, learn about the man behind the coach. Click the Book to read the players telling their stories in their own words. This is the book that UCLA Athletic Director J.D. Morgan tried to ban.

Click the book to read the first chapter and for ordering information.

The Last Legion (0/10)

by Tony Medley

Whenever a studio doesn’t allow critics to attend a screening before opening, that tells you that the filmmakers and distributors (in this case Dino de Laurentiis and The Weinstein Company, respectively) don’t have much faith that anybody who sees it will have anything good to say about it.

And they were right! To say that this is amateurish would be to elevate it to a level of professionalism it does not achieve. When I see a film like this I am unbelieving that so much work and money could go into something so dreadful.

The story is that a young Roman, Romulus (Thomas Sangster), is a direct descendant of Julius Caesar, but some bad guys have taken over Rome in the sixth century and are trying to kill him, after they killed his parents. He’s protected by Aurelius (Colin Firth), who faces enormous odds in every fight. I mean, he’s got the entire Roman Empire against him. Throw in the Emperor who is now in Constantinople, and it’s basically the entire world. He’s got about four guys who are supporting him. Four guys and a girl, that is. Because the best fighter among them is Mira (Aishwarya Rai), who takes on ten guys at a time and kills them all, emerging without so much as a scratch. Rai is clearly no athlete because all her fights consist of her pirouetting first this way, then that. Her opponents never catch on. When she walks, she doesn’t have the walk of an athlete and her fight scenes are burdened with innumerable cuts. First a pirouette, then a cut to a slash, then a cut to a dead body.

Director Doug Lefler has taken a woeful screenplay by Jez and Tom Butterworth, from a story (hahahaha) by Carlo Carlei, Peter Rader, and Valerio Massimo Manfredi, based “in part” on a novel by Manfredi, and made it worse. So many writing credits indicate that nobody really wrote the screenplay. It must have been put together piecemeal.

Movies are fiction. As such, they often have to have scenes that ask the viewer to suspend disbelief in order to further a plot, and that’s generally OK, if what we are asked to belief is at least reasonable. But there are so many idiocies in this movie that it quickly strains credulity to the breaking point. Here are a few. Aurelius & Co. feel that they have to go to “Brittania” to escape and preserve the Empire. They take off on horses in their Italian garb (where it’s hot, you know?). In the next scene they are crossing the Alps fully clad in snow garb. Where did they get their clothes? What did they do with their horses?

Worse, they are climbing up a peak that looks like Mount Everest, clearly the highest peak in sight. In the background, however, is a valley about 10,000 feet below them cutting through the mountains. Why did they decide to climb the highest peak to get across the Alps when the valley was available?

Next, they are in a very small boat, apparently crossing the Brittania Channel, which later became known as the English Channel, much to the dismay of the French. Then we see them landing at the White Cliffs of Dover and then riding horses. Where did they get their horses? They didn’t have them crossing the Alps and they didn’t have them in their boat and they didn’t know anybody in “Britannia.”

Suddenly they are galloping up to Hadrian’s Wall, which is very far to the north in England (that’s where Britannia was, remember?). They had all of Brittania to visit; why did they go there?

The cinematography (Marco Pontecorvo) could have been some saving grace for this thing, because the movie could have had some wonderful locations. Alas, the cinematography is as bad as the rest of the film.

The thing that really bothers me about this film is that Firth and Ben Kingsley (who plays Abrosinus/Merlin) are pretty good actors. Kingsley won an Oscar®, for heaven’s sake. What are they doing in something as terrible as this? Don’t they read scripts? Are they that hard up for parts and money? They didn’t produce, but they did get an “in collaboration with” credit. Take it from me, it wasn’t worth it.

August 18, 2007