Watchdog

Gunnin' for That #1 Spot, 90 minutes.

This is a look at the September, 2006, "Elite 24" game at Rucker Park that brought together many of the nation's top high school basketball players, including Kevin Love, Michael Beasley and Kyle Singler.

The director is Beastie Boy Adam Yauch, who knows how to mix cool highlights with cool music.

The film addresses concerns over high school kids in the Internet era, but some of the concerns are decades old.

I had some personal flashbacks to my time covering the world of city high school hoops in the 1980s, before these guys were born.

Among the characters in the movie is Ron Naclerio, the coach at Cardozo since the dawn of time, and Tiny Morton, now the multiple city champion coach at Lincoln High and in my day a kid so shy he sat next to me for an entire All-City dinner without saying a word.

Best lines: Someone calls Singler a blond Billy Paultz. And Naclerio says this: "In Africa, they've got AIDS. In basketball, they have the disease of me."

(By the way, that Paultz picture I used in an earlier post is from this great site on the ABA. Enjoy.)