Some highlights from Miles Wray's "What's Happened So Far: A Review of FROM DEEP," which appeared on FanSided's Hardwood Paroxysm blog on April 7, 2014:
 

  • "It’s a film that manages, like all true and real loves, to see the best and most glorious traits about basketball, the professional and playground games alike, while also acknowledging the legion of unsightly warts on its personality—namely, this game’s tense and fraught racial history."
     
  • "In more conventional hands... FROM DEEP would be a history book of the game, a museum exhibit guiding the viewer through the sport’s major plot points. And while we do get all of the plot points... what FROM DEEP provides is a dynamic sampler of basketball’s constantly evolving aesthetics. As Kashmere cuts a precise path through what feels like miles of tape from every imaginable source—from national-broadcast HD to games where the bottom wasn’t yet cut out of the basket to the annals of Hollywood’s portrayals of basketball—the perpetual progression of basketball styles begins to reveal its shape, the change over decades of play artfully distilled for a single sitting."
     
  • "Kashmere is able to perfectly match the genre explorations of the Showtime Lakers with hip-hop’s first self-realized hits. It’s as if the twin industries of basketball and music are taking cues from each other, each prodding the other to step out into new sonic landscapes. Onwards into the nineties and this century, the influence of the most racially loaded figures of the times (see: N.W.A., Allen Iverson) is subsumed by the unavoidable wave of commerce and endorsements."
     
  • "Just like the playground games it so admires, FROM DEEP is joyfully devoid of the background hum of commercial pressures. It does not grab hip-hop’s coattails because hip-hop is the shortcut ticket to the prized demographics du jour: high esteem is given to both the game and the music. Both topics are discussed because, overflowing with the creativity and passions of so many brilliant people as they are, both topics deserve to be discussed."
     
  • "FROM DEEP is being released and screened here in 2014, but its expiration date is nowhere on the horizon. Stick it in a Smithsonian vault and bring it out twenty, thirty years from now and it will all make perfect sense... it will make sense because it has so totally captured the styles that have happened in and to basketball up to this point." 
     
  • "Kashmere has given us a uniquely thoughtful and meticulous view of basketball, respecting and exploring the imprints the game has made, and will continue to make, on the rest of society. Watch what he does next."


For the full review, visit:
http://hardwoodparoxysm.com/2014/04/07/whats-happened-so-far-a-review-of-from-deep/


Miles Wray writes a recurring column for McSweeney's Internet Tendency called Reviews of Self-Help Books by Professional Athletes and helps create Spartan. He's on Twitter at @mileswray. You can read more of his writing at mileswray.contently.com

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