Entertainment
10 Winter Sports Movies to Get You Into The Sochi Olympics Mood
The Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia are right around the corner. To get you in the mood for two weeks of all winter sports all the time, here's your comprehensive list to all the winter sports movies you need to watch before the Games start on February 7. Hurry if you start now, you can get through all ten!
Blades of Glory
Okay, this movie is a little bit (a lot) of a joke but the Will Ferrell + Jon Heder duo makes for some laughs, and the ridiculous costumes are definitely worth the view.
Image: Paramount Pictures
Slap Shot
Paul Newman’s 1977 hockey comedy highlights exactly why the sport can be so entertaining: it’s all about the fights, of which there are no shortage of in this film.
Image: Universal Pictures
Cool Runnings
An often unrepresented sport in movies, this one highlights the true story of the Jamaican bobsled team’s first time in the Olympics. Despite being about the cold snow, this movie is as heart warming as it gets. Example A+ line: “A gold medal is a wonderful thing, but if you’re not enough without it, you’ll never be enough with it.”
Image: Disney
MVP: Most Valuable Primate
In the 2000s, movies with animals that played sports were really popular, but they mostly had to do with dogs, so props to this movie for starring a chimpanzee instead. Use the upcoming Olympic games as an excuse to watch this little guy go from a life in a medical research facility to a life of glory on the ice rink. Truly inspiring. Just think, if he can hit a hockey puck at 110 MPH, you can do anything.
Image: Keystone Family Pictures
Miracle
The true story of an amazing comeback win in hockey by the USA Olympic team against the Soviet team. There’s no sports movie better than one based on real life and this is no exception.
Image: Disney
The Mighty Ducks
Everyone’s favorite childhood movie starring the dreamy Emilio Estevez as the winning-obsessed lawyer who has to coach a rag-tag hockey team until he learns there are more important things than winning. And good feelings were had by all.
Image: Disney
Ice Princess
This movie showed me that you could love math and be a pretty ice skater. Feminism for the win! Plus it starred Joan Cusack and Kim Cattrall and young Hayden Panettiere and Michelle Trachtenberg.
Image: Disney
Downhill Racer
Roger Ebert called this skiing movie “the best movie ever made about sports—without really being about sports at all.” So for all you non-sports lovers out there, this one is for you! Also it stars young Robert Redford who is basically the best ever.
Image: Wildwood/Paramount Pictures
Youngblood
How can you not love Rob Lowe and Patrick Swayze in a hockey movie? Plus this is Keanu Reeves first film and Entertainment Weekly describes his French-Canadian accent as “if Pepé Le Pew grew up in Malibu and then had a minor stroke.”
Image: MGM/UA Entertainment Company
Men with Brooms
Everyone probably needs to watch this ASAP because it is the culmination of so many great things. It’s a Canadian romantic comedy centered around the sport of curling (where you essentially fling cement down the ice and try to slow its path with brooms so it lands inside a target.) I haven’t seen this yet, but I eagerly anticipate the romantic ending with the guy surely telling his female curling love interest, “I love you, eh?” Also, plaid pants.
Image: Alliance Atlantis
