Learning from Movies: Dodgeball

This 2004 "sports" comedy is 70% fresh on Rotten Tomatoes, and 75% of the audience reports liking it.

It stars Vince Vaughn, Christine Taylor, Ben Stiller (who didn’t write or direct, surprisingly), Rip Torn, Justin Long, Stephen Root, Alan Tudyk, Missi Pyle, Gary Cole, Jason Bateman, and Hank Azaria.





Do you believe in unlikelihoods?

Take a break from that fine, lead-based, paint and learn something about dodgeball after the break.

• Victory. Honor. Pride. All these mean nothing... if you don't have balls.
• Ugliness and fatness are genetic disorders, like baldness or necrophilia, and it’s only your fault if you don’t hate yourself enough to do something about it. Just ask these guys:

• Shouldn’t your personal trainer be part of a highly-trained, quasi-cultural staff of personal alteration specialists?
• You’ll still be you in a legal sense.
• Sometimes there’s two somebodies for one person. We like to call that “the jackpot.”
• High school’s changed a lot since my day, if being a male cheerleader means you’re not a loser.
• You’ll laugh at this one day. I’m laughing already.
• Go at your own pace. That’s what it’s there for.
• “Differences” include sleeping with three of your competitor’s employees in one night, and sending him a congratulatory male stripper.
• If you can't raise fifty-thousand dollars with an impromptu carwash, I guess it just wasn't in the cards.
• The sport of dodgeball was invented in the 15th-Century by opium-addicts in China, but back then they threw severed heads at each other.
• Dodgeball is a sport of violence, exclusion, and degradation. Remember to pick the bigger, stronger, kids for your team, so you can gang up on the weaker ones.
• The five d's of dodgeball are: dodge, duck, dip, dive and dodge!
• This is Patches O'Houlihan saying "Take care of your balls, and they'll take care of you."
• I found that if you have a goal, that you might not reach it. But if you don't have one, then you are never disappointed.
• Testing positive for three separate types of anabolic steroids and a low-grade beaver tranquilizer disqualifies you from regional dodgeball qualifiers.
• Dodgeball is the national sport of Romanovia.
• If you want to have dodgeball victory, you have to grab it by its haunches and you gotta hump it into submission!
• "Normal" and "normal for us" are two different things.
• If you can dodge a wrench, you can dodge a ball.
• If you can dodge traffic, you can dodge a ball.
• No one resists White Goodman when he puts on his shiny shoes.
• Nobody makes me bleed my own blood. Nobody!
• Las Vegas. A city built of hot sand, broken dreams and $5 lobster. A city where you can get a happy ending, if you pay a little extra. A city home to a sporting event greater than the World Cup, World Series and World War II combined.
• If it’s almost a sport, we've got it here - on ESPN 8.
• No personal balls of any kind will be allowed on the court.
• Leather and lace belong in the bedroom, not on the dodgeball court.
• It's time to separate the wheat from the chaff, the men from the boys, the awkwardly feminine from the possibly Canadian.
• I don't think I'm a lot dumber than you thought that I think that I thought that I was once.
• Too bad Hallmark doesn't make a "Sorry your dodgeball coach got killed by two tons of irony" card.
• We've seen it all here, folks: Grit, determination, and incontinence.
• I guess if a person never quit when the going got tough, they wouldn't have anything to regret for the rest of their life. But good luck to you. I'm sure this decision won't haunt you forever.
• Sudden-death dodgeball is the greatest happening in sports.
• Let me tell you, a double-fault final-play elimination hasn't occurred since the Helsinki episode of 1919, and I think we all remember how THAT turned out!
• Ladies and gentlemen, I have been to the Great Wall of China, I have seen the Pyramids of Egypt, I've even witnessed a grown man satisfy a camel. But never in all my years as a sportscaster have I witnessed something as improbable, as impossible, as what we've witnessed here today!
• Good guy wins. Bad guy loses. Big freakin' surprise. That's the problem with the American cinema: Can't handle any complexity. "Whoa! Don't make me think!"

Thank you, Chuck Norris.