Watch Youngblood For Free

Best movie ever!

if their story seems completely bonkers, almost like a feverish work of fiction, you ain't heard nothing yet.

This is a must-see and one of the best documentaries - and films - of this year.

Each character in this movie — down to the smallest one — is an individual rather than a type, prone to spontaneous changes of mood and sometimes amusing outbursts of pettiness or ill humor.

I know nothing about hockey but managed to learn a few things from watching this formulaic sports story.One is that a goalie has to be extremely supple. He must be able to do splits comfortably. And there is an unsettling scene towards the end, just before Rob Lowe's penalty shot, when the goalie of the enemy team (that's the proper term) extends one ugly padded leg in one direction and kneels on the other, then slithers slowly back and forth in front of the net like a dangerous eel or serpent. He also apparently gets to wear a mask as threatening as he likes -- skulls, a mass of stitches, any design will do.Another thing I learned is that hockey isn't all speed and skill with the stick. The teams, the referees, the coaches, the fans, are all allowed to stand back and not interfere with two players who have decided to duke it out, first with sticks, like Medieval jousters, then with bare fists like kids in a junior high school playground. The fight can last a long time, until one of the combatants hits the dirt, or rather the ice.There's nothing much new about the plot. Lowe is a natural talent on the ice but must quit for a time during his rise to celebrity in order to overcome some personal demons and then return to become the star he was always destined to be.He's only seventeen years old and gets hazed when he joins the Mustangs. But he makes a friend too, Patrick Swayze, who tells him that nothing, absolutely nothing, compares to playing in the rink. I figured Swayze at once for a paralyzing C-spine injury that would turn him into a mummy from the neck down. I almost got it right.Then there's Racki, an ugly name for a gargantuan enemy player given to smashing members of the other team and playing dirty. I figured Lowe would wind up beating him to a pulp. Bingo.Then there's Cynthia Gibb as the daughter of Lowe's manager, Ed Lauter. Lauter doesn't like the team even looking at her. But how could anyone not? She was a model at fourteen and is now the cutest, cleanest face on the screen since Sandra Dee, but less debauched than Sandra Dee always appeared, what with her Bayonne accent.Gibbs' Dad and Gibbs' own reluctance to have her date a team member are soon overcome. The obstacle is perfunctory. We've already seen Lowe's manly chest and buns of steel, which are pretty revolting, but we get the merest glimpse of Cynthia Gibbs' far more graceful nudity. She can't act but it doesn't matter because Lowe can't act either. That doesn't stop them from being beautiful people.Patrick Swayze, on the other hand, gives a convincing performance as an experienced player. I've always admired Swayze, a dancer, singer-songwriter, horse breeder, who trained at the Joffrey Ballet -- and was from Texas. Died a way we don't want to die.Best performance award goes to -- envelope, please -- Eric Nesterenko as Lowe's Dad. It's not a bravura performance. It's a reassuring one. He has the same sympatico quality on screen that Richard Farnsworth once had, or that Werner Herzog has now. If I were to spill the beans to someone, I wouldn't mind if the listener were someone like Nesterenko. Of course that's his screen persona. In real life he may get his kicks pulling the wings off flies.This isn't any masterpiece of film making. You can pretty readily call the shots. But it's better than I'd expected it to be, which may or may not be saying much since my expectations were pretty low to begin with.

Back in 1986 prior to the opening of this film, some press was spilt about the level of dedication "pretty boy" actor Rob Lowe was going to for the title role, such as bulking up a bit for the role and the extensive training to make the hockey scenes as authentic as possible. After all that preparation, it seems a shame that the end result is a predictable largely generic feel-good sports film set on the ice. Lowe is the title character, who in a whirlwind of activity becomes a force to be reckoned with on the ice. And I mean whirlwind - in the space of 24-48 hours Lowe leaves home, arrives in the city, is seduced by his mature landlady, gets on the wrong side of a brutal hockey player, wins a spot on the team, gets caught with his pants down by the coach's daughter Cynthia Gibb, subsequently starts a flirtation with her, is hazed by the team members in a rather humiliating fashion and wins the respect of veteran player Patrick Swayze. One can accuse the film of much, but being boring is certainly not one of them. There are things that work well in the film. The hockey scenes seem authentic and rousing, even though there is rarely ever any doubt about where the film is headed. Lowe and Gibb share a certain amount of chemistry and the camaraderie among the teammates (including an unknown at the time Keanu Reeves) feels accurate. Swayze is also fairly solid in a typical role of semi-mentor. Unfortunately, the film is hampered by its formula. There are certain steps that it needs to hit by rote and it is at best moderately enjoyable to see it hit them. Part of the problem rests with the leading man. At the time, Lowe was dismissed as little better than a Teen Beat sensation, which is a bit unfair. However, even his most ardent Fans must admit that Lowe fares much better in ensemble pieces (The West Wing, The Stand, Brothers and Sisters) where his shortcomings can be muted than he does as a leading man, where his lack of charisma starts to come into play. Despite his hard work, Lowe never seems completely believable or at ease in the central role, which has a tendency to throw the film off its stride. Yet there are still reasons to watch. Hockey fans will enjoy the on-ice action, romance fans will probably find something to like in the relationship between Lowe and Gibb, and Lowe fans will have the guilty pleasure of seeing him in what has become his essential nude scene - embarrassed and trapped in a public hallway in a filled to capacity jockstrap while being ogled by Gibb. Any of those aspects are certainly worth a painless couple of hours to take in the film.

Being Canadian and playing competitive hockey for most of my life, I have to say there are a lot of realism's to the movie but the premise is one of the things that is lacking. In my experience Major Junior teams that are going into the league final do not have try-outs the week before. A player as skilled as Youngblood would most certainly have been noticed earlier and should already been playing, especially with an older brother that played before him. All in all this is probably my favorite all time movie and the little things that aren't realistic really don't matter. Rob Lowe, Patrick Swayze, Keanu Reeves and the rest of the cast did an excellent job learning and portraying hockey players.

I found myself bored by this movie. Firstly, I did not like Rob Lowe or Cynthia Gibb in this movie. I found their characters predictable and cliché and their romance even more so. I did like Patrick Swayze, I though he gave a good performance. But I have to say in a movie like this it isn't good to judge performances as the material isn't very hard to act.My main problem was as I said, it doesn't capture your attention and i'm mostly talking about the hockey games. I felt like their wasn't even an effort to make the action interesting. I should have been cheering the characters on at that last hockey game but I bored. I guess my opinion is a bit biased after watching the Maurice Richard movie whose hockey sequences were rivaled by no one else in their excitement and joy.I certainly would not recommend this movie to hockey fans. Maybe the lingering Rob Lowe fans would enjoy it but i found this to be a boring and unmoving film even for a teen movie.