Filmmaker Christopher Browne documents the mission of a group of middle-aged bowlers as they attempt to revitalize the sport and get the television-watching public interested in it again.In the midst of this, the Professional Bowlers Association is purchased by a trio of Microsoft programmers who hire Steve Miller, a Nike marketing guru. Can the new money and the expert bring this nostalgic game back to life? (Seeing as I am writing this in 2015 and the film is from 2004, my guess is no.) We do get to meet some interesting characters, like Walter Ray Williams who uses his knowledge of physics to excel at both bowling and horseshoes. His house is practically a mansion, and then you are left wondering: how much money is there in professional bowling? Apparently a lot.

Focusing on the underbelly of professional bowing, ALOOG, shows what happens when three microsoft engineers decide to buy the Professional Bowlers' Association for $5m in the hopes of reviving the sport. With the help of a former Nike executive, Steve Miller, the sport is given a makeover for the 21st century. Some bowlers are skeptical, and some delusional, yet the PBA tour regains a t.v. contract with ESPN. Long days on the road, loneliness, paltry paychecks, and the hope of redemption and riches that fuel these men on make it an interesting movie. The price that is paid in terms of broken marriages, stress, lack of respect all combine to create a vivid portrait. Of the four bowlers profiled, ex physics professor Walter Williams is by far the most successful. Happily married, he lives comfortably on his bowling winnings, and by movies end has earned an impressive 400k in earnings on tour. The others, a son of a legendary bowler himself, a hall of famer who is alone, and broke at movies end, and a family man on his way up in the tour are presented as three dimensional people not caricatures from a movie like 'Kingpin'. Worth checking out.

I was actually watching Enron The Smartest Guys in the Room and it had a trailer for this movie on it. So I went to check it out. Good lord is this documentary boring. It might actually be worth my while to watch real bowling compared to this junk. It basically boils down to two guys that apparently don't like each other. I never really watched bowling. It was one of those sports thats more fun to actually play it. The only way I got through this home video was I was scanning photo's at the time. There's no sense of purpose or direction. It simply meanders wherever and whoever the camera is pointing at. This came to be disappointingly bad and I actually came off disliking bowling more than when I came in watching this. Which I don't think was the intention of the film. I can't call this a documentary. A documentary informs people, this is simply a batch of home video's shot with PBA stars talking. Yawn. Go watch something else.4/10Quality: 4/10 Entertainment: 0/10 Replayable: 1/10

Follows an attempt to revitalize the Professional Bowler's Association, which had fallen on hard times and was in danger of going bankrupt. The "revitalization" mainly seems to consist of a wholescale borrowing from extreme sports and the WWE and is mostly pretty silly to these eyes, although it's clear that a lot of other people dig it.The movie follows a bunch of old-time pro bowlers caught up in the transformation as they wend their way to a "world championship". Most interesting is Wayne Webb, a nice, fragile sort who devoted his life to the sport only to discover that it no longer has much use for him. Webb is a complicated guy, as much a victim of his own weaknesses as he is a victim of his world. It's nice to see that the movie doesn't cheapen him, reduce him down to a stereotypical one-dimension.The movie gets very exciting towards the end, even for this general bowling-skeptic. And it's full of sly jokes -- the best of which is a complex one: the movie begins with the assertion from some bowling fans that the movie KINGPIN presented an exaggerated, stereotypical view of bowling. By the end of the movie, though, we're well into KINGPIN's world, complete with middle-aged men doing crotch shots, cheesy introductions, and a lot of red lighting.