The faithful reader might remember a piece I posted last fall on Glory Road. Thad H. posted a comment on that piece suggesting that I might enjoy Friday Night Lights, the story of the 1988 Permian “Mojo” Panthers, led by Coach Gary Gaines (Billy Bob Thornton) in their bid for their 6th State Championship.
If you like high school football you’ll love this movie. It takes place in small-town Texas (Odessa, to be exact), where football is a religion and the high school players are hailed as much as NFL stars. Director Peter Berg serves up plenty of bone-bruising hits, body-bending catches, and tackles that have to involve a trampoline just off camera.
Odessa is a blue collar, nearly impoverished town, and there are two kinds of boys: those who might make it out of this town, and those who won’t. Those who might play their hearts out on the field in hopes of getting an NCAA scholarship. Those who won’t play their hearts out on the field because this is all they’ll ever have.
Beginning of the season.
All this creates an intense environment to grow up in. Gaines is threatened with termination if he doesn’t win State, and after one loss, comes home to find “for sale” signs all over his yard. One of his players, Don Billingsly (Gerrett Hedlund), is cursed to be the son of a local football legend, and not have his ability. For several painful scenes, Chuck Billingsly (Tim McGraw) verbally abuses Don and grinds him down for cut-ups on the field. The Panthers win most of their games, but people flagellate them for every mistake. All of this spills onto the field, of course, and Berg makes the action nasty enough that you wonder if this is a sports movie or the teen version of Braveheart. If you enjoy watching young men get their noses smashed and fingers broken, this is the movie for you.
FNLdoes keep the audience involved. I kept backing it up to revisit what happened. The pacing is a little off, though. In a couple of close games, for example, Mojo is getting killed for awhile, Gaines yells a lot, and then suddenly they have some big plays, and end up winning or making it close. The film never builds your anticipation or shows what they changed on the field to get that result. A good sports movie would at least have some kind of inspirational speech that turns things around.
But why complain? This is a movie made for sports nuts, and it makes you feel like you’re watching a real game. There was only one thing about this film I really didn’t like. (Spoiler alert: you might want to skip the next paragraph.)
Target audience of "Friday Night Lights."
For the championship game, Mojo goes up against Dallas Carter, a team full of 300-pounders that hardly seem to belong in high school. As a matter of fact, in reality, D.C. was later stripped of its title for playing an ineligible player.
End of the season.
No one expects Mojo to give D.C. any trouble. After being down as much as 21 points, Mojo comes back to close the gap to six, and then falls inches short of a TD at the last second. We then see a lot of slow motion walking across the field. One person walking is Don Billingsly. Chuck comes out of the stands and gives him a hug – which Don actually accepts! WTF?? Now that he’s fought overwhelming odds, covered himself in bruises and sprained every joint in his body, he’s good enough for acknowledgement from the man who’s treated him like dirt all his life, and he takes it?? I wanted him to push dad aside and congratulate his team, or kiss his girlfriend, or something.
A lot of guys love to talk about how football produces the best kind of men, and this movie was made for them. I tend to think the success of ex-players has less to do with qualities the game instills than the fact that having played for the local high school is a golden ticket into the local country club. It gets a little old having to be twice as good and work twice as hard as the guys that played football. That doesn’t mean I can’t appreciate and enjoy the drama that comes with sports, however. FNL succeeds at what it sets out to do, and for that I give it
Reviewing a documentary can be a bit tricky, since it’s not always easy to divorce oneself from the subject matter of the movie and do an objective writeup. So in the interest of full disclosure, I should probably get a few things out of the way off the bat regarding my relationship with America’s largest retailer.
I thought this documentary, which claims to be “The documentary for the rest of us” (riffing on Apple’s “the computer for the rest of us” slogan from the early 1990′s), would be a nice exploration of the computer company of which I am rather fond, along with the creative minds behind their signature product. And it’s not that the documentary was bad, or even poorly made, it’s that I went away from it feeling as though there was so much untapped potential, so much brilliant source material, that was left entirely untouched by the filmmakers.
With America’s eyes turning toward the battle for Rifqa Bary in Florida, it seemed fitting to pull this one out of the vault. Americans are famously clueless about history, but especially so when it comes to the history of Islam and Christianity. When I was in Bar Exam preparation, the lecturer, who was your typical American WASP, aparently felt the need to vent concerning the Crusades. He said the kings and knights went off to “teach Christianity to the heathens” in the Middle East, and how they completely destroyed the “Islamic Culture” there “that had existed for thousands of years.” He then went back to legal matters, but many listening had no doubt been entrenched more deeply in very popular and very dangerous misconceptions. Circumstances prevented me from addressing him directly, but I would have liked to point out that, at the time of the Crusades, “Islamic culture” had existed for about 400 years (Christianity, for the record, had been around for about 1000), that the Crusades had nothing to do with converting anyone or teaching anyone anything, but were about reclaiming territory and securing safe pilgrimages for the already faithful, and that they had hardly been unprovoked.
Not that facts aren’t presented here–plenty of them, to be sure, make up vital portions of the movie. There are interviews throughout the movie with several individuals who worked at Enron as well as Bethany McLean, the reporter who broke the story of Enron’s scandals in 2001 (as well as co-author of the book on which this movie is based), corporate whistleblower Sherron Watkins, and even Gray Davis, the former governor of California. Snippets of congressional hearings, particularly those involving Jeff Skilling, the president of Enron, are revealing and sometimes tough to sit through, as we watch him dance around the truth and even outright lie to his inquisitors about what happened at Enron and the key role he played in the downfall of the company.
Documentaries can be as subjective as their creators want them to be, and footage, interviews, points of view, and even shooting locations can be manipulated to support any political agenda or other motive that the director has. Extreme examples of this can be found in any of Michael Moore’s sensationalist films, which can only be called documentaries by the loosest possible definition of the word, and even in other works such as Morgan Spurlock’s faux-indictment of the fast food industry in Super Size Me, and Ben Stein’s biased look at intelligent design in Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed (which I thought was a good film, but I was fully aware of its political bent and, thus, the biased nature of the material which was being presented). Waco: Rules of Engagement is surely guilty of these same transgressions to some degree, but without an opinionated narrator advancing the examinations being presented onscreen, and with so much of the footage taken directly from congressional hearings in the years following the tragedy, it lends a greater deal of credibility that many documentaries tend to lack.
Interviews shown in the film of fellow Branch Davidians also show a group of people who were simply looking for answers, and for whatever reason, found them in Koresh and the end-times theology of the Branch Davidians. Where the film truly shines, though, is in showing how mishandled and bungled the attacks on the compound, begun by the ATF and carried to a bloody end by the FVI, really were. Through extensive footage taken from the aforementioned congressional hearings, this film documents incredible lapses in the chain of command, confusion on the part of the agents on the ground, and shows how the situation grew beyond control and ended up in the tragic killing of not only Koresh but dozens and dozens of his followers, many of whom were women and children.
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