Monday Day Darkness

Having seen Friday Night Lights today, it's funny that I mentioned in an earlier post that a coin flip would determine my movie selection on this Columbus Day 2004. A pivotal point of the high school football movie involves a coin flip, one that has great meaning for the focus of this feature, the Odessa Permian Panthers of Texas. Now let's set the record straight, men like sports. Not all men might like movies as much as I do, but I garuantee that if a man HAS to watch a movie, he'd prefer it to be about sports. Sports movies are great, whether they are dramatic like the Natural or Any Given Sunday or comical like Tin Cup or Major League. They always deliver on the rudimentary level of sports action and the plot is usually along the same lines which breeds familiarity, and that makes them pretty safe bets. If you like one football movie, chances are you will like them all. It's hard to fuck it up, Necessary Roughness (Kathy Ireland saved that one) and Radio (nothing could help this one) aside.

What usually separates an okay football movie from a superb football movie are the performances. The story goes either one of two routes.

A) meet the team, watch the overcome adversity and win the big game in the 4th quarter
or
B) meet the team, watch them overcome adversity and lose the big game in the fourth quarter.

And both work just as well from a viewing perspective because throughout either scenario we meet interesting characters, maybe see some boobies and always get caught up in the "big game" action. It's a guy thing. We are essentially easy to please and most of the makers of sports films get it.

Now what makes Friday Night Lights special are 3 things.

1) Billy Bob Thorton is legit as an actor. The role of coach in this particular movie is very subtle, it's not your typical loud over the top (Al Pacino in Any Given Sunday anyone) cliched performance of the small town coach. And the strength of the film is his ability to evoke emotion visually instead of saying every hackneyed one liner you have come to expect in movies.

2) Peter Berg provided a strong script devoid of the expected and fairy tale endings that Hollywood loves. I don't want to spoil the film, but things don't get resolved easily and not everyone is going to be alright....and I like that.

3) The style in which Berg chose to direct this comes across as very fly on the wall, much like a documentary. Considering it is based on a true story, it makes absolute sense, but it would be so easy for another director, one without a connection to the story (Berg's cousin is the award winning journalist whose work the movie is based on) or with indie credibility, to fuck it up.

Getting back to Billy Bob for a moment, let me say upfront that his personal life is none of my business and that I pretty much consider him to be a scum bag when I comes to women. (Kids everywhere, 20 ex-wives, etc.) And he tries to hard to be eccentric (see Jolie's blood, tattooes, horrible singing) and that detracts somewhat from him getting the respect he deserves. But I'll be damned if he isn't a phenominal actor.

Sling Blade, Bad Santa, A Simple Plan, Monster's Ball, The Man Who Wasn't There, U-Turn and I'll even give him Armegeddon. Even in the shit he was in, Intolerable Cruelty, Pusing Tin, Bandits, he makes an effort to be above the others around him and it shows.

Don't get me wrong, there are flaws in Friday Night Lights. The "coach's wife" character is the most pathetic in all of cinema. I counted two lines for that hot, tall red head from Spin City who plays Billy Bob's hapless wife and mother to his invisible daughter. And based on the epilogue, you get the feeling there must have been a lot of scenes that got cut out. Why don't we learn what happens to Colmer the 3rd string Running Back? But overall, I would rank this football movie a sure thing.

Now ladies, I'm not sure how you are going to react to this one, but considering that I know no less than 10 guys who have been dragged to a Kate Hudson movie....it's time you returned the favor. You dig?