Inocuous, ineffective film. They know what the're doing.

Rating: 1/10 (3 May 2008)

Apparently this is a very hard film to make well. It very well maybe an impossible film to make well. I haven't read the book, but by all serious accounts it by and large dismisses and does not articulate the main argument in the book. Impossible for two reasons: It would take an Oliver Stone in his Midnight Express devotional mood to make it, and apparently not Grazier and Berg.
Is being stuck in the realities of Football Texas as bad as a Turkish prison? No, but at least there you know you are in prison. In the realities of this film you do not realize significantly the quality of that which binds you, which is the failure of this film. In the end it can't have it both ways. To have all of the expectant beats of a traditional sports movie, and have the desired ironic effect. You get exited as you watch this film by all of the sounds and reactions, and those realities aren't shaped with irony by the screenwriter. Can they be? Very tricky to do I think. In the end we are suppose to come away with... is an insurance salesman, so and so is has twins, they lost the football game...and what? Everyone in this film lost, even the likable coach who was the inadvertent orchestrator of this institutionalized brutality that we have been conditioned to accept as normal so those unfortunate "normal" people who are everywhere can get there anger out by first investing their emotions in, then watching young men, so unlike themselves, time has proved, bludgeon themselves every week.
Oh, now they cash in on the fact and we are reminded that it's a true story. That surely has to give it some more credibility. Did you know...this actually happened...
Oh, oh, the critics lauded the film, and it made money, oh, oh, I like it when I touch it cuz she moan a l'il bit/ Jeans saggin' so I can see her thong a l'il bit.
Chingy knows where it's at and he says it. These filmmakers hide and distort it pretty well. They might be "Gettin' it" in their personal lives, but on screen, well its a different matter altogether isn't it.
A really a muddled effort and message.
Impossible to make maybe also because of the economics of film. Who would pay to see one of the sacred cows of American culture (football) beaten and demolished on screen? I would, maybe you would too, but unfortunately not enough people to pay for the film and let the people at Universal keep their jobs, or so they timorously believe. What a great film that would have been! Hard to write well, impossible to make, but at least worth the work and effort.
You see you have to hate it and enjoy it at the same time both in traditional ways the filmmakers believe.
So you get the watered down bittersweet Koolaid to sip on. It won't kill you, but might make you wonder, hopefully at the duplicity of film's meretricious, ineffective creators. Hollywood's sharp understanding of the economics of the lowest, common, safe economic denominator time after time. The false thin facade of Grazier, Berg, and co. that if it has the veneer of truth that it's all good. They know what their doing.
The irony here is, though, that I think the people involved were considering and are considered being involved in a "cutting edge" non commercial venture film, because this film is not intrinsically commercial. Go figure. In which case they just didn't have the know how to do it right, or perhaps their ideological baggage kept them from seeing the correct path because I think they think they made a great or at least a good, maybe even a very good "against the grain" film. Probably an amalgamation of everything.