MOVIES: Friday Night Lights

First of all, thanks to all of you who checked in on my Oscar liveblogging, and left such nice feedback, both here and at your own sites. Especially as I was still updating it. This is the first event I've ever truly live blogged, with constant updates throughout the night; usually I just wait until the event is over, and my coverage is complete, before posting my entry. It was challenging, but fun, and I look forward to doing it for the Emmys.

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Before the Oscars I watched the DVD of Friday Night Lights. I generally like sports movies -- they're mostly predictable, but in a very comforting sort of way -- but despite a great deal of praise, this is one of those films that I just hadn't gotten around to seeing before (still haven't seen Miracle, either).

This is based on the true story of the 1988 Permian High School Panthers football team, and holy crap, those Texas boys are out of their freakin' minds for football. It's not that I question the reality of the maniacal devotion the town shows to the team, and their truly unhealthy obsession with winning the state championship at any cost, but I just can't relate to it. At all. Maybe it's a Southern phenomenon only, but I can't even imagine anyone, let alone an entire town, getting so worked up over a high school game.

But the movie does an incredible job of pulling you into that world, that mindset. It's great in portraying the pressures on the teen athletes ("It feels like we're going to war," says one, and he doesn't mean it lightly; he couldn't be more frightened if he were about to be shipped out to Iraq), as well as on the head coach (when he loses a big game, a dozen For Sale signs are planted in his front yard). Billy Bob Thornton is the coach, and he plays it mostly with a quiet, powerful determination; he doesn't seem as crazy as the townsfolk, but he truly wants and needs to win every bit as much as they do.

The younger actors are mostly effective as well. For the longest time, I had a nagging feeling that I recognized the actor playing Mike Winchell, the quarterback -- something about his voice, his accent, rang familiar to me. Finally it hit me -- I remembered him as a child actor, from the TV show American Gothic, from the X-Files movie (he's the kid who gets infected with the black oil right at the beginning)... and from Billy Bob's Sling Blade (in one of the extras, he mimics Billy Bob's performance in that film, and it's hilarious). His name is Lucas Black, by the way.

Derek Luke (of Antwone Fisher) plays star running back "Boobie" Miles, and his story is the most heartbreaking. He's spectacular on the field, cocky, charismatic, with obvious NFL potential, until a career-ending knee injury in the first game of the '88 season. For these kids, almost the only way to get out of that small town was through football. Boobie never made it out. In the extras on the DVD are interviews with the real-life people the movie is based on; Boobie Miles is still cocky and charismatic, but you can see in his eyes when he talks about football that it eats at his soul. It's devastating. As is Luke's portrayal of him in the film.

There's a good deal of football action in the film, and the final game certainly pulls out all the cliches, but it's not really about the action. It's about how these characters survive in a town like this, with pressures like these. Despite the liberties taken (reportedly a great many) in translating the original non-fiction book to the screen, it's far more realistic than nearly any other sports movie I've ever seen. It's a smart film, by turns bleak and uplifting. Don't rent this looking for Varsity Blues.