“Friday Night Lights” is a good football movie. Correct that. “Friday Night Lights” is a great football movie.
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Being perfect is not about that scoreboard out there. It's not about winning. It's about you and your relationship with yourself, your family and your friends. Being perfect is about being able to look your friends in the eye and know that you didn´t let them down because you told them the truth. And that truth is you did everything you could. There wasn´t one more thing you could've done. Can you live in that moment as best you can, with clear eyes, and love in your heart, with joy in your heart? If you can do that gentleman - you're perfect! - Billy Bob Thornton
I thought I´d start out my review of "Friday Night Lights" with that little quote from Billy Bob Thorton´s character, Coach Gary Gaines. It is a perfect little quote to show the feelings that Coach Gaines had for his players. Coach Gaines - A man who was under immense pressure from the football-crazed community that treated high school football with a passion and a fervor that rivaled that of professional football. The high school players are treated like superstars and given every luxury the town could afford them. They were the apple in the eyes of every mother and father in Odessa, Texas. But this preferential treatment lasted as long as they won games and they produced positive results. In Texas, high school football is serious business and you can be the hero of the town on day and the next day the townsfolk are prepared to run you out of town.
"Friday Night Lights" is a good football movie. Correct that. "Friday Night Lights" is a great football movie. Based on Buzz Bissinger´s book about the Odessa-Permian Panthers of 1988 and directed by the author´s cousin, Peter Berg, the film takes some liberties about the events that happened on a year when Odessa was a huge favorite to win the state title and overcame being undersized and losing their star running back to making a solid run at the title. Billy Bob Thornton may be best known for his more foul-mouthed roles, but the man is a seriously talented character actor that first came to light in the incredible "Swing Blade" and has shown a lot of versatility since then. After watching "Friday Night Lights," I cannot imagine anybody else in the role and I can think of a few movies that would benefit from having had Billy Bob in the role as a head coach.
The young actors that play the real-life high school footballers suffer from the Hollywood problem of being too old for their parts, but they pull it off nicely. Sure, everybody is incredibly handsome and in better physical shape than most players I was friends with in high school, but it isn´t nearly as bad as some of the other ´high school´ films out there. Derek Luke was thirty years old when he portrayed James "Booby" Miles. He looked like he belonged in an NFL locker room. His performance was solid and helped you forget the age difference between himself and the boy he was playing. Lucas Black is a very good casting decision as quarterback Mike Winchell. Though he didn´t sport the mullet cut of the real-life Winchell, there is a strong resemblance. Jay Hernandez is fine as Chavez, but this is an instance where Hollywood actually downplays reality. From interviews and footage, it appears the real-life Chavez was a far more interesting person than the film character.
The remainder of the young cast is equally entertaining and effective in their roles. Garrett Hedlund does well as Don Billingsly, a player whose father was a school legend and he must live in the difficult shadow cast by his father. Lee Jackson and Lee Thompson Young play backup running backs Ivory Christian and Chris Comer. I can´t point a single finger at any actor for not doing a commendable job in this film. The eleven week shoot did not allow for a tremendous amount of time to train to be a football player and to handle not only the acting duties, but the arduous task of performing choreographed football scenes.
There are some liberties taken in "Friday Night Lights." For instance, Boobie wore the number 35 jersey in real-life. In the film, he wears number 45. Director Peter Berg matched player numbers in the film so they could use stock footage from real Permian games. This of course, had to be more recent footage, since the 1988 footage would have been too dated to be included and would have looked very horrendous on this HD-DVD transfer. That was a minor freedom. The more severe liberty taken was that Dallas Carter actually defeated Permian in the Semi-Finals and not the State Finals. Dallas Carter would go on to have the state title stripped from them for player ineligibility issues and Permian would continue on to win the state title the next year.
The film is not just about football. It is about the journey that each of the players must make emotionally through the film. Billy Bob´s quote has strong meaning to these players and his message to them that winning the title is not everything. Winchell has an obsessive mother that has more interest in him being a star quarterback than he does. He is a social outsider when compared to his teammates and he enjoys playing football, but he is taken aback by his mother´s constant force-feeding of plays at the breakfast table. Don Billingsley finds himself constantly at odds with his father, who believes his son is a complete failure unless he wins the state title. Boobie is the star running back that blows his knee after an innocent mistake by a backup running back has him return to the game. His season and career is destined to be over and he must wrestle with only knowing football and having that taken from him.
I have always enjoyed a good football movie. "Remember the Titans" is a good one. "Any Given Sunday" was a bit excessive, but still entertaining. The original "The Longest Yard" was pretty good. "Rudy" was a good one. That little guy had a lot of heart. "Radio" with Ed Harris had its problems, but made for a good evening of viewing. "Brian´s Song" with James Caan and Billy Dee Williams is another classic. I´m not sure which film I would consider to be the best football movie, but if I had to pick three it would be "Remember the Titans," "Brian´s Song" and "Friday Night Lights." To choose a winner might require a three-way coin toss.
Video:
"Friday Night Lights" is not a film where it is going to knock your helmet off with its visuals. However, the 2.35:1 widescreen transfer of "Friday Night Lights" is very good. Much of the ´in-game´ footage and sideline footage was shot in a style that does not lend it to the high level of detail that HD-DVD is capable of, but even those scenes look very clear. Colors leap off the field and when the cinematography allowed it, the level of detail is superb. I saw no digital artifacts or flaws from the VC-1 compression process, but the film did suffer from a few bouts of film grain. Much of this was due to the cameras used for filming. Odessa Panthers were black and white. The black jerseys look great as do the night skies under the Friday night lights. There are times when the source materials level of detail is going to look soft because HD-DVD is capable of much higher resolution. This is a film where this type of problem exists, but it is never distracting and the film looks solid throughout.
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