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Seeing as football season is
in full swing and my testosterone went off the charts with
a recent victory over some handicapped kids in a flag football
game, I thought I’d have a look at “Friday Night
Lights.” You know, to re-live some memories of my JV
triumphs, and how I got to bully nerds, stick the heads of
unsuspecting freshmen into various toilets and bang hot cheerleaders.
Yeah, I'll let you believe I was on the right side of the
toilet bowl.
The difference is that when I played high school football
(I did, I swear!), nobody really cared whether or not we won,
except our coach. Then again, he wore nut-strangling polyester
shorts and smelled of pork rinds, so his opinion wasn’t
that high on the charts. As for my father, he tortured me
by simply showing up at all my games, saying things like "as
long as you do your best, I will be proud of you." Fucking
sadist.
Based on the best-selling book by H.G. Bissinger, “Friday
Night Lights” all but physically takes the audience into
a small west Texas town of Odessa and shows their simple but
ambitious goal: beat Midland Texas High School and win a state
championship. Yeeeeee Haaaawww! It don’t get any better’n
that! What makes it worse is it actually won't get
any better than that -- not for anyone in this jerkwater town.
If you fuck this up, you will be a pariah. You will sell women's
shoes like Al Bundy. Although the players dream of the day
when they will leave Odessa, most of them know they never
will, making football their only path to glory. But judging
from the amount of cooze and booze they get just by playing
football, one would be inclined to ask why they would leave
Odessa at all.
Billy Bob Thorton masterfully plays coach Gary Gaines, the
head football coach of Odessa-Permian, and, as with most towns
in the football-hungry state of Texas, Coach Gaines is expected
to take the boys to the state championship, this year, next
year, and the year after. To make matters worse, the star
player, James “Boobie” Miles blows out his knee
in the first game of the season. I know what you’re thinking:
How could a small town pin their hopes on a team led by a
guy nicknamed “Boobie?” Yes, it is a dead giveaway.
But “Boobie” apparently didn’t know that.
Nevertheless, the rest of the team is expected to pick up
the slack and keeping winning. It turns out that football
is a much more difficult game than they imagined, especially
when you factor in their fucked up personal lives. Lucas Black
plays the tortured quarterback, Mike Winchell, who scarcely
likes the game of football must deal with his troubled mother.
Garrett Hedlund plays Don Billingsley, the back-up tailback,
constantly berated and abused by his father, once a star football
player for the same school.
Although the movie is disturbing in the way that such scrutiny
and pressure is placed on this one football team by the entire
town, it is also captivating. From the football action to
the snippets of local radio call-in shows dubbed over shots
of a sprawling west Texas landscape, the movie captures every
nuance of the football season and life in that one, small
town. Despite the fact that we've seen these people in plenty
of other sports movies, the characters in “Friday Night
Lights” seem like the archetype for all the characters
who preceded them. And that’s saying a lot, with the
pantheon of great sports characters including the likes of
Tom Cruise in "All The Right Moves," Coach Harris
from “Revenge of the Nerds,” and that chick from
“Bend it Like Beckham.”
Of course, the most obvious reason to see “Friday Night
Lights” is to hear the ridiculous motivational spoon-fed
to adolescents, so a coach can keep his miserable job, or
get a sizable bonus. After a point, there’s only so much
can be garnered from such aphorisms as, “If you can’t
play ball, then how you gonna walk tall?” or “Why
are you boys so fucking stupid?”
But like the boys who just couldn’t try hard enough,
in the end, “Friday Night Lights” is a winner.
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Photo:
Billy Bob Thornton to Garrett Hedlund: "You fucking loser!"
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