2007 August 10 archive at Progressive Wednesday

Archive for August 10th, 2007

The TGIF Movie Review: Friday Night Lights

August 10th, 2007 by Matt

When you live in Ohio for a decade, you have two choices: join the cult that is Buckeye high school and college football, or do everything in your power to ignore said cult. I chose the latter, if only because I hoped to retain as much of my Empire State identity as possible. This ain’t to say I don’t dig on football (or double negatives, for that matter), because I do. I really do. And Friday Night Lights, a film loosely based on the Permian Panthers high school pigskin team, reminded me of that fact.

The film focuses on the Panthers’ 1988 season, and the small, economically depressed, west-Texas town of Odessa. Both the game sequences and the life in the hamlet are filmed with a dusty cinematography, which perfectly suits the flick, enhancing the overall tone. To show what football means to this community, the film opens with a player studying plays at the breakfast table with his mother. Early on, we hear local sports-talk radio, where callers discuss, not the Dallas Cowboys or the Houston Oilers, but rather the Permian Panthers. Football here–high school football, that is–is everything. The story is passionate and engaging, and addresses, not just sports in America, but the nature of family, racism, poverty, joy, abuse, alcoholism, hopes, the perfection of friendship, the illusion of loss.

I’d rather not give away many details of the narrative, except to say two things:

This movie avoids being a repeat performance of Hoosiers.
This movie demonstrates the apparent randomness of events–so much hangs on a single helmet, a coin toss, a yard.

The football sequences are an adrenaline rush (fight, not flight) with the intensity of Tabasco sauce, and the realism is so powerful and engaging I have no idea how they choreographed and filmed this sucker without maiming a dozen people. Pushing the energy further is the soundtrack, a brilliant score created by the instrumental post-rock outfit, Explosions in the Sky. In all seriousness, if you’re a music lover like me, it’s worth it to check out Friday Night Lights just to hear what this band has managed to do.

I’ll close with a line of dialog I found particularly compelling (it’s also a summary of one of the film’s many themes): “It took me a long time to realize there ain’t much difference between winning and losing except how the outside world treats you.”

Enjoy….