Sgt. Angle Reporting for Duty!

In just a few days, you maggots will be slugging yourselves down in front of your fancy television sets for a few hours to watch the NFL Kickoff. After that, your weekends the next few months will no doubt, like mine, be taken up with several hour spells in front of the same television, elbow deep in barbecue flavored potato skins, the frothy head of beer coating our already frazzled mustaches while the ol’ pigskin gets tossed and run around over 100 yards of pure green grass-tro-turf.

She wants you to play, too.

With the oncoming season already embedded in your calendars, I’d hope you have some time here and there to remember what makes football so great to watch, whether in reality, or in the fictional world blown big on the silver screen (silver screen would be an awesome name for a crazy good offensive play, wouldn’t it?). Below I give you some of the best of the best in Football Films.

There’s two kinds of football films, really, just as every cinematic genre can play two sides to the same tonal coin: the TEAM stories, (speaking of teams, how about the team of James Ninness and Jed Soriano? You can get to know them and their work better when you purchase Mythoi Book One: Birth here) and the REDEMPTIVE or INDIVIDUAL stories. Sometimes these types overlap, but most of the time you can pinpoint what kind of sports film you’re watching. For me, TEAM stories tend to evoke more participation on my part, as an INDIVIDUAL tale is more often than not a sort of biopic.

RUDY, for instance, is a REDEMPTIVE story — our main character carries the weight of the plot, against all odds as the weakling with a single dream. We’re not following a football tossed to and fro, characters weaving in and out of focus, and because it’s Notre-Freakin’-Dame, we don’t have to worry about the W-L percentage. What we’re more interested in is seeing an underdog simply get on the field, to go against all odds and just play, simply to fulfill his dream. Four out of Five Rifles.

THE EXPRESS is another REDEMPTION football story. The lead character, Ernie Davis, was the first black footballer to win the coveted Heisman Trophy. He also died before he could play in the NFL, and his success and good nature helped pave the way for integrating college football teams in the 1960s. The movie version of his life is labored most of the time, a cliche tale of “we know he’ll succeed and we’re watching what we expect to see.” The “conflicts” are based solely on race and little else — we’re watching Syracuse make a run for a championship, so the TEAM doesn’t matter as much. The story is all about Ernie changing the lives of the people around him, yes, including his teammates. But the success we want is not for the victory, but for the change to happen. Halftime speech here. Three out of Five Rifles.

For this, she will always be my hero.

VARSITY BLUES. Another ME over TEAM film, this time about a high school quarterback who unexpectedly takes the reins of leading his team away from the coach, played by a brilliant Jon Voight. We get a lot of the QB’s life outside of school, outside of the sport, and want him to stand up to his father, want him to take that leadership role that’s so important. Off the field, the other players don’t make too much of a dent. Their personalities don’t shine, and we’re again shown a movie about a dude, not about the team. Four out of Five Rifles.

This is a team you can get behind.

Now this is not meant to imply that these “individual” football stories don’t work — they do, and usually quite well. But it’s important to know what kind of movie you like, what kind of movie you’re going to be viewing, and then what kind of movies you would recommend. Inspiration comes in all sizes, mostly from “individual” tales, but more often, from the stories about entire teams who learn to care more about each other than the victory that tends to always be out of reach.

THE REPLACEMENTS. A bit corny, and blessed cursed by the presence of Keanu Reeves, this late 90’s entry into the genre focused mainly on the team, the camaraderie of a band of kooky gents taking over during a pro-NFL strike. While we focus mainly on Keanu’s redemption, there is more screen time spent with the team than without. We are also handed plenty of scenes with head coach Gene Hackman, again emphasizing the team, the effects of decisions “on the guys.” Four out of Five Rifles.

Sinbad makes it unnecessary.

NECESSARY ROUGHNESS. Oddly, this TEAM-focused movie also spends most of its’ screen time on its quarterback, an aging Scott Bakula, who has one year of eligibility left in college ball. But, like The Replacements, Roughness gives us a heavy dose of the coaches behind the scenes, and almost every scene plays around the team as a whole rather than just Bakula’s past mistakes. Three out of Five Rifles.

FRIDAY NIGHT LIGHTS. I’ve shined on this film in prior posts (mainly the TV show), but it’s worth mentioning again and again. It’s a TEAM movie in the largest sense of the word — not a single player becomes the “focus” of the story, and even the coach is more of a presence than a focal point, so that by the end of it all, when the championship game is played and the players move on, we come to realize we’re watching more than a movie about a team, and much more than a movie about any one individual. We’re watching an American past time embodied and infused with life, a cultural moment in the history of sports and people. Five out of Five Rifles.

(You’ll notice that the clips above all contain speeches from the respective films. I’ve heard tell that the speech in Any Given Sunday is one of the best inspirational speeches in recent film history. Judge for yourself:

Got a favorite sports movie? A favorite football film? Give me your own briefing in the comments below.

You are dismissed!

Sgt. Angle

Sgt. Angle Reporting for Duty!

Recent television news has sparked my interest in spreading my own preferred programming. Pilot news: Shit My Dad (William Shatner) Says based on a Twitter feed (as I wrote about a while back), Kathryn Bigelow directing the pilot “The Miraculous Year,” a drama revolving around a New York family as seen by a charismatic Broadway composer, and Frank Darabont’s adaptation of the comic “The Walking Dead”.

Darabont and Bigelow have directed television before — he an episode of “The Shield” and the pilot for the short-lived and fun Jeff Goldblum detective show “Raines”, she a few episodes of the great “Homicide: Life on the Street”. “The Walking Dead” will prove to be right up The Mist director’s alley in terms of character and microcosmic town environments over a grand scale, and the source material provides more than enough foundation for a series to last several years. Meanwhile, for Bigelow’s “The Miraculous Year”…not much to be said at the moment, other than it’s written by John Logan (Gladiator, The Aviator).

The recent rise of filmmakers transitioning to television should excite you, but in no way should it prevent you from enjoying great television from years past. Here are some TV shows that, if still on the air you need to get addicted to, and if no longer on the air then you should speed watch DVD box sets with no remorse.

1. “The Wire” — Creator David Simon wrote “The Wire” as a love song to his hometown of Baltimore, and like any great love song, the meat is in the heart of the series, the incredible cases, the layered and complicated stories, and the diverse plots which converge into one stream at the end of each season. Season one is a detective story, on the trail of an inner city drug kingpin who evades capture while claiming territory, and the pawns who are the drug dealers. Season two brings us a virtually all-new cast as we head to the port of Baltimore — where all the drugs come in. Each character’s tale is gripping, from the detectives and their murder cases, to the police commissioner’s ongoing political strife; to a young mayoral candidate and his political aspirations, to a school classroom’s deterioration in the face of the drug world. All is not well in Baltimore. But, as the threatening rogue Omar would say, “It’s all in the game.”

In the game of television, “The Wire” is proof of the power that television can hold, and the educational value of watching something you love fall apart. Too bad the audience never grew too large, but perhaps that was a blessing to those of us who watched all five seasons on the edge of our seats. From Variety: “Whatever its commercial fate, however, “The Wire” has secured its place as one of the most demanding and thought-provoking series ever to grace television”

2. Sportsnight — For anyone who didn’t have a chance in the 90s to catch hold of Aaron Sorkin’s A Few Good Men or The American President, “Sportsnight” came along and wiped the floor clean for all television sitcoms of the future. It’s too bad that converging elements brought out the hook all too soon for this gem of a show. Here’s the stage as it was set: The behind-the-scenes relationships and happenings of a late night sports news show a la ESPN’s Sportscenter. A strong female lead producer (Felicity Huffman), two charming yet arrogant sportscasters (Peter Krause and Josh Charles), the young rookie (Joshua Molina) and the sage, wise protector of his staff (Robert Guillaume). Directed by the great Thomas Schlamme, “Sportsnight” was the first of its’ kind to have a complete, fully operational set built on a soundstage — all four walls. This meant the camera can go anywhere it pleases, and because it was set behind-the-scenes ON a soundstage, the camera could film a lighting crew or a boom op and it would all be a piece of the scenery.

Steadicam chews up the halls as characters walk and talk through 50-page scripts reading Sorkin’s breakneck dialogue. He gave an interview in which he stated that he sold the pilot before writing the script, and wrote it the day before he was to pitch it. Of course, it sold at the same time as “The West Wing,” a pilot script that was once considered the best pilot ever written in Hollywood. After season one fazed out the network-imposed laugh-track and shifting time-slots, Sorkin split his weeks — and his brain — between “Sportsnight’”s comedy and “The West Wing’”s social relevance. Writing both shows each week, ABC decided to suck all the air out of “Sportsnight” because of low-ratings and expenses. Were it not for “Sportsnight“‘s innovative set design and directing, single-camera techniques, etc., perhaps we wouldn’t currently have “The Office”, “Arrested Development”, or any number of other single-camera comedies on the air now.

3. Deadwood — David Milch is one of those creators who won’t stop, and doesn’t seem to care that his brake lines have been cut and he’s barreling at us at 100 MPH’s. And that’s just what makes for great television. Set in the late 19th Century US Midwest, Deadwood was a real town with real characters — including the grungy, manipulative, and perhaps mad Al Swearengen (Ian McShane) — that David Milch turned into a dirty place where dreams die quick, guns are drawn quicker, and saloons become meeting rooms as much as they are festering dens of thieves.

HBO canceled the series all too early, a decision which Milch was devastated by, but understands. Everything has an end, and even episodes by themselves must come to a conclusion. But whatever we’ve missed in the deleted season four we can make up for by watching Wild Bill meet Swearengen, and Calamity Jane’s grief in a bottle over and over again.

4. Breaking Bad — Perhaps one of the greatest first seasons in television in the past twenty years, Breaking Bad started off with a terrific pilot episode and concluded its’ first season in just seven episodes, all taking place over just three weeks in the timeline of chemistry teacher Walter White (Bryan Cranston), who says so much by doing much and saying little (fathom that!). Walter is already struggling to support his wife and teenage son, taking on a night job to wash cars in his New Mexico town. After getting diagnosed with cancer, Walter doesn’t want to break the news — or the costs -  to his wife, and joins his brother-in-law on a drug bust. The suspect, a meth dealer, escapes, but Walter recognizes his former student’s car, and comes up with a proposition: Walter cooks, Jesse (Aaron Paul) deals, and they keep doing so until Walter can save up enough for his family after he dies. Walter uses his insanely brilliant skills as a chemist to cook the finest, purest form of meth that the southwestern US has seen — bringing him unwanted noteriety in the criminal world, a slew of dealers to contend with over territory, and the heat of the DEA — including his brother-in-law.

And that’s just the first two episodes. “Breaking Bad” hands you, the viewer, in a meth-covered glass dish, the chance to watch a good man go bad — for good reason. No matter how much you fight it, you want Walter to win. He’s a character built out of failure and circumstance, out of devotion to his family rather than his passions. Is it too late to make things up for your past mistakes, even if it means breaking the law? Season three begins in March…catch up now, and catch on. “Breaking Bad” airs on AMC.

5. Friday Night Lights — I know, who cares enough about high school football to want to watch a show about it? What’s in it for me? Well, if you’re a soldier like I am, then you know how discipline and dedication play into all aspects of your breathing existence we’ll call life. That’s what :Friday Night Lights” is about. It’s not about the game, it’s about the in between — those moments alone when you think you have failed, the moments you have with your family you wish you could get back, those moments when you think you’re in love and happy forever only to discover that life finds a way to step in. “Friday Night Lights” focuses on the Texas town of Dillon and the high school football team, the players, the coach and his family, and the town citizens who love nothing more than watching their team play and win. But it’s more than that. It’s about the people behind the players, the fans, and the coaches.

Season four just wrapped up on the DirectTV channel a few weeks ago, and over the last few years, the show has tackled the following topics: love, death, birth, divorce, affairs, paralysis, abortion, religion, steroids, racism, one-night-stands, broken promises, deteriorating friendships, reconciliation, and gangland shootings. That’s just on the surface. Featuring one of the top (dare I say) three actors on television today as Coach Taylor, Kyle Chandler, Friday Night Lights should not be missed.

6. Battlestar Galactica. I don’t need to mention this modern masterpiece of a show, because if you haven’t heard of it by now, you’re clearly not of this planet. It’s not just a science fiction program. This is a genius work of art, a steady, worthy contribution to the history of television, and one of the best shows you will see, as a fan of sci-fi, solid acting, strong characters, and good television. Need I say more? See below for my final argument: Edward. James. Olmos.

You are dismissed!

Sgt. Angle

Sgt. Angle reporting for duty! Short and sweet this week, as I’m on deadline for resting mine eyes.

I’ve just been pontificating what’s in store for all you heavy readers and viewers out there in the upcoming MYTHOI: BIRTH issue to be released soon, and words cannot describe what only pictures can. See for yourself.

Then again, words cannot describe all that music has to offer. Music has that uncanny ability to actually represent more than the lyrics tell you. Thanks to contrasting melodies, choral harmonies, and dizzying sound engineering, music can be known to make our hearts beat faster, or stop them all together. Which brings us to Michael Jackson (Effing Segues). THIS IS IT is the documentary revolving around MJ’s rehearsals for his final “curtain call” tour of London. As of today, “…It” has earned over $34 Million at the US BO. I haven’t offered money to the Jackson Family Fund seen the film yet, but I hope that you do, sirs and madams, and that you tell us about it. However, I do know that Jackson’s dance steps will live forever, just like Keanu Reeves is immortal, and was AKA King Charlemagne. Or a vampire.

Until you get the chance to watch the source of Neverland Ranch dressing King of Pop in his final dance moments, you can think long and hard about how to spend the next five years of your life building on the moves and creations of others.

For instance, you can join the recent Hollywood trend of remaking character-driven foreign films to fit the American filmmaking mold.

I don’t have a large axe to grind with remakes. The Departed was a fine film. So was 3:10 to Yuma. What I have a problem with is the idea that American audiences “on a wide scale” cannot already see “Let the Right One In” as it was intended to be seen, in the glorious Scandinavian snow quality. Why remake it at all? Why not plop down a huge chunk of change if you love the movie so much and blast it out into theaters across the country, tell the audience “you should see this,” instead of allowing the director of “Cloverfield” to lay his handheld fingers on it? Just screen the original. If you screen it, they will come.

I want that to be your mantra as you also think about the movie reboot of Battlestar Galactica. This is a property that has been a cult favorite ever since the original TV series in the 70s, and has already had a spectacular “reboot” which began in 2004, thanks to the creative, adaptive vision of Ronald D. Moore.

The Moore reboot added layers of philosophy and religion, of humanity in every one of the characters, and developed an entire universe that is similar yet unique from our own. What will Bryan Singer bring to the table, and why now? Could he be capitalizing on the recent success of Moore’s series and the title in question?

A type of reboot I can usually get behind is the movie-to-TV launch of a popular film, or at least, a film worthy of deeper exploration. Think of Friday Night Lights, and I’ll take you there. What Peter Berg was able to lift out of the book for the film, he made fly for the TV series. Now entering its’ fourth season, FNL is more than football, more than teenage drama. It’s about heart. It’s about hope. And it’s about a coach who still stands for integrity and decency despite his losses, because in life, it’s not about losing, it’s about how you deal with the loss. Have clear eyes (a clear vision for your future) full hearts (pumping blood through your veins and hope through your mind) and you can’t lose (you will always emerge victorious). This is a show that began as a true story, was written in a book by H.G. Bissinger and adapted into a film starring Billy Bob Thornton. The characters beat through the heart of America, and their weekly lives have become a dramatic mirror of clarity for millions of viewers.

I can think of reboots that work (Star Trek, Casino Royale, even) and remakes that are terrible and unnecessary (the wood block of Keanu Reeves gave only stiffness to The Day the Earth Stood Still, and is Leo DiCaprio seriously thinking of tackling The Third Man? Orson Welles shall roll over in his grave!). Can you? Perhaps venture into foreign lands and discover the French films of Jean-Pierre Jeunet before he jumped over to the Alien franchise (again, another reboot) to see how original movies from other lands can be. Broaden your horizon over the ocean once in a while, please.

But back to the subject at hand: This Is It. Michael Jackson. Did he have a heart worth beating for another 50 years, or did it just give up because he thought he’d lost everything? Dance your words into our comment section, and tell us: Is This It?

So Say We All.

Sgt. Angle