Undefeated (Friday, February 17, 2012) (12)

Ever since Hoop Dreams, documentarians have been obsessed with movies about sports teams, particularly ones in inner cities. In the past few years there has been a rash of mediocre ones that have minor interest and bad scripts. Considering this background, Undefeated, directed by Daniel Lindsay and T.J. Martin, is a real triumph as it tells a very compelling story of a football team, focuses on a few interesting and exciting kids and uses some wonderful moments to tell a heart-warming tale of success despite poor odds.

This is not a film about a high school team going undefeated over the course of a season, after all, they lose their first game only a few minutes into the film. The title refers more to the concept of not being beaten down and not giving up. It's the philosophy of the team's hero coach, Bill Courtney.

Courtney is a slightly out of shape middle aged white guy who owns a lumber supply company in Memphis. Following his life-long dream of coaching a football team, five years ago he became the volunteer head coach of the Manassas Tigers in North Memphis. Manassas High School was recently rebuilt, so their physical facilities look nice, but the student body comes from very poor families with very little support. The school has a history of being one of the worst football teams in Tennessee for most of the last 40 years, but through hard work and discipline, Courtney has turned them back into a contender.

We follow star linemen O.C. Brown and Montrail "Money" Brown (not related), who are two of the senior leaders of the team, either physically or in effort and drive. O.C. is a typical giant of a lineman who struggles with his grades as he gets interest from many division 1A college football programs. Meanwhile, Money is a great student, but is a bit undersized to play on the line, so he makes up for his physical deficiencies by working twice as hard on the field.

At some point another kid, Chavis Daniels, gets out of juvee, where he spent about two years for assault, and continues to have issues with controlling his anger and his mouth. He gets in fights with coaches and other players and Courtney has to figure out how to use him on the field and how to not give up on him, as that would be a veritable death sentence for the young man.

Formally documentaries are difficult to inject too much style into, as their primary purpose is to explain something. Non-fiction is simply not as expressive and malleable a medium to easily make beauty. There is one moment in this film, however, that is one of the loveliest moments from a documentary I can think of in a long time. It's subtle and was probably the result of a lucky camera man shooting the right thing at the right moment, rather than being scripted by a director, but it's powerful and perfect for a moment. A tip of my cap to the directors for connecting two disparate elements from two parts of a film into one lovely shot.

This film is one of the five nominees for Best Documentary Feature and it would be very deserving of the prize were it to win. It's a very good film, unsentimental, efficient and well made. Considering it probably could have done well just being OK (like so many other recent sports team docs), I consider that a great achievement.

Stars: 3 of 4

Big Fan (2009) (Tuesday, January 19, 2010) (217)

Big Fan is a small gritty drama about a loser parking lot attendant (Patton Oswalt) who is obsessed with the New York Giants. He works nights and spends time in his booth listening to sports talk radio and writing long slams at the Giants' next opponents that he reads on air when he calls in to the show. One night, he sees his favorite player pumping gas near his house in Staten Island. He and his buddy follow the guy into Manhattan and into a strip club. When Oswalt approaches the player to talk to him, the player beats the crap out of him. Oswalt then has to decide whether he will press charges against the player and possibly hurt his beloved team by getting the player suspended.

The story is very clever, tight and follows a pretty honest, realistic path for any superfans around the world (I could easily see a similar story playing out in England with soccer or Canada with hockey, for instance). It moves along quickly and keeps a good pace throughout. There are a few details, though, in the script (or in the direction) that are frustrating and badly executed (like how Oswalt doesn't make his calls to the radio station from a mobile phone outside of his mother's house where he lives, rather than in his childhood bedroom where his mother can hear him and get upset that he's keeping her awake). This is the first directing gig for Robert D. Siegel (who also wrote this film as well as The Wrestler) and perhaps with a bit more time, small things like this will be ironed out in his work.

Oswalt's performance is really great (he had a fabulous 2009, by the way, with this and two supporting performances in Observe and Report and The Informant!). He is pitiful but likable and is totally convincing in his blind dedication to his team and his sad life. He knows it's sad, but it's good for him. He's lazy and somewhat limited, but he enjoys the power and attention he gets from his nightly talk radio calls. He likes being seen as someone who knows something about stuff and enjoys the power he feels from his minor celebrity with listeners.

I think part of what makes the movie enjoyable is that we all know people roughly like Oswalt. We see the guy at work with the football team flag or schedule; we know friends who travel out of town for their team (even for a sure loss); we know people who do fantasy leagues sports and are obsessed with minutiae of sports. This movie feels like a plausible scenario in the modern world of superfandom and it's intimate, small-budget look lends a nice patina to the little story.

Stars: 2.5 of 4

The Blind Side (Monday, December 7, 2009) (189)

I have always been skeptical of Sandra Bullock and her alleged appeal. She has never really done much for me. I guess she has a nice body, but I've never found her especially *hot* - and always found her acting so pedestrian (if not outright bad) that it's barely worth mentioning. As a result of this, I was very worried about The Blind Side, a film where she plays a Southern WASP who takes in a poor black kid with a hard past and a good heart.

I figured this role would be beyond her abilities and she would junk it up trying to stretch to it (like how she stretched in The Proposal). I was surprised by her performance, though, as it was pretty solid and not too overdone. The film overall is good, not great, but also not terrible.

Michael Oher (Quinton Aaron) is a giant of a teen who looks like a football lineman from across the room (or from outer space). His childhood in Memphis was terribly traumatic and he has been left homeless without any friends or family. After he is offered a spot in a tony parochial school, he is taken in by the Touhy family. Mother Leigh Anne (Bullock) and father Sean (Tim 'Yeah, My Daddy's Name Was Tug, Fuck You' McGraw) are a super rich couple with two kids who live in a magnificent mansion 'on the right side of town'.

The Touhys are huge Ole Miss boosters (for the non-football fans out there, that's the University of Mississippi and their mascot is a mustachioed plantation owner with guns ablazin' - classy) and realize that if they can get Michael to learn how to block in football, he can be a great offensive lineman in high school, college and the NFL. In order to do that, he has to work hard to get his grades up, keep out of trouble, not slip back in with the gangs in his old neighborhood and deal with whatever demons he has in his head.

There are two ways of looking at this movie: As a story of a tough-luck kid who is trying to transform his life into something better; or, as a story of a football player who works hard to make a name for himself and changes his life by playing football. The first story is rather trite and saccharine full of all sorts of tearful moments where he tells his family that he loves them. The second story falls totally flat as the football scenes are terribly choreographed and shot.

The main football scene - somewhere around the mid-point of the film, involves Michael's first game (it seems his first season playing is his senior year and he's mostly playing because of his size, rather than his talent). In it, he gets beat on the block time and time again by a fast linebacker/defensive end (it's high school ball - it's hard to tell what position the kids is playing). He figures out that he has to block the guy between his pads and drive him backward. He does this - and then proceed with one of the strangest plays ever, driving the guy backwards 50-some yards.

Rather than showing us the block or the play that results in the hole he opened up, director John Lee Hancock shows us the reactions of his family, Bullock, McGraw and Co., in the stands. This is dumb. I will admit that it must be really hard to make a movie about a non-skill position (quarterback, running back, wide receiver), but the answer to that problem is not to cut away and not show the play. It should be to show us his block or show the block and cut to the running back going down field to the end zone. The 'big uglies', as Keith Jackson would say, deserve better than to concentrate on their sassy mothers.

On top of this, many of the football scenes are used as comic relief with a buffoon coach in an almost-Necessary-Roughness-style farce. This neither helps tell the story, nor does it set the right tone for the film. That Michael has trouble being physically brutal the way he needs to in order to play well tells more about his psychology than about him being a 'gentle giant'. This should have been handled better.

In the second half of the film, after Michael has become a major football star, he is pursued by all SEC football programs from South Carolina to Arkansas. Again, this part is played as a joke - which is a mistake considering this leads to the heart and soul of the movie - that Michael feels loved by his family and football is one way they can mutually show that love.

(One of the jokes in this sequence is that all of the SEC coaches shown are no longer at the schools they are recruiting for. Phil Fulmer recruits for Tennessee - he left after the 2008 season; Nick Saban recruits for LSU - he left after the 2004 season and now coaches for Alabama; Houston Nutt recruits for Arkansas - he left after the 2007 season and now coaches Ole Miss; Ed Orgeron recruits for Ole Miss, though he strangely never gives his name - he left after the 2007 season; Lou Holtz recruits for South Carolina - he left after the 2004 season and now slurs his words on ESPN; Tommy Tuberville recruits for Auburn - he resigned after the 2008 season. This is funny in a college-football world, but I think totally falls flat on 90% of the audience. Then again, I don't live in SEC-country, so maybe it plays better in the South.)

The acting throughout is pretty good. This is clearly the best role and best performance of Bullock's career - and it's a good thing too considering she's currently the biggest female box office draw in America. She is sweet, serious and sarcastic when necessary. She talks down her bigoted friends at lunch who worry about having a 'black boy' in her house (a totally unnecessary, badly written scene, by the way) and stares down the hoodlums in the housing project where Michael's mother lives. McGraw is also good - playing an up-tight fast food franchisee with great ease and talent. The young son, SJ, is played by Jae Head who played the same role in the television version of Friday Night Lights and Hancock. Someday he'll grow up and become more than just an excitable young boy.

Quinton Aaron does a very nice job playing Michael. He is very vulnerable and sweet and the pain he feels comes through well. I wish he had given a bit more for me to bite into with the performance (he's basically binary: sweet or scared), but that could be the writing and directing as much as his performance.

The script, also by Hancock, is probably the worst part of the film. Throughout it doesn't know if its a comedy or a drama (it's a drama) and it very easily tosses aside characters who we see once and never again. In the opening scene we see Michael with his brother. After this, we never see the brother again. Later, we meet a teacher who believes in Michael's potential, played by Kim Dickens, but after about three scenes, she falls out of the movie as well.

In addition to this, there is a strange sexual tension between Michael and his adopted sister. Several times we see her looking sexually turned on by him (he, on the other hand, is totally neutered), but this never goes anywhere. Even if this actually happened, it doesn't help tell the story and just comes in as noise beside the main thread (it's also weird and borderline racist, I think, to have a story about a white girl who is sexually mystified by a big black man).

This movie should have been cut by about 15 minutes. It runs more than two hours and the extra time is not necessary. The script is a mess and the direction is not wonderful. Bullock, McGraw and Aaron are good and there's the nucleus of a good story buried inside it. This movie has a lot to offer, but is not wonderful.

Stars: 2 of 4