My name is Jack Bandit, and welcome to my brand new blog, "Jack Bandit's Armchair America." The premise of this blog is quite simple, folks. These days, everyone's opinion is online. If you're having trouble deciding whether or not you should give the new Gutter Twins album a try, where's the first place you go? If you're like me, you go online. You go to Pitchfork, or you go to NME or Stereogum or what have you. Same thing with movies and television. If you've heard a buzz about a particular movie or TV show but aren't sure what it's about, you check out IMDB or Rotten Tomatoes and see if it's worth your time. And that's all well and good. But what if you're like me and don't know whether or not you can trust the opinion of some random yahoo who may or may not be getting a little something under the table to write a favorable opinion? I've been disappointed by too many anonymous reviewers for too long to take their word seriously anymore, and I finally decided that I was gonna throw my hat into the ring and see if I can't offer my opinion to my fellow cynics. I mean, why not? Everybody's entitled to their own opinion; now, they're entitled to mine too.
And I don't see a reason to limit myself on what I'd be willing to criticize. I don't care if it's a movie or a TV show or an album or a book or a commercial or a tube of toothpaste. If I've formed an opinion about it, I'll be sure to let you know. That way, this place will have more of a blog atmosphere so I won't feel like such a whore for voicing my criticisms. I also don't really care if it's a "new release." If I haven't seen it or heard it, it's new to me, right? I could swear I've heard that somewhere before. I just can't remember where. Actually, the main reason I've set such wide parameters for myself is that I feel that the frequency of my writing has been seriously lacking lately, and setting up a blog of this nature will allow me to record just about every thought I have.
It might take a while for you to figure out whether or not my editorial opinion is in line with yours, but I doubt it. I'll be the first person to tell you that independent fare has spoiled me, as I now have a very low tolerance for media mediocrity. With that in mind, here's a preview of the kind of perspective you're gonna get from Jack Bandit's Armchair America. (I apologize for not starting this thing off on a more glorious note, but this is the last movie I watched).
"Conventional opinion is the ruin of our souls." - Rumi
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Friday Night Lights (2004)dir. Peter Berg
Starring Billy Bob Thornton, Lucas Black, Tim McGraw
In the past ten months or so, Explosions In The Sky has become one of my absolute favorite bands. I was totally floored by their most recent album, last year's All of a Sudden I Miss Everyone. I was in the middle of a period of great existential contemplation, and their intricate and soothing tone resolved to ease my internal unrest in the face of a cruel and indifferent world. I did my homework on them, as I am wont to do, and it came as a surprise to me that, in addition to a hearty back catalogue, Explosions In The Sky have a film score to their credit. This in itself wasn't the shocker; their music has a very cinematic feel and it wasn't hard for me to imagine them using their sound as a musical accompaniment for a feature film. What surprised me was that the film they scored was Friday Night Lights, which had always appeared to me to be a cookie-cutter machismorgasm about the pressures and hardships of Texas football, or basically a rehashed Varsity Blues. In fact, if I remember correctly I believe that the conclusion I came to after watching its trailer in the fall of 2004 was that Friday Night Lights would turn out to be Varsity Blues without the dick-and-fart humour or MTV-sponsored revolt. I never had any desire to ever see Friday Night Lights, but finding out that an awesome band like Explosions In The Sky would be providing the soundtrack made me kind of curious. Was their music good enough to make an otherwise unbearable movie worth watching? This past Friday night, I courageously set out to find out for myself.
To judge this film from its cover, one might gather that Friday Night Lights was more than just a run-of-the-mill, formulaic sports movie. The black-and-white shot of the Odessa-Permian Panthers' team captains holding hands as they walk to midfield for the coin toss tends to give the impression that there is some kind of intense urgency bursting out of the simplicity of its design. To look at that poster gives one the impression that Friday Night Lights was about the intimate bond forged by the team and, in turn, the podunk mining community that obsessed over them; that the social, economic and racial disparity plaguing the town would be temporarily displaced by the hope that came alive when the Panthers took the field. In essence, it looks like the kind of film that a band like Explosions In The Sky would lend their talents to. However, if you were to watch this movie with those kinds of expectations, you'd be in for a huge fuckin' disappointment, my friend.
The first thing anybody should know about this movie is that it was adapted from the book Friday Night Lights: A Town, a Team, and a Dream, which tells the true story of the 1988 Permian Panthers, a top contender for the Texas football state championship. The story unfolds in the town of Odessa, a hole in the earth that, like many other small towns in Texas, takes its high school football very seriously. The second thing anybody should know about this movie is that the highly-lauded TV show of the same name was co-created by the man who directed this movie, Peter Berg. This is significant because after watching this movie, it will be abundantly clear why he felt it was necessary to adapt for television: there's simply no character depth whatsoever. If it had delved deeper into family issues and made the dysfunctional relationships caused by the town's devotion to football the film's main focus instead of using them as a secondary plot element to make the football sequences more delicate (consequently making the film at least an hour longer), Friday Night Lights could have been one helluva movie. With the source material this movie had to pull from, it could have been on par with the likes with Raging Bull as one of the most raw and heart-wrenching sports films of all time. As it is, though, it'd be laughable to even mention these two movies in the same sentence.
Not that I blame Peter Berg for the way it turned out. Something tells me that the finished product was not the movie he had set out to make (if it was, why would he feel compelled to turn the story into a TV series, which, by the way, succeeds in all the ways that the movie failed?). Something tells me that Berg thought he was gonna turn out an epic, gripping drama that revealed Odessa to be a pressure cooker of socioeconomic turmoil whose collective emotional crutch happened to come in the form of a high school football team. I think he was prepared to turn out The Godfather of sports movies. But apparently, Universal Pictures didn't see things that way. They probably thought that'd have been too depressing for the teen/jock market they were obviously pandering to. Surely, the train wreck that was Any Given Sunday must have had something to do with Universal from wanting to step on any toes or go past the two hour limit. On the other hand, though, maybe if Berg's directing résumé was a little more extensive than Very Bad Things and The Rundown, maybe Universal might have given him the artistic freedom he was looking for (I was gonna propose that maybe Universal wasn't as interested in pumping out quality cinema as they were in turning a profit, but films like Gladiator, The Deer Hunter and Psycho, among others, would tend to refute that point; however, Transformers,The Fast and the Furious and Josie and the Pussycats all came from Universal too, so I'll let you draw your own conclusions about that one). I read that Richard Linklater was attached to direct before Berg came along, and with Linklater's penchant for piecing together multiple storylines, I might have been interested to see what he'd have come up with.
The major problem I had with this movie was all the sports movie clichés it dug up, from the montage of the whole town closing itself up on game night to the stubborn star running back refusing to follow doctor's orders, but another issue came up when I read review after review written in defense of how realistically the movie depicted the emotions of the high school football experience and what it's like to be part of a team. Well, I can't help but feel a little sorry for the kind of person who would think that, because that tells me that they're all self-centered assholes whose relationships are completely vacuous and dull. Not once throughout that entire movie did I ever get the impression that any of those players gave a shit about their teammates. Take the quarterback with the sick mom. Did any of his friends care enough to ask how she was coming along (if they were even aware that she was sick)? Or the tight end with an alcoholic for a dad. I didn't see any of his teammates offer to let him stay at their house and get him out of an abusive situation, or maybe suggest to the coach that he ask the kid's dad and to take it easy on the hooch. And if the Panthers were such a tightly-knit brotherly football squad, then why did the injured star running back feel like he had to wait until he got in the car to bawl his eyes out about having nothing to fall back on? Couldn't he go to his teammates for support or was he afraid of showing a dent in his armor (To me, that scene where he cleaned out his locker seemed awkward and forced)? Give me a fucking break. The camaraderie suggested in the poster? Please. Even in the game footage, there was little teamwork to speak of; I can't recall one gang tackle or lead block in the entire film. In short, what I'm trying to say is that if you thought that Friday Night Lights was an "emotional" movie, I'd think about strengthening my relationship with myself if I were you.
Another person I felt bad for was that Connie Britton. She was practically nonexistent as Billy Bob Thornton's wife, and when they were on-screen together there was as much chemistry as I would have with Lindsay Lohan.
Early on in the film, there's a scene where a state trooper pulls up next to a pair of Permian players at a 7-11 parking lot, and he's driving a cruiser consistent with the era, but when there's a closeup of the running back's cleats when he brags in the locker room on the first day of practice how he's gonna look good stompin' everybody down in his Nikes, you'd have to be an idiot not to realize that they weren't 1988-model. In fact, all throughout the movie, the players are seen wearing equipment that didn't even exist in 1988. Why the double standard? Suspension of disbelief my ass; I can't get behind that shit at all. And don't get me started on all the "realistic" game footage; I lost count how many times the overdubbed announcer's calls didn't even match what was going on on the field. The guy would say that a receiver had caught the ball and had crossed the fifty, but the picture would clearly show that he was only at the thirty. And on the climactic play where the quarterback has to scramble for the end zone, I'm pretty sure he jukes past the same guy at least five times. For those interested, here's a list of all the mistakes and anachronisms in the movie. A list of fuck-ups that long clearly shows that this movie wasn't released with even a semi-intellectual audience in mind, and it's too long for a guy like me to take the film too seriously. It can only serve to back up the theory that Universal's only plans for this movie were for it to fill a niche in the teen jock market.
As for Explosions In The Sky, I thought their scoring was fairly exceptional. Honestly, it's the only thing that kept me from turning the movie off. Even in a piece of shit predictable movie such as this, their song "Your Hand In Mine" sounded heavenly, and their killer post-rock instincts added a fair deal of much-needed drama. On the whole, though, I think the movie would've been far more compelling from the perspective of the community rather than the team. It certainly would have done a lot to avoid the familiar ground the movie was treading on. But then again, that's what we have the TV show for. I'm not from Texas myself (Personally, I find their addiction to football rather annoying), but if I was, I'd be embarrassed that my home state's rich football legacy was being represented by a piece of shit movie like this.
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Peace be with you.
I'm outta here.
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