Billy Bob Thornton, Lucas Black and the movie ‘Friday Night Lights’

It’s spring and there’s barely any sport playing anywhere. A movie review of decent high school football movie based on an H.G. Bissinger book seemed in order. Friday Night Lights (2004) followed the 1990 book Friday Night Lights and preceded the television show Friday Night Lights (2006-2011). This review looks strictly into the movie.

(From left, Garrett Hedlund as Don Billingsley, Jay Hernandez as Brian Chavez, Lucas Black as Mike Winchell, and Lee Jackson as Ivory Christian in the movie Friday Night Lights).

Lucas Black stars as quarterback Mike Winchell for the Permian High School Panthers of Odessa, Texas in the western part of the state. Odessa offers little economic future for its residents, so high school football offers a subtext of the brief moment of hope for the players that live there. Brian Chavez, a highly motivated defensive end for the team who later attends Harvard and becomes a lawyer, sees success and is played by Jay Hernandez. Lee Jackson as Ivory Christian played middle linebacker. His ambition to become a minister getting replaced by an ambition for football get understated treatment in the film. The heat of expectation for playing state championship level football is a strong motif through the film.

(From left, Derek Luke as James Earl ‘Boobie’ Miles, Billy Bob Thornton as Coach Gary Gaines, and Grover Coulson as L.V. Miles in the movie Friday Night Lights).

A pair of the central story for the 1988 football season revealed in the telling of Odessa and Permian High were the expectations for championship expressed through Coach Gary Gaines and the football dreams of James Earl ‘Boobie’ Miles. Billy Bob Thornton plays Gaines as Derek Luke plays the star football player. The sting of an early season knee injury brings about angst and the lost ambition of college football dreams for Miles. Grover Coulson plays Boobie’s uncle and father figure, L.V. Miles, who serves as an emotional rock through MRIs in Midland, Texas, a city whose football team is a rival to Permian High.

(From left, Tim McGraw as Charles Billingsley and Garrett Hedlund as Don Billingsley in the movie Friday Night Lights).

In the face of the disappointment that seemingly faced the Panthers of Permian High came the story of ball carrier Don Billingsley and his demanding, hard-to-please and abusive alcoholic father, Charles Billingsley. Garrett Hedlund plays the Don, who likes to party yet bears much of the heat of his father’s poorly expressed hopes. Tim McGraw plays Charles Billingsley. The subtext and culmination of this story receives central treatment in the Peter Berg directed movie.

(H. G. Bissinger wrote the book Friday Night Lights, which became the movie Friday Night Lights).

The movie Friday Night Lights has received appreciation by audiences and movie critics in many ways surpassed by the television series that followed it. The takeaway isn’t that the film didn’t live up to its potential, as the drama that underpinned the television series simply was difficult to capture in a film that ran for less than two hours. While I liked the drama and at least appreciated the attempt to give some realism to the savagery of the football as a sport, the sporting action itself left me wanting more of that. Also, the choices around which dramatic stories to emphasize from the source material clearly left audiences wanting more, as a five-season television show seems to suggest. I give the movie Friday Night Lights 3.75-stars on a scale of one-to-five.

Matt – Wednesday, May 20, 2020

Tom Cruise and the film ‘Vanilla Sky’

Interested in a trippy movie with some top-rated movie stars? Do you like the multi-layered revelation structure of a movie like Inception (2010)? Are dream-involved movies of the subconscious mixed with love, such as Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004) of interest? Are movies involving dreams of love the hope for better your thing, including the movie What Dreams May Come (1998)? If you’ve answered yes to more than one of the above, then the movie Vanilla Sky (2001) just might be the movie for you.

(Penélope Cruz as Sophia Serrano, left, and Tom Cruise as David Aames).

Tom Cruise stars opposite Penélope Cruz and Cameron Diaz in a movie that may have been a bit ahead of its time. Cameron Crowe directed Vanilla Sky, which performed much better with audiences then it did with critics at the time it was released.

(Cameron Diaz as Julie Gianni)

Cruise is the clear movie lead who portrays a self-indulgent, vain publishing magnate who inherited his publishing house after the death of his parents in an automobile accident. We first meet the character David Aames as he expresses his so-called friendship with Julie Gianni. The scene is a foreshadowing of the story to be revealed later, which now leads us to David’s friend Brian Shelby, portrayed by Jason Lee.

(Jason Lee as Brian Shelby).

It is Brian, aspiring actor by trade and under the influence of his friend David, who introduces David to Sophia Serrano, played by Penélope Cruz. David feels like he’s in a dream, yet immediately expresses his interest in Sophia at David’s birthday party. Within a small period of screen time, the love triangle of David, Julie, and Sophia is established with Brian as the wannabe love interest for both Julie and Sophia to boot.

(Kurt Russell as McCabe)

The love triangle continues to play out as we learn that David is under legal suspicion. We see David in a jail circumstance with McCabe, portrayed by Kurt Russell, trying to get David to share the details for an unknown murder that hangs over David’s head. In the course of this, we get some of the backstory for how David came into his publishing empire, in addition to the fact of Thomas Tipp, portrayed by Timothy Spall, supporting David against an aggressive board of directors out to gain control of the publishing house that David controls.

(Tom Cruise as David Aames, left, and Timothy Spall as Thomas Tipp).

All this is background to plot questions that take the audience into questions of physical attraction, friendship, intimacy, loyalty, promises, and the nature of what each of these demands within the context of a relationship. These questions are all part of the larger questions of the movie, especially of what life has to offer as well as your role in seeking it.

(Noah Taylor as Edmund Ventura).

The questions, after many layers of Vanilla Sky try to speak of questions about mental health, interpersonal relationships, and even the Me Too Movement of a later prominence than the period when this film takes place. In the context of Me Too, Vanilla Sky does not hold up well on all scores. (That is a different blog to be explored later). In the context of the movie, Noah Taylor as Edmund Ventura helps bring clarity to the outer most frame of the movie’s narrative.

Due to the multiple layers of the movie when it was released, my instinct is that many critics of this movie at the time of release inappropriately undervalued the quality of the issues raised and the subject matter explored. Many of the questions indicated were and are socially important. The questions raised in the places where the movie leads are hard, unpleasant, and raise decidedly unpleasant feelings and thoughts in the audience. A 2001 movie audience may not have been ready for these questions. Critics at the time seem to have been.

Blog friend Cobra rates this movie quite highly. My guess is that this has to do with the narrative structure, the emotional questions raised, and the mystery of the layering of the answers to the questions raised. It is with these points in mind that I will rate Vanilla Sky higher that many did at the time of the film’s 2001 release. Acknowledging that the film is challenging in some ways for some audiences is also fair. That all said, I rate this film 3.75-stars out of 5.

Matt – Saturday, December 1, 2018