Rome wasn’t built in a day, but I wasn’t on that particular job.
When Brian Clough (Michael Sheen) takes over as manager of the Leeds United football club in 1974, he seems less interested in preparing them to play and more focused on punishing the team for the sins of its previous coach, his personal bête noire, Don Revie (Colm Meaney).
One day, not today, not tomorrow, not this season, probably not next season either but one day, you and I are gonna wake up and suddenly we’re gonna be like every other team in every other sport where winning is everything and nothing else matters.
Sports films about plucky collegiate or high school underdogs overcoming the odds have become a significant sub-genre in recent years. Dating back to Hoosiers
Even if you’re down there for an hour, you’re down there.
Invincible is a reasonably entertaining gumbo of The Rookie, Rocky and a long list of underdog-makes-good sports movies. It’s not particularly groundbreaking or even all that original, but the movie holds together on the strength of a solid cast and attention to detail.
I don’t want your money. I want your bookie’s fuckin’ money.
I liked this movie almost every time that Tom Cruise made it back in the eighties. (more…)
Gentlemen, the hopes and dreams of an entire town are riding on your shoulders. You may never matter again in your life as much as you do right now.
I went to high school at Servite in Anaheim, California, which was about as football crazy as a school gets in Southern California. Football crazy in California, however, is to football crazy in Texas as Presbyterians are to Pentecostals. This movie is about a little town in West Texas where, if the Second Coming happened on any given Friday night during the fall, the locals would likely say to Jesus, “Hold your horses there. Don’t You know there’s a football game on?”
I wonder how such a degenerated person ever reached a position of authority in the Army Medical Corps.
He was drafted.
Anyone who pops in their DVD of Robert Altman‘s movie adaptation of Richard Hooker‘s novel expecting to see a two-hour version of the TV show is in for a rude shock. The long-running series starring Alan Alda is related to this movie only by title, character names and setting. Stylistically, they are very different animals altogether.
The CBS sitcom, for its groundbreaking subject matter, is still a traditional “workplace” comedy at heart, very much in the tradition of The Mary Tyler Moore Show. The TV Frank Burns has far more in common with Ted Baxter than with the religious fanatic portrayed by Robert Duvall in the movie.
The movie version is a choatic, anarchic and hilarious celebration of insanity as an antidote for insanity. (more…)
