Anonymous Houston Extra has seen the movie Friday Night Lights and has logged in with his take:
Well I hate to be the negative one but I just think the movie could have been so much better. The performance of each and every actor was clearly superb but the directing and screenplay were lacking in the eyes of many of the extras who participated in the Houston filming. Peter Berg chose a few personalities to go deep rather than give us a better flavor of the community as a whole. I mean, unlike "The Rookie" or "Hoosiers" where we got a real sense of the community culture, FNL gave us a couple boosters and a guy at the burger stand. I guess all the people in the stands were suppose to give us a feeling of life in Odessa along with "gone to the game" signs in store windows.Berg totally weakened the storylines with excessive time spent on shoulder pad crunching rather than the interesting vignettes of dialog that were playing out among fans, boosters in the suite, recruiters, announcers, cheerleaders and students, faculty and alumni. Somehow that all got left on the cutting room floor and turned a potentially great movie into a docu-drama. In my opinion the best part of the movie was when the dads and alumni in the stands were conversing on opening day practice. After that it was all weak dialog or Billy Bob monologues.
And as far as crunching tackles... enough already. Did they have to take us through every blessed game of the season. Maybe it's just my taste but movies like "Rudy" with a great story behind it are so much more enjoyable. Of course those movies like most are meant to be positive, uplifting and project optimism. Berg also separates the audience from the characters in game action sequences. Unlike Tom Cruise in "All the Right Moves" where you see the actors making plays on the field you feel the absence of the actors in the action.
The town of Odessa is enthralled with high school football because they love it and enjoy it. It brings the community together it doesn't tear it apart. Berg could have made this movie more about a community that goes "Over the Top". That's real and it happens in towns all over the United States. Instead Berg would lead us to believe that high school football is the root of all evil for a small town in West Texas.
Thanks AHE. For my own take on the movie see the post just below this one or click "Friday Night Lights." Saw it. Loved it!. And to see all of the items at this web log about the making of the movie click "Friday Night Lights".
I saw it this weekend and LOVED IT!!!! Maybe I missed the point, but when I went to see the movie, I thought it was about the pressures these students felt to win in this small town. I never once thought it was supposed to be about the TOWN as a whole. Anyway, I think Peter Berg did an excellent job, as did the actors and the writers.
Posted by: Nicole | October 10, 2004 at 10:14 PM