Friday Night Lights Review
by Jon Popick (jpopick AT sick-boy DOT com)October 1st, 2004
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Color me pleasantly surprised by Friday Night Lights (it opens next week), which looked like Remember the Titans II - another movie about a real-life high school football team and their improbable run for the state championship. Here's what Lights has that Titans didn't: A real director (The Rundown's Peter Berg), a blinding score (Austin's incredibly lovely Explosions in the Sky), the lack of an archetypical Denzel-ish lead, and a far superior source.
Based on a book by Shattered Glass' Buzz Bissinger (who happens to be Berg's cousin), Lights is set in 1988 Texas, where perennial powerhouse Odessa Permian is on the verge of tackling yet another promising season with incredibly high expectations. Powerful Division 1 college recruits line up just to watch pre-season workouts - yes, football is that big of a deal in the economically depressed town. Businesses close on game day, and even Odessa's housewives know the team has size issues on defense, and offer suggestions to the coach as if they were helpings of delicious apple brown betty.
That means there's a whole lot of pressure on both the players and their coach, Gary Gaines (Billy Bob Thornton). Anything less than an undefeated season and/or the state championship would be deemed a failure. Lose a game, and you might just come home and find a half-dozen "For Sale" signs planted in your front yard.
Because Lights is a sports film, it is contractually obligated to delve into only a handful of the team's players: The Big Star Running Back (Derek Luke) who refers to himself in the first person, can't read and, undoubtedly, will get his comeuppance; the Son of a Local Legend (Garrett Hedlund) who just can't measure up to daddy's (Tim McGraw) high standards; the Emotionally Troubled Quarterback (Lukas Black, who co-starred with Thornton in Sling Blade); the Backup Running Back (Lee Thompson Young) who, of course, will get his chance to shine.after he pulls a Thurman Thomas; the Gentle Giant (Lee Jackson) who doesn't utter a word.until he unleashes the inevitable final reel speech that motivates his teammates in ways they never imagined; and the Token Latino (Jay Hernandez) who doesn't really do anything other than being Latino.
This lot, despite being so very familiar, is much more flawed that the usual cookie cutter characters found in sports flicks, and it's difficult not to become emotionally involved in their plight. Berg shoots it all with a handheld camera, making Lights look like a gritty art house football film. This more than makes up for the picture's fair share of the usual sports clichés, the overuse of Public Enemy (who probably weren't yet an institution of rural Texas in the fall of 1988), and the fact that Lights is so comically light on swearing, it's like watching a badly dubbed version of a Tarantino film on Bravo! (sample line: "Shut these cocky sons-a-guns down!").
My biggest problem with Lights was the portrayal of the all-black Carter-Dallas team as a bunch of D-block thugs who lie, cheat and play dirty. This wouldn't have been as much of an issue if it wasn't for an earlier scene depicting the Carter-Dallas coaches as conniving, suspicious complainers while their white counterparts from Odessa Permian were fair and even-keeled crackers. Even if this were really how it happened, it still plays really badly.
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