Altered States
Friday Night Lights is one of those movies made with big bucks to make it look dirty and it works—this movie reeks. Based on a book by H.G. Bissinger (who wrote the article which inspired Shattered Glass), Friday Night Lights opens in Texas, slowly introducing a high school football team's players and coach—in harsh close-ups with a wobbly camera. One second, the camera's in someone's face, the next it's showing someone jog, sweat and grunt.
The wobbling and grunting never let up. Universal's football picture, presented with Brian Grazer's Imagine Entertainment, is a submersion in the subjective. The purpose of this approach is to distort, not to depict, reality. It is a trend that is spreading, from the Blair Witch nonsense to The Bourne Supremacy, and the perceptual-level assault gets all the bells and whistles here.
When what is happening on screen can be determined, it is ugly. Dads, moms and uncles shatter car windows, beat children and get drunk in a foul portrayal of parents. Aimless teenagers speak in monotonous snorts, mostly serving as martyrs for sadistic parents. The roster of coaches, players and cheerleaders is a blob of anonymity. The mind that seeks to know what's happening—and to whom—is punished, which makes watching the anti-conceptual Friday Night Lights hard work with no pay.
At some point, murky images do repeat and become familiar. But these boys are a band of blank walls—except for a Hispanic kid (Jay Hernandez)—about whom one feels nothing but sympathy, and pity has its limits. Lacking stabilizers, this unsteady motion picture, director Peter Berg's vision of Texas high school football, is as shaky as it is grim.
Coached by Billy Bob Thornton, this team apparently gets by with one practice—for the entire season. Chance, not strategy, drives the team, which advances without any discernible goals. Games are an unbearable blend of body-slam sounds, blood and ear-splitting heavy-metal music. Eventually the boys reach a championship at the Houston Astrodome, the outcome of which is predetermined by the movie's philosophy. The Bad News Bears in Breaking Training, which also featured a game at the Astrodome, was more suspenseful.
Billy Bob Thornton is sufficiently ambiguous—he comes off as a nice coach but, judging by his actions, he's a monster—and he overacts as much as one would expect from an actor who regards William Shakespeare's plays as "b——-t", which Thornton recently proclaimed. The sludge he's slinging here makes Rudy look like Hamlet.
Lucas Black's quarterback Mike is the closest to a lead character and he, like the cast, does what he can in Friday Night Lights' abbreviated scenes. At the end, director Berg throws a bomb for a prequel-type version of another movie quarterback named Mike—Dennis Quaid's small-town stud in Peter Yates' bittersweet Breaking Away. But it's way out of bounds and it doesn't remove the mud from this noisy, dirty flick.
The wobbling and grunting never let up. Universal's football picture, presented with Brian Grazer's Imagine Entertainment, is a submersion in the subjective. The purpose of this approach is to distort, not to depict, reality. It is a trend that is spreading, from the Blair Witch nonsense to The Bourne Supremacy, and the perceptual-level assault gets all the bells and whistles here.
When what is happening on screen can be determined, it is ugly. Dads, moms and uncles shatter car windows, beat children and get drunk in a foul portrayal of parents. Aimless teenagers speak in monotonous snorts, mostly serving as martyrs for sadistic parents. The roster of coaches, players and cheerleaders is a blob of anonymity. The mind that seeks to know what's happening—and to whom—is punished, which makes watching the anti-conceptual Friday Night Lights hard work with no pay.
At some point, murky images do repeat and become familiar. But these boys are a band of blank walls—except for a Hispanic kid (Jay Hernandez)—about whom one feels nothing but sympathy, and pity has its limits. Lacking stabilizers, this unsteady motion picture, director Peter Berg's vision of Texas high school football, is as shaky as it is grim.
Coached by Billy Bob Thornton, this team apparently gets by with one practice—for the entire season. Chance, not strategy, drives the team, which advances without any discernible goals. Games are an unbearable blend of body-slam sounds, blood and ear-splitting heavy-metal music. Eventually the boys reach a championship at the Houston Astrodome, the outcome of which is predetermined by the movie's philosophy. The Bad News Bears in Breaking Training, which also featured a game at the Astrodome, was more suspenseful.
Billy Bob Thornton is sufficiently ambiguous—he comes off as a nice coach but, judging by his actions, he's a monster—and he overacts as much as one would expect from an actor who regards William Shakespeare's plays as "b——-t", which Thornton recently proclaimed. The sludge he's slinging here makes Rudy look like Hamlet.
Lucas Black's quarterback Mike is the closest to a lead character and he, like the cast, does what he can in Friday Night Lights' abbreviated scenes. At the end, director Berg throws a bomb for a prequel-type version of another movie quarterback named Mike—Dennis Quaid's small-town stud in Peter Yates' bittersweet Breaking Away. But it's way out of bounds and it doesn't remove the mud from this noisy, dirty flick.
