Friday Night Lights
“Perfection is being able to look your friends in the eye and know you did everything you could not to let them down.” -Coach Gary Gaines
This is an extremely hard film for me to review. It is pretty well known that it is my favorite movie of all time and that I most likely am going to skew this rating some. I tried to get out of the rating system on this one, but Z and E wouldn’t let me off the hook. In my world this is a 10, but the ZEJ scale is sacred and I have to have some honesty in knowing that it isn’t a perfect film. Getting the chance to watch this in theaters was such a joy for me and a surreal experience. A film that dives into multiple characters' stories by letting you see glimpses of them and let you create and feel their backstory. Along with good character design, it also has a unique filming style, which may not feel that way now, but was great in 2004. Lastly, I love the soundtrack and to this day listen to Explosions in the Sky, and I am almost sure Z will write something about it being a little too much, but he is wrong! Along with a deep message at its core, the reason I love this film is how raw it is. It isn’t a standard Disney feel good and it feels like a real movie. So as Gary Gaines said, perfect isn’t necessarily being perfect, but giving everything you have, which this film does for me.
**Side note: If you have a film that means alot to you and you have a chance to see it in theaters, find a way to do it. Theater experience is the best way to watch a film and you won't regret it!
-J
For the 20th anniversary of its release, a couple theaters had showings of Friday Night Lights, which as Jord mentioned, is his all-time favorite movie. I remembered if fondly myself, having seen it a couple times in the mid-2000s, but Ellen had NEVER seen it somehow, so we thought it would be fun to get the ZEJ team in theaters to re-live this, or in E’s case, experience for the first time. For Jord, to watch a movie he watches two or three times a year in theaters for the first time ever, is special, and I don’t want to take that away from him, but the journalist in me has to point out some of the flaws of 20-year-old movie. The first of which, is that it is not a very good theater experience. The movie was shot in the early 2000s style of a thousand quick cuts per scene and camera shake that on the big screen actually make it almost hard to watch. Think the “you wouldn’t steal a car” PSA stylization and effect, which actually did come out the same year as this movie, and you’ll know exactly what I’m talking about. Secondly, the movie plays up the apparent black / white race divide of the era, attempting to show reality, but it does so in such a poor way that it actually makes the movie come off as racist itself. Finally, there is such little character development and over-reliance on the, to be fair, masterful Explosions in the Sky soundtrack to draw out emotion, that it feels gimmicky. That being said, despite its very real flaws, I still enjoyed it overall. There’s not many sports movies that show a team that loses “the big game”, and there’s certainly no sports movies that are as BLEAK as this one. I’m not a fan of bleak in general, but it makes this movie standout from the genre and I think accurately depicts the undercurrent of this movie, which is that in this community, high school football is EVERYTHING, to the point where it can become not fun anymore. And the movie somewhat critiques this view, with a scout at one point reminding our protagonist, that “it’s supposed to be fun, you know? Greatest game in the world,” and I think by the end of the movie, the team mostly understands this, despite all the external pressure of the parents and community at large. Friday Night Lights is heavily flawed, yes, but a movie worth watching if you’re a fan of the genre.
-Z
