Unfortunately, with Any Given Sunday, Stone is closer to the bombastic mess of JFK than the emotional resonance of Platoon. And that's not even a fair comparison, because with JFK, he was at least trying to say something, even if that something was absurd. What's the central conflict of Any Given Sunday? Hard to say, since I only saw the first hour of it. But it seems to be that pro football is all about the money. Gee, you really blew the lid off that one, Ollie! No secret's safe from you!
The first half-hour is an inchoate muddle. All I gleaned from it is that the star quarterback (a dyspeptic--I just love that word--Dennis Quaid) gets hurt, so does his replacement, and suddenly perennial bench-warmer Jamie Foxx gets his shot at the big time and the first thing he does is vomit. And Al Pacino is the coach, and he, like, wants to win or something. And Cameron Diaz is the team's owner, and she, like, wants to win even more. And make a lot of money. And screw a hooker. Oh, no, wait, that's Pacino. But the team, like, kind of sucks. Or maybe they don't. I couldn't tell. I really hate football, I should mention, and I have no interest in learning the rules, so I wouldn't have been totally sure of what was going on anyway, but my favorite columnist David Poland complained football fans couldn't follow the action either.
I got a headache almost instantly from the pounding rap soundtrack and the pointlessly spastic camera work. And then there are all these horribly hackneyed scenes where a bunch of football players crash into each other and make all these grunting and smashing noises and it goes all slo-mo and echo-y for Crucial Plays, like I haven't seen THAT in every goddamn sports movie EVER. The music drowns out most of the dialogue, except for every once in a while when everything goes completely silent so a character can make a Pronouncement of Great Import. I'm surprised that Stone trafficked in such cliches, but I was even more disappointed by his pandering to the lowest common denominator with bathroom "humor." What hath Adam Sandler wrought?
Looking over the cast list on the IMDB, I sort of wish I had stayed to see Jim Caviezel (because he's hot) and Elizabeth Berkeley and Charlton Heston (because they're jokes--speaking of which, did you see that The Daily Show named Charlton Heston their Man of the Millennium? Pretty convincing argument). But I got to see Ann-Margret, and that's joke enough for me. I do want to mention the one performance that stood out: Lela Rochon as Jamie Foxx's girlfriend. She made me care more about her character in 30 seconds than Pacino, Diaz, Foxx, or Quaid did in an hour.
Anyway, the reason that I left is not just that the movie was sucky and loud. About an hour into it, the sound cut out. It switched on and off for a while, and the audience with Pavlovian regularity reacted to each outage with a loud "AAAAHHHHH!!!" followed by a lot of cursing. Maybe they were venting their frustrations, but I like to think they were supplying the missing dialogue, which at that point was pretty much all "Fuck!" This audience was behaving like they were at a real football game anyway, and things started turning uglier than a Philadelphia Eagles crowd when the sound kept cutting off. Then the theater decided to remedy the situation by turning the sound up even louder, so that we'd get a deafening blast of soundtrack, followed by silence, followed by audience freestyle commentary, including the four under-ten-year-olds in my row who contributed the most enthusiastic profanities. This seemed as good a time as any for me to leave.
The film was presented by two radio stations and the local UPN
affiliate,
and they had a contest before the movie to give away various
promotional
crap. For the first time ever, I actually had a sticker under my
chair (that means you get to go up front and be in the contest, which
wasn't
really a contest because everyone got something, no matter how stupid
they
were, like the not one, but two people who couldn't name A SINGLE AL
PACINO
MOVIE). But I weighed the benefits of a poster I'd never unroll
or
a sweatshirt I'd never wear against being humiliated by the obnoxious
DJ
hosting the contest... and stayed in my seat. I may regret it
when
I see how much posters are going for on e-Bay, but I like to think my
dignity
is worth a little more than $9.99. Although at one point I sort
of
wished I had gone up, because one of the trivia questions was "Name a
show
on UPN" (three people couldn't), and I don't know why, but I really
like
the idea of saying "Shasta McNasty" in front of an audience.
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