(Anthem Art and Culture), by Gary Morris (Editor), Bert Cardullo (Introduction), Jonathan Rosenbaum (Foreword). London and New York: Anthem Press, 2009.
— David Hudson, IFC.com
None of these questions gets answered. After fifteen minutes of setup, Friday Night Lights turns into an hour-plus sports video — players bouncing along in slow motion, cheerleaders doing splits and back flips, coaches yelling "Get out there and play some football!", and lots of soul-stirring music.4 The badass running back is injured and learns humility. The obsessive-compulsive dad cleans up his act. The quarterback gets over his mom. The evil cheerleader keeps her panties on. The shy white guy and the shy black guy just play football. The Panthers play their hearts out and fall one foot short of the championship, losing to Carter-Dallas, an all-black, big-city team that plays dirty.5
When scientists have complete contempt for a theory, they say "it's not even wrong" — it doesn't even state a testable proposition. Friday Night Lights is similar; how can you criticize a film that says nothing?
1. "Rural idiocy" gag courtesy of Karl "City Boy" Marx, who became a revolutionary when he discovered he couldn't get a decent pousse-café outside of Paris.
2. In the film, Odessa appears to be nothing more than a crossroads. We're never shown so much as a two-story building. In fact, it's a city of 100,000 people. In typical Hollywood fashion, all the players are shown as desperate for the state championship so that they can win a scholarship as their ticket out of Odessa. But does everyone in Odessa want to leave? And if they do, why don't they just get in their car and go?
3. We never find out what's wrong with her. It was probably too depressing.
4. The first fifteen minutes contain "shocking" bits — a southern matron telling Coach Billy Bob to "run that nigger," kids boozing it up, girls unbuttoning their jeans — to be put in the trailer to make the film look edgy. Once they're out of the way, Friday Night Lights is pure PG schmaltz.
5. Carter-Dallas was not really a class act. To preserve the eligibility of its players, the school instituted a grading system that gave a passing grade in any course to every student whose record showed no unexcused absences, even if they did no homework and flunked every test. Several members of the Carter-Dallas team are currently doing time for a series of armed robberies they committed after winning the state championship. The ringleader used his mom's BMW as the getaway car. Not smart.
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