Football season is here again, and many of my nicest friends are tailgating and plastering their innocent, unknowing babies with “their” team’s colors. However, I am not looking forward to never-ending afternoons listening to the droning idiotic ramblings of old guys who can’t seem to pronounce anyone’s name. I’m being unfair—lots of people like football, or so they tell me while brandishing their beating sticks and advancing upon me in a menacing formation. I LOVE FOOTBALL, GUYS, I SWEAR.
I truly don’t mind football in smaller, more highly dramatized doses. Excitement! Injury! Perseverance! How ’bout something about the length of, oh say, two hours, and with an appropriately epic soundtrack? What’s that you say? They make MOVIES about FOOTIEBALL? Oh perfect! And there will be no throwing things at the TV allowed at my party, just wings and nachos and hard hits and butts with zero commercial interruption.
Varsity Blues
Varsity Blues is a good mix of the serious (small town scandal! drugs! family drama!), the hilarious/pitiful (Billy Bob), and the super duper cheesy… with a little bit of football sandwiched in between. It’s kind of painful at times, but hey, it feels a lot like high school football season.
Also, you may remember this:
Enough said.
The Longest Yard
This is by all accounts a terrible, horrible, no good, awful movie worthy of inclusion on our list of Bad Movies That Are Fun To Watch. What gets me every time is that these guys make it look fun. They showed up on set every day to play football and laugh. (I also don’t mind the original 1974 version, but I’m specifically referring to the hip-hop pumping foul-mouthed way-too-many-gay-jokes 2005 version. Yeah, I’m sorry, I hate me too.)
The Program
The Program is a legit movie that showcases some legit football playing. It’s probably the closest approximation of actual college football as Hollywood has ever put together. This is the football lover’s football movie, and if Saturday games looked more like this I might buy into the hype.
Rudy
There are several genres of football movie: the silly, kicking-ass kind, the serious drama kind, and the true-story gonna make you cry kind. This falls firmly into the category pass the motherfucking tissues. If Rudy doesn’t motivate you to be the best person you can be, you are a broken, crumbling shell of a human being. Way to act, Sean Astin.
Remember The Titans
This is the ultimate football movie “based” “loosely” on “things that happened.” There’s something pitch-perfect about the pairing of football with overcoming racism, so even when Remember the Titans veers into the dangerously implausible storybook zone, I still follow right along the path they lay out like a hungry (gullible) little puppy. The glorious, honourable sport of football: single-handedly eradicating racial hatred since 1971 and BOY don’t it feel good in your tingly-bits.
What other football movies did I miss?
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About Jamie Jamerson
