BEFORE: Sticking with football, one of the three "true sports", and Burt Reynolds carries over from "The Longest Yard". I think I'm done with Burt Reynolds movies after this, unless he pops up unexpectedly in something.
THE PLOT: A three-way friendship between two free-spirited professional football players and the owner's daughter becomes compromised when two of them become romantically involved.
AFTER: Well, if "The Longest Yard" was a football film mixed with a comedy mixed with a prison film, this is a football film mixed with a romantic comedy mixed with a social commentary on the 1970's. The 70's were a weird decade (yes, I was there, but not as an adult) with a lot of people trying to "find themselves" (Hey, dude, you're RIGHT THERE. You're welcome.) through these self-help seminars like EST and Primal Scream therapy. You might be more familiar with the later incarnations of hucksterism like Tony Robbins and Scientology, but there was a time before the infomercial was invented, where people couldn't just dial a number and give away all their money, they had to go to a hotel ballroom somewhere, where they had to listen to a live seminar. Some people perhaps preferred putting their money in a bucket and setting it on fire, with much the same result, but I digress.
ASIDE: I feel like I got scammed this weekend, by watching 2 episodes of a show on Discovery called "Stephen Hawking's Grand Design". It was supposed to use physics and cosmology to unlock the secrets of the universe and the "meaning of life". After a few interesting stories about Newton's theories on gravity, the nature of quarks, string theory, etc. they finally started to get around to Hawking's insight into the meaning of it all. After a brief side-note about the "brain in a jar" theory (the belief that possibly, we're all just brains in a lab being stimulated by electrical impulses from a supercomputer, and all of reality is just an illusion of computer code), Hawking's big revelation is that reality is subjective, time and space are flexible, and light is both a particle and a wave - so the only meaning in life is that which we impart on it, and the answer won't be found "out there" but within. Honestly, I expected something more from such a respected physicist than a bunch of new-agey philosophy. End of ASIDE.
Apparently, as part of this process of finding themselves, people in the 1970's were open to all kinds of different living arrangements. The hippies from the 1960's were forced to grow up and get jobs, but the spirit of "free love" no doubt continued - so there was probably a lot of hinkiness and kinkiness going on, a la "The Ice Storm". This film has some promise, since it's got a twice-divorced woman living with two NFL players, in a non-sexual reverse "Three's Company" sort of set-up.
But eventually it becomes romantic between two of the friends, creating a typical Hollywood love triangle, and we all know those end one of two ways - they stay the course, which is boring, or pull a "Philadelphia Story"-style swap at the last minute, which is more interesting, if less believable. And a wedding that devolves quickly into a Three Stooges-style pie fight (essentially...) just proves they didn't know how to end the scene in an adult way.
All this goes down in the week leading up to the Super Bowl. There's not much focus on the game-play, not much Super Bowl hype. Is it possible that the Super Bowl wasn't as much of a thing back in the 1970's? They did feature "Up With People" as the halftime show three years in a row, after all. (kids, look it up) They sure didn't spend a lot re-creating NFL games in this film - the game against Green Bay in particular looked like it was filmed in a high-school stadium, or perhaps in the parking lot.
The dialogue wears a little thin, too - whenever you have characters engaged in a conversation that just keeps circling back on itself (the one about photos of African trees + animals is the worst offender) it's a sign that maybe more writing could have been done. I've read that the book this film is based on got more into the gritty behind-the-scenes antics of NFL players, but it just feels like the film may have gotten off-track.
Also starring Kris Kristofferson (last seen in "He's Just Not That Into You"), Jill Clayburgh (last seen in, umm, "Silver Streak"?), Robert Preston, Bert Convy, Richard Masur (last seen in "It"), Brian Dennehy (last seen in "Legal Eagles"), with cameos from Carl Weathers, Ron Silver (last seen in "Silkwood") and Lotte Lenya.
RATING: 4 out of 10 tuxedos
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