BEFORE: It's another film today that I just don't know what to do with - I mean, it's somehow an entire film about the NFL draft, which apparently is a big deal every year, it's televised and everything. Again, I'm not a sports guy, and I think big league sports might be a bit out of control, a film about the drafting process which is tangential to the sport itself only kind of proves my point. I get that there are movies about football, sure - "Any Given Sunday", "The Longest Yard", "Rudy" and so on. But did we need a movie about the NFL draft? Probably not, which is the main reason I've avoided it for so long. But the chain is the chain and I kept a little spot on the watchlist where I piled up three Kevin Costner movies, so while the clearance sale is still going on, I want to get rid of them all, they're just taking up space in the warehouse.
This year's NFL Draft is longer than a day, it will take place April 23-25 in Pittsburgh - sorry that I couldn't arrange to watch this film any closer to this year's event. For someone who runs a calendar-based movie blog this might be the equivalent of watching a Christmas movie in August, I don't know. But I did what I could - the whole process is still a bit of a mystery to me, and by that I mean my own scheduling process, not the NFL draft process. But we live in a world now where everyone the ability to record videos and a place to post them, since joining Instagram I can't tell you how many people are making video lists of the best pastrami sandwiches sold in NYC or where to find the greasiest cheesesteaks or the most secret speakeasies, judging restaurants on the weirdest scales you can imagine. Like there's a guy who's a cab driver who reviews restaurants on his lunch breaks, popping in to get a table for one at some of the most exclusive restaurants you can imagine, and everyone can't wait to serve him because they know he overtips.
But I'm sure there's someone out there who, for example, judges restaurants only on their decor, or their names or reputations. We've got Michelin-star ratings, celebrity chefs, and then there's being internet famous as opposed to being known for making good food. I have to wonder what's being lost in the process, because sometimes you just want to have a decent meal in a place that isn't too crowded. But judging a restaurant on anything other than the food seems a bit like making a movie about the NFL draft and not the sport itself. But let's find out.
Kevin Costner carries over from "Let Him Go".
THE PLOT: Cleveland Browns GM Sonny Weaver has the opportunity to rebuild his team when he trades for the number one draft pick. He must decide what he's willing to sacrifice on a life-changing day for a few hundred young men with NFL dreams.
AFTER: Well, I was kind of right, this is a film that started at 8 on the ridiculous scale and then took it up to 11. Partly society is to blame, because we can't really do anything "small" here in America, everything that starts out small eventually gets overhyped to the point of madness, the Super Bowl is just one example, if you feel like spending six or eight hours watching a tribute to excess, to the point where there's so many food traditions or tailgating "rules" that there's a whole subculture just for THAT, then you've got the exorbitant amount of TV commercials and just the money spent on making and booking ONE of those ads is larger than the GDP of most countries, I'd say that things have gotten pretty far out of hand and they're not going back. There's a sponsor just for the COIN FLIP, and people are also betting on the coin flip (one of hundreds of things you can bet on).
Another example is the Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade, like I imagine 100 years ago somebody just thought it might be a nice idea to inflate a couple balloons, book a marching band and entertain a few dozen people in the streets, and now look where it all is. It's a three hour mythic mash-up of product placements, musical numbers from Broadway shows, marching bands from all over the country, dance troupes and celebrities who drop by and comment for five minutes because they've also got something to promote. Whatever entertainment value a parade might have once had is now buried under a giant merchandising pile, but God help your Broadway show if you DON'T do a performance on 34th St. during the parade, you might as well just close down the theater because everyone will be going to the other show down the block that did perform. They have plenty of marching bands in the NYC area, I'm just saying, and they all pretty much look and sound the same, why do they have to fly an entire band plus parents and support staff in from Flagstaff, Arizona - it all seems very wasteful to me, but I guess then those teens get to say they were on TV and also they got to visit the big city. At the end of the day, does NBC get to air three hours of programming that means something, that they're proud of? Or is it just a tradition now, muscle memory and we keep doing what we're doing without thinking about why we're doing it?
To be fair, sports movies only took things so far, because at one point somebody wrote the book "Moneyball" and regular people started to realize that there might be more to the game than what you see on the field, and every team has staffers who are even more obsessed with stats than the fans are, and they've also got researchers who dig into each player's personal history to try to determine not just what kind of player they're going to be, but what kind of person, what kind of teammate they're going to be, and for the team owners who are spending millions on THIS guy over THAT guy, maybe that all adds up to something, or maybe it doesn't, because nobody has a crystal ball that works 100% of the time. The best you can do maybe is spend your money wisely, make the best picks you can, cross your fingers and hope for the best - and STILL 100% of the people are going to get fired over time based on the decisions they made or didn't make.
But still, I went in to this knowing almost NOTHING about the NFL Draft, and after I really don't know much more. I know that the team with the worst record each year gets the best (first) pick the next, so it's a bit like my father's family's old Christmas gift distribution. (We did the white elephant thing, where everybody got a number and then picked wrapped gifts in order, but you couldn't pick the gift you brought, and you had options to trade what you just opened for anything that had been unwrapped before. Other trades were negotiated afterwards, privately.) But then every team gets a pick in every round, unless they've traded away that pick to another team for something else in return. Is that about it? I have a feeling this system was designed to make things equitable among all of the NFL teams, but then the teams with the smaller budgets are free to negotiate with the teams with the bigger budgets, and that's not equitable at all. The teams in the larger markets might have more power and assets to negotiate with, so again, something about this very fair system doesn't seem very fair.
We follow Sonny Weaver Jr., the GM of the Cleveland Browns, who receives directions from the team's owner to at least TRY to get the most coveted player in the draft, a QB named Bo Callahan, because he's going to put asses in the seats. After speaking with the also-struggling Seattle Seahawks, Sonny is able to trade for their #1 pick in the first round, but only by giving up the Browns' 1st-round pick for the next THREE years. This puts the Browns in the best position to secure Callahan, only it raises questions, why were the Seahawks so eager to give up their pick? I mean, they got something in return, but perhaps that was just a cover-up tactic, do they know something about Bo Callahan that the other teams don't? Sonny would rather draft a running back named Vontae Mack, or even a legacy player like Ray Jennings - but the owner wants the flashy new quarterback to replace Brian Drew, their sophomore QB who might have a bad knee, and who also seems to be demanding a trade IF the Browns take Callahan, because that town ain't big enough for the both of them.
Meanwhile, everyone assumes that the Browns will take Callahan with their new first pick, so the head coach starts to revolt because he didn't plan for this, he likes Drew, the old QB just fine and he's got all his plays for the season centered around what Drew can do. Ali, the team's accountant, is called in to see if the team can even afford to draft Callahan, because of the salary cap (another thing that I believe is supposed to level the playing field, but I bet there are plenty of ways around it). Sonny starts re-reviewing all the footage of Callahan, too, to see if he's got a weakness they haven't discovered yet, and he has the team's security officer do another deep dive into Callahan's background to find any hint of scandal, other than the fact that there was an incident at his birthday party in college, and it seems none of his teammates were involved, but that also means they weren't THERE, and why weren't they? Did Callahan not have any friends on the team, or did he have bad B.O., or were the local cops inclined to hide the fact that team members were there? Anyway you try to explain it, it doesn't make much sense.
Also meanwhile, the film needs to pile on all this other personal drama, to hide the fact that this is a football movie where nobody plays any football - sure, it's the off-season and Draft Day, but maybe you came here for a football movie and not a negotiation movie. So for some reason that accountant, Ali, is in a situationship with Sonny, and they have to keep it quiet because that's probably an H.R. violation. But, Ali is pregnant so they're going to have to disclose sometime soon. And on top of THAT, Sonny's father died like a week ago and he was the GM before Sonny was, and in his will he had a request that his ashes be scattered on the team's practice field, and Sonny's mother wants to do this TODAY, right now, while she's there, and Sonny for some other reason doesn't have the stones to say, "Mom, today's just not a good day for this, I'm very busy, how about tomorrow?"
I mean, it's really like "What could POSSIBLY go wrong on Draft Day", only heightened beyond the absurd. There are 365 days in a year, but every problem in Sonny's life seems to have come to a head on Draft Day, of course. How is a man supposed to conduct trading business, research a player again at the last minute, keep the coach from quitting, keep the team owner from firing him, and try to figure out who the other teams are going to pick while also trying to figure out who HE is going to pick? It's a lot. Also it's worth considering that you may draft a player you really want, or you may draft a player to keep him from another team that needs him, or you may just draft a player for the hell of it so you can trade him later to another team. This is worse than 3-D chess, this is like doing a jigsaw puzzle in the dark when you can't even feel the shapes of the pieces.
It's also possible that all of the team's research isn't worth a damn. People always point out that Tom Brady, one of the greatest if not THE greatest, was picked like 140th in his year. Some stats will tell you a player is really great, and then you still have to cross your fingers and hope he lives up to the hype, while other players you may draft just to round out the team, and one of those guys can really surprise you one day. Or so I've heard. Anyway, I don't know what all the fuss is about, because at the end of the day, this is still drafting for the Cleveland Browns, one of the worst teams in the NFL on a perennial basis. I've spent time in Cleveland, and I can tell you their fans are some of the most loyal there could be to a team that has just never delivered for them, not even a bit. Yet we're supposed to believe here that there are players somewhere who are ECSTATIC to be drafted by the Browns. I refuse to believe it, except that playing for Cleveland might be slightly better than digging ditches in Kuala Lumpur.
It's just my feeling here, but I speak as someone who's gotten a behind-the-scenes look at hypefests like San Diego Comic-Con, and now I've peeked behind the curtains of NBA games, while I'm selling beer at Nets games. My strong suspicion is that simply everyone is just throwing shit at the wall to see what sticks. Certainly nobody knows for sure what movies are going to be successful, what children's TV shows are going to catch on, and which players are going to coalesce into a successful team of contenders in any sport. Everyone's running around trying to get maximum eyeballs on their product, whether that's at live events, on TV screens or on social media. But I think mostly the thing to remember is that nobody has a clue, not at all, not from what I've seen. Creative people just keep putting stuff out there and hope that other people find it and enjoy it, but sports is really its own thing, teams just have to keep practicing and playing the games and trying to win, but then there's this whole ridiculous culture (or cult) built up around each team and each sport.
Directed by Ivan Reitman (producer of "Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire" and producer of "Space Jam: A New Legacy")
Also starring Jennifer Garner (last seen in "Family Switch"), Denis Leary (last seen in "Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work"), Frank Langella (last seen in "Sweet November"), Sam Elliott (last seen in "The Company You Keep"), Sean "Diddy" Combs (last seen in "Girls Trip"), Terry Crews (last seen in "Serving Sara"), Ellen Burstyn (last seen in "The Tale"), Chadwick Boseman (last seen in "Stan Lee"), Rosanna Arquette (last seen in "Yacht Rock: A Dockumentary"), W. Earl Brown (last seen in "The Unforgivable"), Kevin Dunn (last seen in "King Richard"), Arian Foster (last seen in "Baywatch"), Brad William Henke (last seen in "The Frozen Ground"), Chi McBride (last heard in "Beavis and Butt-Head Do the Universe"), Griffin Newman (last heard in "Disenchanted"), Josh Pence (last seen in "La La Land"), David Ramsey (last seen in "A Very Brady Sequel"), Patrick St. Esprit (last seen in "Acts of Violence"), Timothy Simons (last seen in "Don't Worry Darling"), Tom Welling (last seen in "The Fog"), Wade Williams (last seen in "Message from the King"),
Dave Donaldson, Jordan Harris, Zachary Littlejohn, Enre Laney, Laura Steinel (last seen in "Babylon"), Wallace Langham (last seen in "Daddy Day Care"), Christopher Cousins (last seen in "Untraceable"), Erin Darke (last seen in "The Drop"), Quincy Dunn-Baker (last seen in "A House of Dynamite"), Gregory D. Rush, Tom Headlee, Patrick Breen (last seen in "The Assistant"), David Dunn, Stephen Hill (last seen in "Widows"), Jim Brewer, Margot Danis, Leanora Haselrig, Jennifer McMahan, Brenda Adrine, Edwina Hadley, Pat Healy (last seen in "Killers of the Flower Moon"), Andre Bello, Jacob Bertrand, John Dannug, Shannon Edwards, Mike Karban, Annette Lawless, Gil O'Brien, Nathan Andrew Read,
with cameos from Chris Berman (last seen in "Happy Gilmore 2"), Russ Brandon, Jim Brown (last seen in "Ali & Cavett: The Tale of the Tapes"), Monique Brown, Joel Bussert, Sammy Choi, Jeff Darlington, Rich Eisen (last seen in "That's My Boy"), Ken Fiore, Mike Florio, Aaron Goldhammer, Roger Goodell, Jon Gruden, Rebecca Haarlow, John Heffernan, Marc Honan, D'Qwell Jackson, Mel Kiper, Bernie Kosar, Ray Lewis, Alex Mack, Alex Marvez, Mike Mayock, Tony Rizzo, Deion Sanders, Frank Supovitz, Phil Taylor, TJ Ward, Seth Wickersham,
and archive footage of John Candy (last seen in "Once Upon a Crime...")
RATING: 5 out of 10 retired jersey numbers
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