FTT Film Reviews: Big Fan and Harvard Defeats Yale 29-29

Thanks to my sad Old Man Health and poor life choices, I've recently seen a few football movies that are worth your while. (Count your blessings, Basketball Haters: I could be moving this blog to Hoop Coverage.) And with that, on to the popcorn.

Big Fan

A quirky independent drama/comedy that stars outstanding comedian Patton Oswalt (you might have heard his voice in "Ratatouille", or seen his stand up on "Comedians of Comedy", both of which get a thumbs up from me) as a mid-30s man-child and Giants fan whose life revolves around the team and his late-night calls to a local sports talk radio show. Things go awry after an encounter with the team's star player goes very badly, and Oswalt is then pressured to turn on the club and bring a lucrative lawsuit and/or criminal charges against the player.

While the supporting cast is good, Oswalt is the movie here, and he nails the role. From his scribbled notes for his calls to his difficult relations with his mother, he puts this thing pretty close into the documentary stage in terms of realism. And while the film falls a bit on technical football chops, and you do get the sense that Oswalt's character really doesn't know that much about football, that's not really the point, or even all that unrealistic.

I won't spoil the ending, but it's satisfying and well-written, and while I can see why people wouldn't need to go see this in the theater, it's a perfect quickie rental. Give it a spin.

Harvard Defeats Yale 29-29

This is a nicely turned documentary of the 1968 Ivy League championship game in which Harvard comes from 16 points down in the final minute to tie a nationally ranked Yale team. Game footage is cut with interviews with the modern-day principals, and while one hates to give more attention to New England fans and their most legendary footballery, it's well worth a viewing... especially if you enjoy real-life and yet still Disney-esque conquests of Good over Evil (or, in this case, Evil over More Evil).

How did Yale come to wear the waxed mustaches? Well, it stats with Mike Bouscaren, a Yale defensive captain, linebacker and friend of cheerleader George Bush. (Yes, the former president was a drunken legacy student and mean drunk who got rung up on charges after a game at Princeton.) Bouscaren makes for a fairly fascinating figure as a self-described bad guy and injury artist who fumbled a punt return and took a critical 15-yard face mask on the final drive. While he seems contrite and freely admits that the loss helped him in the long run, you get the sense that he'd gut you as soon as look at you, even now.

I'm also a fan of the Gallagher Brothers, Yale defensive linemen that still seem bitter about the whole thing, and aghast that everything went to hell at the end of a year where they never trailed in any game. The Yale fans, probably led on by Bush (Yale is, at the time, male only), start to fire cannons and chant "You're Number Two" at the Crimson, and the band starts playing the Mickey Mouse theme. Star QB Brian Dowling, who received Heisman votes for his Young Favre-esque Scramble And Throw Anywhere Antics, was also kind of a right-wing jerkoff about the Vietnam War, while the Harvard team was made up of left and right wingers, and even an ex-Marine.

Oh, and have I also mentioned that Yale's star running back is future Cowboy Calvin Hill, who puts the ball on the ground twice in this game? Or that Yale is so arrogant and untested that they don't even have an onside kick coverage team to help slow down the comeback, or that Harvard is led back by a backup QB who doesn't really look like a football player? You watch this game, and you are kind of amazed that it's all real. Harvard's players are, improbably, scrappy lower-middle-class types, at least in comparison with the legacy Yalies. You won't even mind that the zebras give Harvard every call at the close, or that a tie game, no matter how much it burned the Yalies, is not really a loss. (And had there been overtime, I don't think the game becomes any more memorable. Frankly, I suspect the novelty of the tie is a big part of the mystique.)

Oh, and one final thing. Since almost none of the interviewed players, with the exception of Dowling who had three years of clipboard and coffee, played in the NFL. (Hill does not appear on the documentary.) So all of them got out of the game early enough, and since they were Ivy Leaguers, can actually form a sentence. So they are all pretty articulate, and appear to be in good health. You can just watch the game and their memories without being convinced that football is a deal with the Devil where everyone who lives past age 45 has massive health and concussion issues. That's kind of encouraging, too.

Anyway, these are both accessible via a Netflix instant queue, so if you do that sort of thing, you can watch without much commitment at all, really.