Monday, December 17, 2012

"The Winning Season"

Let me first say that I love Sam Rockwell. In case you didn't already know, yes, I love Sam Rockwell. And like anything else you have great affection for, you can tend to be biased toward that. In addition, what I like about independent films is that you are forced to focus on story and direction, acting and characters. You don't have the noise of impressive (or unimpressive) effects to cloud your judgement one way or the other.  With that confession now out in the open, this movie was pretty good, and it was Sam Rockwell who made it pretty good. Despite him playing what I now see as the cliche "asshole-who-really-cares," he played it very well with some brilliant parts to his acting performance. As far as acting from others, it was serviceable enough, nothing stellar, nothing to complain too much about (unless you count the Hispanic girl crying when she missed the game winner that was worse crying than Daniel Radcliffe crying in the third Harry Potter film when he found out that Sirius Black was his godfather and parent's friend and Hermione pulled off his invisibility cloak to reveal a terrible crying performance*). A bit of a small gem was Rob Corddry's embarrassing sport's father at all the games which made for some good chuckles. Outside of the acting, there's not a whole lot to write home about. The story was fun enough; a somewhat stereotypical sports movie. The writing was good, not great; seemed like a lot of one-liners the writer/director probably heard during drinks with his friends over the years. And the characters were likable and/or watchable enough. But it is Sam Rockwell (and I swear I'm not being biased here) that makes this movie better than the mediocrity that the remainder of it is.

*Whilst I'm giving away spoilers, Snape kills Dumbledore, Bruce Willis is really dead, Darth Vader is really Luke's father and Leia is his sister, Norman Bates is Mother, and Charlton Heston is on Earth the entire time.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1293842/

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