BroadcastChic Excellent, a Must See

SeeQuant Blending excellent reporting and strong storytelling, this is a disturbing film truly stranger than fiction

Geraldine The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

Walter Sloane Mostly, the movie is committed to the value of a good time.

guszak No shock that when Bissinger's incredible book of the same name came out, residents of Odessa were none too pleased with what they read. It painted Odessa as a very backwards and overtly racist town. Countless examples and incidents revealed a Texas town still stuck in the Jim Crow days of years passed, inspired only by high school football victories. High school football was the main theme of the book, but the racism found in the community was right there with it. Enter Peter Berg, who wished to make a film about high school football, in particular, he wants to make this book into a movie. The community of Odessa made it clear, no way. Berg would not be allowed to use Permian images or Permian facilities. Berg pleads with the Odessa district to let him make the film, he pledges that he will remove all of the racist elements in the book that made Odessa look bad. In fact, Berg went one step further, he decided he would deal with the prejudice angle, by using African Americans as the example of the bigotry. The black coaches of the all-black Dallas Carter team that faces Permian in the championship game complain bitterly about the initial lack of black referees, implying they want to stack the deck for the black team. During the game, the black refs wink and smile at the black players as they taunt, cheap shot, showboat and play dirty. A black referee blatantly cheats on a call in favor of Dallas Carter. It is incredible! This is when you realize, this horrible excuse for a movie had nothing to do with the actual book it was based. It is very difficult for me to tell anyone that they should watch a movie, when the story being told, completely distorts the truth of what that film was supposedly based on.

Tim Pfeifer Based on the award winning book by H.G. Bissinger, Friday Night Lights provides the audience with an inside look at the magnitude of high school football in Texas. The film follows several players, as well as the head coach, as the Permian Panthers attempt to win the State Championship during the 1988 season. The roles of Mike Winchell and Don Billingsley are portrayed well by Lucas Black and Garrett Hedlund. Through their performances, Black and Hedlund were able to show the pressure and stress that football players felt. At one point in the film, one football player says, "relax we're seventeen" and Billingsley responds, "do you feel seventeen?". This quote emphasizes how in Texas, high school football players are held to higher standards than most teenagers. The best performance came from Billy Bob Thornton though, as he played Head Coach Gary Gaines. Thornton does a great job in showing the anxiety of a football coach in Texas. It was cool to see Billy Bob Thornton and Lucas Black together again, eight years after they starred in Sling Blade. The film is directed well throughout, but the final scene stood out the most to me. The scene consists of three football players standing in the parking lot of the stadium a couple days after their last high school game ever. As the players bid farewell to their careers, you can see how a huge part of their lives is over. High school football really isn't like it is in Texas anywhere else. Through excellent directing and acting, the film is successful in highlighting the enormous impact that high school football has on small towns in Texas.

eddie_baggins Perfectly encapsulating not only the high stakes sport that is American college football but the trials, triumphs and all in between for those growing up in an environment that builds pressure upon shoulders not yet acclimatised to the highs and lows of adult life, Peter Berg's frenetic and heartfelt Friday Night Lights is a stunningly crafted example of the power of sporting themed movies and a career highpoint for many involved.Based upon H.G. Bissinger's book which is itself centred around the real life Permian High Panthers football team that was the heart and soul of the small Texan town of Odessa in the late 1980's, Friday Night Lights is not merely built for an excuse to deliver action packed staging's of football matches but is built to allow heartfelt and important messages to play out around it, so much so that this moderately financially successful film spawned the well liked Emmy winning TV series of the same name.Berg (who at the time was better known as a character actor in films like Cop Land and Smokin Aces) displays a natural talent as a story teller here, as well as a fine orchestrator of his young actors (who almost pass as 17/18 year olds) and as we're introduced to the Panthers team from Billy Bob Thornton's well-meaning and measured Coach Gaines, Lucas Black's conflicted quarter back Mike Winchell, Garret Hedlund's pressured Don Billingsley and Derek Luke's flashy star playmaker Boobie Miles, it's easy to be pulled into this world of eventual pettiness and goal driven attitudes that consumes all those that inhabit it.These characters feel alive, cut from reality, the town they live in eats, drinks and thrives off them and their sport and Friday Night Lights showcases a realistic view of what the college football scene represents to those that follow it. There's the young men who have had their chance to build their life upon one successful year, those that have found success in the arena and now struggle to live out of it and those that merely find themselves driven by the idea of the team's success, an outlet if you like to allow them to forget their woes. It's in this broad spectrum of characters and snippets of Odessa life that we get that sets Friday Night Lights aside from other films of its ilk and become something more, something truly special.Much more than a mere sports movie, Friday Night Lights is quintessential viewing for movie lovers even if sport is but a foreign occurrence to them. From Berg, the fantastic soundtrack by Explosions in the Sky through to Billy Bob Thornton and an impressive young (at the time) cast with standout turns from Black, Hedlund and Luke, Friday Night Lights saw the nigh on perfect culmination of material and participants come together to deliver one of, it not the best sport movies ever made.5 coin tosses out of 5

coljam21 This is the best football movie I've ever seen. Well I take that back, this is the best sports movie I've ever seen. Funny I never heard about it until recently. But when I realized that Billy Bob Thornton and Lucas Black would be sharing the screen again I definitely had to tune in. So there's this small town with nothing going on and football is their only salvation so they take it seriously. They down right obsess over it. All the adults live vicariously through the high school football players and the players do their best to deal with the immense pressure and stress placed on them to win championships.Thornton did an amazing job but Lucas Black was the star of the show. His performance was powerful and impressive. He displayed so much intensity and conviction that I was with him every step of the way. As a matter of fact all of the main characters did an amazing job. I really liked that this was not a typical football movie about an underdog team that gets their stuff together just in time to win the championship. Just made the move all the more realistic. This movie really is a gem. The director did a fantastic job.