Matcollis This Movie Can Only Be Described With One Word.

Softwing Most undeservingly overhyped movie of all time??

StyleSk8r At first rather annoying in its heavy emphasis on reenactments, this movie ultimately proves fascinating, simply because the complicated, highly dramatic tale it tells still almost defies belief.

InformationRap This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

MartinHafer "Harvard Beats Yale 29-29" is a critically acclaimed film that bored me to tears. It's a shame, as this game that the film is about is among the most exciting ever played and SHOULD have been a wonderful topic. But the film is made in the most pedestrian manner--with low energy interviews, too many clips of the game itself and no incidental music or any qualities that make it appear cinematic or well polished. Aside from the novelty of seeing Tommy Lee Jones (he played for Harvard on this team), I found that the film never interested me. Now this is NOT because I hate sports documentaries--I love them. In fact the "30 For 30" series from ESPN is brilliant and highly engaging. But this documentary fails for me because it's so lethargic.

GeneSiskel George Gipp and fiery halftime speeches do not figure in this film. Rather, what is fascinating about it is to hear a bunch of 60-somethings, Ivy League football players whose athletic careers mostly concluded on a Saturday afternoon in 1968, talk intelligently about what an exciting game with a story-book ending meant to them in the context of those times. The interviews are excellent, with an overlay of retrospection and introspection totally missing from post-game interviews on, say, Fox Sports today. The game footage that we see interspersed between those interviews -- undefeated Yale, ranked an unheard-of sixteenth in the country, played its traditional rival Harvard, also undefeated, in the final game of the season -- is interesting enough but not likely to hold the attention of non-sports fans. Of course, 1968 was a watershed year in a tumultuous decade, before "women were invented," as a Yale player puts it, so the game could not be played without accounting in some way for Viet Nam, student protests, ROTC on campus, political assassinations, class differences, sex, the fleeting nature of fame, and the necessity and unexpected results of growing up. Oddly enough, the words of Tommy Lee Jones, who played guard for the Harvard team and roomed with Al Gore, are among the least insightful. Producer, director, interviewer, and cinematographer Kevin Rafferty is a cousin of George W. Bush, but you would not know it from his film. There is something of the spirit of "The Fog of War" in this documentary which I greatly enjoyed. Full disclosure: I graduated from Harvard College in 1966, will never wax nostalgic about my years there, and remember Harvard football as a laughable excuse to enjoy autumn sunshine in New England.

madmanstat3 I don't know how the person in front of me is writing a bad review on this. This movie was hilarious and entertaining. I'm a football lover and even i wasn't excited about seeing this, until i saw how amazingly entertaining all of the characters are. You really get to see inside the minds of these players, and what it was like to be part of such a great game. The players are all very entertaining, (except Tommy Lee Jones) and some of them you love, some of them you hate. Great movie, great story, a great time. These players are funny, and quick to make fun of themselves and each other. I don't know how anyone could not love it. Maybe not great for girls, but anyone else is going to love it.

prudhocj ..............and if he/she did they sure didn't bother to try to understand it or what the movie had to say! This is one of the best movies of the year so far. It has twists and ironies that make us think about what games and human interplay have to teach us as well as the participants in the event. Some of the players came in not knowing what to expect, some came in sure they would win and others in the course of the game refused to give up on the game, themselves and their teammates! One of the players throughout the movie was presented in a way that we as viewers thought we would wind up intensely disliking him but in the end he wound up learning so much from this game that it helped him become the person he is today - in his own words, a "better person". This forced the viewers of the film to learn something about themselves as well. The movie has humor, pain, arrogance, humility and a full range of human emotions as well as nuttiness and thrills. Pegasus3 missed so much about this movie that it does appear they didn't really see it. E.g., they say that it was a close game?? Well gee, it WAS A TIE GAME...how much closer could it be?? And the player talking about injuring another player (who was his friend BTW)... he actually thought he HAD injured him in the game to get him out of the game BUT as we see in the footage on the play where he was sure he had accomplished this he was nowhere near the play!! What irony! And the fact that P3 didn't even understand the title....the most ironic of all. He asked if he missed something? Well only the entire point of the movie - that Harvard "won" the game simply by tying the score in the end when they weren't even expected to come close! They won by doing so much better than they were expected to do. Contrary to the writers comment the title DID sum up the movie! All in all - a well-made, interesting and ultimately great movie. The players themselves summed it up best - it was only a game but what a game and what FUN it was to play in it. GO SEE IT!