We continued watching it when we got home, and by the end, I had determined that it might be the most stereotypical sports movie of all time. It almost feels like a parody of Friday Night Lights (the movie, not the TV show), which is ironic, since it came out five years before. (Of course, the book FNL came out a decade before that.)
Let's run down the list of stereotypes:
(Main folks)
1. Star quarterback. Good guy, (scholarship to FSU!), goes down with knee injury. Tres sad.
2. Backup quarterback. Aw shucks guy, forced into spotlight, excels and faces temptations.
3. Cue: skanky cheerleader with a heart of gold (She just wants outta this town!) and gravity defying whipped cream skillz.
4. Backup QBs girlfriend. Mousy cute girl (see: scrunchie), she will get stepped on, ultimately forgive boyfriend for being an a-hole.
5. Ruthless small Texas town football coach. He runs the place, cops are afraid of him, has a Saddam Hussein-like statue of himself outside the school. (How creepy is Jon Voight in this movie?!? Is it just me?! You kinda get the feeling he could really be this way in real life. Shudder.)
(Side folks)
1. White wide receiver. Perv. Drunk. Perv. My inner-feminist was gagging that his creepyness is supposed to pass for humor. As if.
2. Black wide receiver. Ruthless coach keeping him down. Averages 133 yards a game and only has three touchdowns! Shame!
3. Fat offensive lineman. Named: BillyBob. For real. Like most fat guys in movies, you feel for him, even though he too, is a perv.
4. Sex education teacher who moonlights as a stripper. Sigh. We'll come back to this.
5. Dumb dads who's goals in life is to get their boys on the football team.
I think that about covers us. We've hit on pretty much every character from a sports movie, while at the same time getting most characters from any teen movie. The story goes as you might think, star QB goes down, backup QB get in and thrives, while at the same time rallying against Ruthless Football Coach. Meanwhile, he's tempted by skanky cheerleader, but for the most part remains faithful to mousy girlfriend. It comes down to the final play ... and touchdown! Fade to black.
Along the way there are a series of implausible events that occur, which happens of course in most movies, but I think this might have been at the dawn of movies of the "F it" era, where plots didn't have to work, as long as there were a lot of rapid shots and hot girls.
Football implausibles:
1. We've got Billy Bob, a 350 pound beast, playing on the offensive line as opposed to nose tackle. Most HS players go both ways, but it doesn't appear Billy Bob does. He's also not the center, fine, maybe he doesn't have the hands for snapping. He's also not guarding the weakside. When he passes out, QB fails to recognize and in poor football judgement, allows himself to get laid out. No way the team wins a district championship every year with these poor football skills.
2. Players are launching from outer space on these tackles. There's about 100 unflagged helmet-to-helmet hits in this game. I got six concussions just watching this movie.
3. The team adopts a spread offense after they get rid of their coach, which for some reason, works like they're the 2007 Patriots. Meanwhile, the other team fails to call any time outs and lets the 'good guys' run the most effective two minute drill of all time.
4. They also block a punt in which Billy Bob lays out the middle of the field while white WR blocks the kick. If this worked this well every time, no one would get a punt off against them -- ever.
5. The final play they run is the hook and ladder, in which their super secret code is the player-coach sticking his finger in his mouth and pulling sideways. (I would love to see Bill Bellichick adopt this play calling strategy: laying his hand out and flicking on the flea flicker, holding his arm straight up on the statue of liberty, mimicking a pass on the fake field goal, etc. Can we do this against the Jets?) Their 350-pound lineman, who thinks his job on the play is to run down field like he's confused, somehow is the best person for this job, and he carries about seven players into the endzone.
Teacher implausible:
Somehow, their sex education teacher's night job is stripping ... and NO ONE KNOWS. How is this possible? Is stripping normally an anonymous profession? Are background checks lacking at this school? How is it that the owners at the strip club know exactly who the boys are but there aren't any local pervs who have noticed a school teacher is an exotic dancer? What I find funny, is that she actually seems to feel awkward when she sees them there. Of course, now that the boys know she's a stripper, feel welcome to make sexual advances towards her. This Texas town's school system is is a well-oiled machine! Somehow, backup QB still manages to get into Brown in what I can only imagine is another knock on Rhody's Ivy League school.
And finally, whipped cream bikini implausible:
I'm not even going to argue that it's implausible to have a whipped cream bikini without it melting or sliding off. I'm not going to argue that it seems more likely she had a meringue bikini, or a whipped egg white bikini the way that thing held form. And I'm not going to roll my eyes that she managed to make out with backup QB without any of the whipped cream getting on his shirt. I have one issue, and it's with the cherries. These are the world most gravity defying fruit. When she sits down, and leans over on the couch, they're still there!! Why? Did they need to be? No, they just didn't care.
Side note: when this scene came on in the gym, I got turned around a creepy guy was staring at the screen, then me with a "what the heck are you watching and what channel is it on" look. Yuck.
So should you rent Varsity Blues because I just dedicated 800 words and a half an hour of my life to writing this? Probably not. And there's so much more I could say, (Dawson as Mox --WTF?, "I don't want your life" catchphrase) But that doesn't mean I won't flip it on in another 5-7 years and relive the ridiculousness all over again.
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