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College Basketball is over. My season tickets are already purchased. This weekend’s NFL draft will just serve as a painful reminder that people like Mark Sanchez won’t be back for college football this fall.

Only 135 days left until kick-off.

To tide me over through this horrible time of year I call “Baseball Season”, I decided to take on a project I miserably failed to do last year: watch a crapload of football movies. Hopefully this will get me excited about next season, or gain a new perspective on and appreciation for sports cinema. Or just provide additional motivation to get more than one movie a month from Netflix.

So, I started with a list. Browsed some websites, perused Netflix’s suggested movies, etc., and came up with 25 movies to start with (and I am very open to suggestions for movies to watch!). That’s gonna be one or two movies a week until I can’t close my eyes without thinking of underdog stories, dramatically-timed injuries, heartwarming endings, and bone-crushing simulated football action scenes. I’m gonna hope that by the end I can’t recognize every stadium ever used and re-used as a film location, but there is a distinct possibility I will have gained that ability.

First up, in no particular order, was Remember the Titans, a classic by which many more recent football movies are judged, and which I’ve seen many times but not very recently. Filmed in Georgia, apparently, and starring lots of people I didn’t even remember were in it – Ethan Suplee, a very tiny Hayden Panettiere, and Donald Faison as the same character he plays in everything he’s ever done.

It was a good movie overall. It’s one of those films that’s great the first time you see it, but it gets so over-hyped and over-played that it means nothing to you for a long time, until you end up like me and go without seeing it for something like six years, and then it’s fresh and entertaining again. At least up until near the end, when I remembered that this was one of those team-captain-gets-permanently-injured movies, and it felt unoriginal and unnecessary, even though it was based on a true story. Then about ten minutes later I realized it only seemed that way because I’m pretty sure this movie started that whole trend.

But all-in-all, a good football movie; it’s easy to see why this is one of the “definitive” films of the genre. It’s got it all – a period soundtrack, drama within the team, evil-doers with really bad sportsmanship, etc. It was a good one to start off my football-movie-watching journey.

Stay tuned as I tackle (ha!) more films, and please send me any movie suggestions you think I should include in my list!

This entry was posted on April 20, 2009 at 8:43 am and is filed under Football, Football Movie Madness, Movies with tags Football, Football Movie Madness, Movies. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.