Post Loss Musings From an OSU Fan On What May Actually Kill Football

I've experienced the pain of being a Buckeye fan in the 90s.  I thought we'd exorcised those demons when Jim Tressel took over and shocked the world in 2002.  Then in 2006, I invited a crew of family and friends over to attend a beer and buffalo wing soaked coronation led by our Heisman Trophy winning superstar quarterback.  That night, Urban Meyer and his Florida Gators broke my heart into 1,000 pieces.  In 2007, I was still numb from it so that loss to LSU didn't hurt so much as it just sucked.

I didn't expect to be CFP champions in 2016 due to the lack of any consistent offensive identity that season.  But I expected the game with Clemson to be close, and that we'd have a chance to pull something out like we did against The Team Up North a few weeks earlier.  It was New Year's Eve and I was at a party.  Many of the people I was surrounded by didn't care about football or OSU nearly as much as I did.  There were a few Buckeye haters there too.  Everyone was also drunk.

The Biopic! But first, a little (actually a lot of) context.

It's been a while and I've got some catching up to do.  I'm sitting at a picnic table at my campsite on a cool sunny day.  I've got nowhere to go and nothing to do except snack and day drink, so this is the best opportunity I'm going to get to pick this back up.  In my last post, I said I was going to tackle comedy next, and I will some day, but I've been putting a lot more thought into biopics lately.  Comedy is something that deserves my full attention to do it justice.

Before I just list the best, I really want to talk about what bothers me about this genre.  It can be very formulaic and is oh so prone to making shit up to enhance a story that may not stand on its own two feet otherwise.  The formula I think of goes like this:

And the Drama Category winner is.....

Our winner could also be categorized as a biopic, however it is sufficiently speculative about things that are unknown, and downright revisionist in other areas.  I'm going to look like a hypocrite here because I've already panned a few movies for taking a true story and blurring the lines between fact and fiction.  Our winner however, makes no claims to being historically accurate and makes it clear that that isn't the point.  It takes two historical figures and uses their story as a backdrop to sympathetically explore the depths of human jealousy and how personal rivalry separates humanity from God.  One character's twisted sense of piety ultimately sets him up for a life so steeped in sin, that he is oblivious to the fact that he has damned himself to a life in hell while still living on earth.  It's like taking the story of the Prodigal Son, but never allowing the older dutiful son to reconcile with his father, and seeing how that plays out over the long haul.  If ever there were a tragedy of our modern world worth putting to the big screen, it is the all too unfortunate truth that humans cause themselves so much unnecessary suffering simply by never trying to become any good at forgiveness and accepting that they are worthy of being forgiven.  Our winner puts it all out there right in front of us to see this tragic human flaw.

So without further ado, the Big Empty Gen X Drama Movie Award (patent pending) goes to:

Drama: First Runner Up

So I’m getting behind schedule and part of the reason is that this particular category is harder to cover. Drama movies require a little more analysis to do them justice, and it is also difficult to find good clips. These movies are more fiercely protected by our capitalist overlords so while every scene that I want may have been posted at one time on YouTube, there is a good chance it has been taken down due to a violation of rules about posting licensed material by someone who didn’t have proper authorization.

Drama Continued

With a few honorable mentions now named and discussed, I'll move on now to the finalists and winner.  For me, a drama movie is meant to serve the purpose of giving us a look at ourselves from an angle or through a particular lens, allowing us a view we would not normally have.  If done very well, it will compel us to consider or reconsider certain truths that we as individuals have established for ourselves.  The drama film can be used as a tool to exhibit what is inspiring, discouraging, beautiful, ugly and all things in between about humanity.  But when it's a good drama (in the way Big Empty defines good), it won't be spoon fed or obvious.  Which brings me to my second runner up:

We tackle the Drama from a Gen X perspective

So with one complete category behind us, we charge forward to explore what's good in the world of drama.  As previously mentioned, the selections here will come from a crowded field.  The challenge here is that the drama movie is the sandbox that Oscar talk plays in.  I need to be upfront that every movie is on a level playing field in this project.  Just because a film had a run that included a star studded red carpet evening where people in Versace cried about how much it meant to them to be involved in it before carrying a gold statue stage left gives it no extra points here.  It is noted that the deciders of who receives those statues don't care what we here at the Big Empty think and the feeling is pretty much mutual.  The Academy is ultimately a political entity as much or more than it is a judge of quality.  Put another way, it is an institutional gathering for the sole purpose of congratulating and celebrating the institution.  That doesn't mean they always get it wrong, but it definitely doesn't mean they always get it right either; and when they do get it right, they took a very different path to get there from the one I would take.  To represent the folks like me and what we think, the only voice we have is our $$$.  So we here take it seriously that if the institutional insider opinion and ticket sales are really the only measure of what's good, that we need to bring something important to the narrative to make this a useful exercise.

Phew, well that was a mouthful of a preface. 

Sports Movies continued

Before I tackle the big kahuna of sports movies, I want to give a heartfelt shout out to Remember the Titans (2000) as my Honorable Mention.  It was really tough to leave it out.  Based on the true story of Herman Boone's uphill battle to integrate a high school football team in Virginia in 1971, the film conspicuously telegraphs that we'll be gathering round the screen for a sermon about racism.  This will either immediately turn people on, or turn them off.  There's a thing about the 'Hollywood tackles racism' thread that gives off a "this will make white people feel good about themselves while doing nothing for black people" vibe.  To do this well, you want to make sure your movie isn't this:

There's a reason that's funny.

Sports movies

The Gen X movie series kicks off with the Sports drama.  I'm going to try to stay as true as possible to pointing out what is culturally significant or important all throughout this.  As I mentioned in my introductory post, the sports drama is very hard to do in an original way.  Which brings me to the second runner up in this category.

The Big Empty Gen X Movie Series

I'm excited to announce a mini project to explore the best movies of my generation.  I'm still waiting for the weather to warm up and need something interesting to occupy my time.  Now first off, this isn't going to be my collection of personal movie reviews or my Baba Booey list of the DVDs that I'd take with me to a deserted island.  Nobody gives a shit about that and it would be a waste of my time to write it that way and a waste of anyone else's time to read it.  For this project, I wanted to dig a little deeper and unpack what makes certain movies good.  When I say good, I mean in a culturally significant or important way.  There's nothing unprecedented about that necessarily except that I've always wanted to read a review about multiple movies that valued the same key themes and principles across multiple genres.  Since I can't find much more than piecemeal reviews of individual movies, I decided I'd write it.

At first I thought this shouldn't be too hard because I tend to think that ~97% of movies don't succeed at being good, leaving me a very small pool to select from.  One of the reasons that  most movies don't succeed in ways that another similar one might to me boils down to the fact that movie making in America is ultimately a capitalist endeavor.  Giving the people what they want