jdberkley

I should probably begin by apologizing-- calling this a "football movie" is a bit demeaning. Superficially, it's accurate, but the true subject of "Undefeated" is the education of inner-city kids through the competition of sports. If you value the lessons team sports can teach, or if you care about kids trying to pull themselves up from desperate circumstances, then I have to believe this is a film you want to see.

I had the privilege of seeing it a couple of months ago at the Chicago International Film Festival, with an audience that I'd wager was comprised mostly of people who didn't grow up in violent inner-city neighborhoods, and there were scenes in this film that reduced many of us in that audience to tears. These weren't tears of self-serving pity, either, but of admiration at what the Manassas Tigers accomplished in this wonder of a season. The film follows the storytelling tradition of the championship season, for the most part, but it's tough to criticize a documentary film for adherence to cliché. In fact, there are scenes in this that you'd dismiss as improbable in a fiction film, and scenes of such close personal observation that you wonder how the filmmakers got them on camera. These filmmakers had astonishing access to coach Bill Courtney and his players O.C. Brown, Montrail "Money" Brown, and the remarkable Chavis Daniels. You will get to know them so well over the course of the film that you might hope for a sequel. I know I do.

My only criticism of the film may not strike you as criticism at all-- in the Q&A session I attended with the filmmakers, they said they cut over an hour of footage to get the film's running time down for the theatrical market. As enthralled as I was with this film, I gladly would have watched another hour-- I wanted to meet more of these players and learn more about their lives. As such, at this length, the film doesn't quite rise to the level of "Hoop Dreams," as that film masterfully integrated its focus on sports into a larger narrative of inner-city life. But "Undefeated" comes awfully close, especially in one of the most moving scenes I've ever seen in a documentary, when a kid gets a piece of news that will change his life forever. You want to see this scene. You want to see this film.

Having read a lot of the other comments here, I have to say it's interesting to see how many people begin by saying how old they were when they saw "Star Wars" for the first time(Full disclosure: I was three. My parents saw it at a drive-in theatre, and all I can remember of that experience was seeing Darth Vader for the first time, and knowing that he was very, very bad). I think that speaks to its extraordinary impact. "Star Wars" was an event, I suppose in the way that the Beatles on Ed Sullivan for the first time was an event. It dates you, to a degree, but the reason it was important-- the reason it remains important-- is that it showed you what was possible. For much of the 1960s and 1970s, filmmakers had concentrated on showing us the brutal, heartbreaking truth of our world(The Godfather, Chinatown, Nashville-- some of the best movies ever made), and many of them succeeded brilliantly. But there's a place for dreaming dreams of things that have never been, too, and "Star Wars", with its epic tale of an Empire and a rebellion in a galaxy far, far away, was the dream a generation didn't know it wanted to have until George Lucas gave it to us.

Is it juvenile, at times? Simplistic, even? Sure. So's the truth, sometimes. We want to believe there's a Force, and that Luke can master its use in time to defeat the forces of darkness. So we believe it. Are the effects a bit dated now? Sure, although I still believe them. Did the success of "Star Wars" possibly kick off the modern blockbuster era, which gives us more and more special-effects-drenched dreck every year? Sadly, it probably did. But the thing the wannabe heirs of "Star Wars" usually lack is the one thing that made "Star Wars" such an event--courage.

Back in 1977, nobody was making movies like this. Nobody thought a film like this, with its mythic storytelling arc and its sweeping vision of intergalactic war, could possibly work...with the exception of George Lucas and his fellow filmmakers.I didn't know all that at the time, of course. Like I said, I was only three. But having watched more movies than most people my age now, I feel comfortable saying that in its way, "Star Wars" is as much an independent auteur's film as anything by John Cassavetes or Woody Allen-- it has the same sort of daring, the same desire not to settle for less than showing us something we've never seen before. A bold, grand sense of old-style craftsmanship infuses everything in "Star Wars", and the film delivers on the promise contained in its subtitle. At the time, it really was a new hope.