Any Given Sunday
Co-Written and Directed by Oliver Stone
Starring : Al Pacino, Cameron Diaz, Jamie Foxx, James Woods, Matthew Modine,
Dennis Quaid, L.L. Cool J, Lawrence Taylor, Ann-Margret and John C. McGinley.
playing at theaters accessible to everyone - ie - multiplexes, etc.
*    (one star)
no time to read the whole review?
THE JIST of MY PROSE
 A total mess of a movie that can't decide which plotline it would like to follow - so it follows all of them, finishes none of them and just about breaks the sound barrier with obnoxious DTS football sounds. Finally, though no one is spared in the acting race - Stone gets some pure energy out of a few of his football scenes and uses some motion-heavy songs really, really well. But that's it. And that's not enough to bother even considering seeing this - to put it nicely - "piece of crap".

 'Any Given Sunday'. A better title - 'Any Given Subplot' (The film itself went
through 5 working titles). The first 20 minutes blaze into your consciousness like fire. It's
not much of a claim to say that it's the best football footage ever put on screen. That's
almost as flighty as saying 'Backdraft' has the best firefighting scenes ever put on a
screen. What am I - supposed to be excited about statements like that?

'Any Given Sunday', apart from having nearly 7 storylines that it fails to develop,
make interesting or complete - is a boring, slow-moving film.

Any scene that's not on a football field (and some that are - they get pretty ordinary
and repetitive just like real football) is just plain bad. The dialogue is so front-loaded
with melodrama - I almost need a spoon to dig through what they're saying to get to the
root of the scene : how it fits, why it's placed where it is and why it's being interrupted by
another scene that's equally as boring. Example : Why would you intercut a scene of
Jamie Foxx being interviewed by John C. McGinley (totally an expository scene meant to
push the race issue) with a scene of Pacino with a hooker (played by Elizabeth Berkeley -
there to be nude and nothing else). What is this meant to suggest? And dig the nifty,
unexplained manner in which Pacino ends up with a hooker :  he turns her down one
night (citing morals) and picks her up the following night. Nothing has occurred to make
me believe that one night he’d be high and mighty about soliciting paid sex and the next
night he’d arrange for it as if calling for room service.

 There's about four times the music in this film than the average film. It's as if Oliver
Stone came to my house, did some drugs (which I now associate with Stone) and
then hooked my VCR to my discman (like I used to do - with the bottle-neck cables) and
put random pump-up tunes over shots of football. So much of it seems so out of place,
thrown together - and why is the music fragmented? (My guess is to include more of it.)
(Nice choices like “Believe” from 'Run Lola Run', “Right Here, Right Now” enacted with
energy courtesy of Fatboy Slim and especially "Leave Home" by the Chemical Brothers.
Another beef in the music. I hate the song "Bawitaba” by Kid Rock - it makes me
uncomfortable because it's so raw with it's masculinity (how terribly appropriate here in a
film about pigskin machismo). I acknowledge it’s dynamic in that propaganda-laced
trailer. In the film, it’s totally wasted. Not used to garner energy or to complement what's
onscreen. Just buzzing up there against the grain of the images. (Reminds me of a
complaint I had heard from Michael J. Wall with 'Casino' that the music was irritating when the complainer was trying to watch the movie.)

No one is spared, really. Charleton Heston - don't blink or you'll miss him - no, wait - blink. Blink alot. Come with a blanket and put it over your eyes.

Focus is stressed so heavily in the film. Why doesn't it take it's own advice and
make a film that's only about one of the following: a) feuding orthopedists; b) a faded
coach; c) a no-bullshit femme owner in a man's world; d) racism in football; e) rivalry
inside a team; f) player's choosing glory over health, etc. I’d have gladly watched a two
hour film about James Woods and Matthew Modine fighting over whether or not it was
right to let a player choose to play injured, each playing seniority vs. ethics as if it were a
strategic game of chess.

This muddled migraine of a film - I’ll not watch.
 

"Cameraman : 'We dropped the camera!'
Oliver Stone : 'No - no - keep it - it's art!' "

                            -Edward M. Prigge, totally on the mark regarding the annoying
                              cinematography that Oliver Stone has included in this banal piece of "art".
 
 

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