In America, they love winners and that’s especially true when it comes to the Super Bowl. Every year, one team wins the Super Bowl and goes home to a parade and sometimes a riot. Another teams loses the Super Bowl, often becomes a laughing-stock, and spends the next season searching for “redemption,” never mind that even the team that loses the Super Bowl still did something that 30 other NFL teams failed to do.
Just ask the Buffalo Bills. In the early 1990s, the Bills accomplished something that no other football team had ever accomplished. They went to four consecutive super bowls. And yet, because they lost all four times, the 90s Bills are remembered for what they lost instead of what they accomplished. If the Bills had won all four of those Super Bowls, they would be remembered as the greatest team of all time. But because they lost, they are forever remembered as being joke.
Four Falls of Buffalo is a documentary about those four Super Bowls, all told from the point of view of the players that lost and the city that loved them. Four Falls of Buffalo is very much a fan’s film but it’s still interesting to watch. Along with detailing what went wrong (and sometimes right) at all four of the Super Bowls that the Bills lost, it also features interviews with the Bills players. Particularly notewothy is an interview with Scott Norwood, the kicker who missed a field goal that, had he made it, would have won Super Bowl XXV for the Bills. Even though the city of Buffalo embraced him after the loss, it is obvious that missed kick still haunts him.
Watch Four Falls of Buffalo in honor of all the teams that made it to the Super Bowl but did not get that win.
Tonight, I watched the latest Lifetime premiere. The film was called High School Lover and, in many ways, it was a typical Lifetime film. As you might guess from the title, it’s tells the story of a teenage girl who defies her overly protective father and enters into a relationship with an older man. Since it’s never a good idea to defy your parents in a Lifetime film, the older man turns out to be an obsessive psycho, the type who shows up at his ex-girlfriend’s house with a crowbar and demands that she love him.
As I said, typical Lifetime film. Plotwise, this was almost identical to almost every thriller that Lifetime has premiered on Saturday night.
However, there were a few things that set High School Lover apart from something like Killer Coach.
Number one, the obsessive psycho was a movie star. That’s right — Christian Booth (Francois Arnaud) is a celebrity. He’s such a celebrity that, at one point, his teenage girlfriend is upset when she reads an article in US Weekly that claims that Christian is getting back together with his ex. And yet, for a celebrity who is well-known enough to appear on the cover of US Weekly, it was remarkable just how much Christian was able to do without anyone noticing. For instance, if Justin Bieber showed up at someone’s house with a crowbar and started breaking all the windows, you can be sure that the paparazzi would be right behind him, taking pictures and shouting out questions. If Ryan Gosling picked up a teenager in a limo and then flew her around in his own private helicopter, you imagine that it would at least be mentioned on TMZ. Yet, somehow, superfamous Christian Booth is able to do all of this without anyone noticing.
This leads me to suspect that Christian may not have been human. Though it’s never specifically stated, I suspect that Christian may have been a vampire, an alien, or a time traveler. He had to have some sort of mystical power to get away with everything that he did.
Secondly, this film was not only executive produced by James Franco but it also starred Franco as well! What’s strange is that this wasn’t a parody like A Deadly Adoption or Franco’s previous Lifetime film, the remake of Mother, May I Sleep With Danger? Instead, this was a totally typical Lifetime movie with James Franco in the role that would usually be played by a former cast member of One Tree Hill.
And yet, James Franco fit right in. He gets to flash his winning smile and there’s a scene where he shows off some dance moves that deserves to be put in the Hall of Fame of Fearless Franco Moments. Watching the film, one gets the feeling that James Franco woke up one day and said to himself, “I want to make some movies for Lifetime just because.” And that’s what he proceeded to do! And let’s give some credit where credit is due. Instead of slumming his way through the film, James Franco gave a good and sincere performance, as did Paulina Singer in the role of his daughter.
Anyway, if it sounds like I’m struggling to be objective when it comes to reviewing this film, you’re right. I love Lifetime melodrama and, though Arleigh likes to make fun of me for this, I love James Franco too. And really, that’s the best review that I can give you. If you like Lifetime movies and/or James Franco, you’ll like High School Lover.
It’s just an odd little movie. When I get around to writing my study of the career and accomplishments of Mr. James Franco, High School Lover will, at the very least, get a chapter or two.
Though it may be regarded as a joke today, the XFL was a big deal for a few months in 2001. The brainchild of the WWF’s Vince McMahon, the XFL was a football league that, like the USFL before it, would play during the NFL’s off-season. McMahon promised that, if the NFL was now the “No Fun League,” the XFL would be the “Extra Fun League.” McMahon’s longtime friend and the President of NBC sports, Dick Ebersol, purchased the rights to broadcast the XFL’s first two seasons.
Ebersol and McMahon put together the XFL (8 teams and 2 divisions) in just a year’s time. They recruited players who hadn’t been able to find a place in NFL. Using many of the same techniques that he perfected in the world of professional wrestling, McMahon encouraged the players to be big personalities and allowed them to pick their own nicknames. Rod Smart would briefly become a star as He Hate Me while another player requested to be known as Teabagger. McMahon tweaked the rules, encouraging faster and more aggressive play. Instead of a coin flip, each game would start with two opposing players scrambling for the ball. The XFL was not only more violent than the NFL but it also had sexier cheerleaders.
In 2001, I was really excited for the XFL. It was everything that an 18 year-old male football fan could hope for. I was one of the 14 million people who watched the very first broadcast. I watched half of the second broadcast and that was it. I lost interest and I was not alone. The XFL started with higher ratings than expected but the final games of that inaugural season set records for being the lowest-rated prime time sports telecasts in history.
What went wrong? That’s what ESPN’s latest 30 for 30 documentary, This Was The XFL, explains. Directed by Dick Ebersol’s son, Charlie, This Was The XFL features interviews with McMahon, the senior Ebersol, players like Rod Smart and Tommy Maddox, and sports journalists like Bob Costas. The XFL’s rise and demise is presented as being a comedy of errors. Already viewed with skepticism because of McMahon’s unsavory reputation, the XFL was doomed by a combination of terrible luck and bad gameplay that confirmed why many XFL players couldn’t find a place in the NFL. During the first week, several players were injured during the opening scramble. In the 2nd week, a power outage interrupted the broadcast of a game in Los Angeles. With ratings in freefall, McMahon resorted to playing up the cheerleaders and sending Gov. Jesse “The Body” Ventura onto the field so that he could harass the coaches during the game. Trying to do damage control, McMahon appeared on The Bob Costas Show and their hostile interview is one of the highlights of the documentary. Even if the league ultimately failed, it is impossible not to admire McMahon’s determination to shake things up.
The XFL’s first season was also its last but, as This Was The XFL makes clear, its legacy is still evident today. Miked-up players, the skycam, sideline interviews, all of these are the legacy of the XFL. Even Jerry Jones, when interviewed, says that the XFL changed the way that NFL football is broadcast.
With this being Super Bowl weekend, take a moment to raise a toast to the memory of the XFL.
The 1950’s were a time of change in movies. Television was providing stiff competition, and studios were willing to do anything to fend it off. The bigger budgeted movies tried 3D, Cinerama, wide-screen, and other optical tricks, while smaller films chose to cover unusual subject matter. The following five films represent a cross-section of nifty 50’s cinema:
BORDERLINE (Universal-International 1950; D: William A. Seiter)
BORDERLINE is a strange film, straddling the borderline (sorry) between romantic comedy and crime drama, resulting in a rather mediocre movie. Claire Trevor plays an LAPD cop assigned to Customs who’s sent to Mexico to get the goods on drug smuggler Pete Ritchey (Raymond Burr , being his usual malevolent self). She’s tripped up by Ritchey’s rival Johnny Macklin (Fred MacMurray , channeling his inner Walter Neff), and taken along as he tries to get the dope over the border. What she doesn’t know is he’s also…
What’s an Insomnia File? You know how some times you just can’t get any sleep and, at about three in the morning, you’ll find yourself watching whatever you can find on cable? This feature is all about those insomnia-inspired discoveries!
If, last night, you found yourself awake at three in the morning, you could have turned over to Starz and watched the 2015 film, Truth.
I can’t say for sure whether or not Truth would have put you to sleep. It kept me awake, largely because I was in a state of shock that any movie could be as bad as what I was watching. Without running the risk of hyperbole, I can say that Truth is one of the worst fucking movies that I’ve ever seen in my entire life. It’s not just that the film is poorly scripted, inconsistently acted, and directed in the most heavy-handed way possible. No, the problems with Truth went far beyond mere execution. Truth is a film with an agenda, one that I kind of agree with, but it’s such a total misfire that it ends up doing more damage to its cause than good. Truth is meant to be a defense of the much maligned mainstream media but it’s so poorly put together that it’s easy to imagine it being one of Donald Trump’s guilty pleasures. Remember how all of us musical theater nerds used to hatewatch Smash? I imagine that the White House staff does the same thing with Truth.
Truth is ostensibly based on a true story. In 2004, veteran anchorman Dan Rather (played by Robert Redford) reported a story that then-President George W. Bush got preferential treatment while he was serving in the Air National Guard. This story was considered to be especially big because 1) the Iraq War was deeply unpopular, 2) Bush was in a tight race for reelection, 3) his opponent, John F. Kerry, didn’t have much to offer beyond having served in Vietnam, and 4) questions were being raised about what Kerry actually did in Vietnam.
One of the most important pieces of evidence in Rather’s story were four memos that had been provided by a retired Lieutenant Colonel from the Air National Guard, a veteran Bush-hater named Bill Burkett (played, in the film, by Stacy Keach). Shortly after the story aired, conservative bloggers claimed that the memos were obvious forgeries. After spending weeks defending the story and haughtily dismissing anyone who didn’t collect an eight-figure paycheck from CBS, Rather admitted on air that the authenticity of the memos could not be verified. In the wake of the scandal, Rather’s longtime producer, Mary Mapes (Cate Blanchett), was fired. Rather retired a year earlier than expected and went on to become one of those reliably dull commentators who occasionally emerges to complain about how the world hasn’t been the same since Adlai Stevenson died. Mapes later wrote a book, which argued that 1) the memos were authentic and 2) it didn’t actually matter whether they were authentic, even though they like so totally were.
With all the current talk about fake news and whether both the media and Hollywood exist in a bubble, Truth is a film that should be especially relevant but, as previously stated, it’s so clumsy and heavy-handed that it actually does more harm than good. About halfway through the film, there’s a hilarious scene in which literally the entire country is shown watching 60 Minutes with awe-struck expression on their face. Children are watching. Customers in a bar are watching. The cooking staff in the kitchen pauses in their work to watch the report. Heroic music rises on the soundtrack. This scene, with all of its self-important grandeur, pretty much sums up everything that’s wrong with Truth. It’s one thing to argue that the news media does, should, and must play an important role in American life. It’s another thing to make your argument by constructing a fantasy world where the entire country plots their lives around watching 60 Minutes. But that’s the way Vanderbilt directs the entire film. He’s so high on the fumes of his good intentions that he doesn’t realize his film basically comes across like a parody of those intentions.
Especially in the second half of the film, there’s a lot of speeches about why journalism is important. And those speeches may actually make a great point but the problem is that none of them convince us that Mary Mapes and Dan Rather didn’t get fooled by some painfully obvious forgeries. In its laudable effort to defend journalism, Truth makes the mistake of excusing shoddy journalism. When, towards the end of the film, Mapes exclaims that the memos were only a minor part of the overall story and not necessary to prove that Bush got preferential treatment, you want someone to ask her, “If you could prove the story without them, then why did you include these unverifiable documents in the first place, especially considering that they were received from a questionable source?” But nobody does because none of the film’s saintly characters have been written or portrayed with the nuance necessary to be able to survive a question like that. Truth‘s problem is that it wants to have it both ways. “It doesn’t matter that this story was based on obviously fake documents,” Truth says, “And, because Mary Mapes and Dan Rather were sent by God to tell the truth, the obviously fake documents were completely real.”
And then there’s the film’s performers. Stacy Keach is great as Burkitt and his eccentric performance suggests the film that Truth could have been if it wasn’t so concerned with trying to portray its lead characters as saints. But then there’s Robert Redford, whose portrayal of Dan Rather has all the nuance and personality of a wax figure. (Redford wears suspenders. That’s the extent of his performance.) As Mary Mapes, Cate Blanchett is totally wasted. She doesn’t really have a character to play, beyond her male director’s conception of what a professional woman is supposed to be like. (She also has a traumatic back story of abuse, which the film trots out in such a klutzy manner that it’s actually incredibly insulting to real-life abuse victims.) Dennis Quaid, Topher Grace, and Elisabeth Moss all show up as members of Mapes’s team. Quaid is playing a military man so he gets to salute in slow motion. Grace is playing a hipster with a beard so he gets this embarrassing scene where he rants about how he’s being targeted not because of sloppy reporting but because of a corporate conspiracy. (This was obviously meant to be a huge applause moment but, like a lot of the movie, it doesn’t explain how the progressive cause is helped by shoddy journalism.) Moss doesn’t get to do anything, other than sit in the background. To waste a cast of this quality is a crime.
So why did this mostly terrible film get respectful reviews? Why did Sasha Stone and Jeff Wells insist that Truth was destined to be an Oscar contender? Call it confirmation bias. Truth plays to mainstream liberals (which includes the majority of film reviewers) in much the same way that God’s Not Dead 2 plays to Christians. But just because you agree with a film’s ideology, that doesn’t make it an example of good filmmaking. While artistic films are often political, it’s rare that political films are ever art. If every anti-Bush film was an artistic masterpiece, we would be living in a cinematic golden age.
Here’s the thing. We live in a time when the media is under attack and being used a convenient scapegoat for every bad thing in America. Donald Trump largely won in 2016 by portraying the media as being biased and that’s a charge that will undoubtedly be repeated many times over the next four years. A heavy-handed mess like Truth doesn’t help anything.
A part of ESPN’s 30 for 30 documentary series, Small Potatoes: Who Killed the USFL? tells the story of the United States Football League. The USFL was not the first American football league to try to take on the NFL but, arguably, it was one of the most successful. Playing a spring/summer schedule, the USFL lasted for three seasons, from 1983 to 1985. During that time, the USFL introduced many rules that would later be adopted by the NFL, including the two-point conversion and the coach’s challenge. Several future NFL superstars, like Herschel Walker and Steve Young, got their start in the USFL.
So, why is the USFL nearly forgotten today? This documentary largely lays the blame at the feet of none other than Donald Trump. Long before he was President or even a reality TV star, Trump wanted to own a football team. When it became obvious that he wasn’t going to be able to buy an NFL team, Trump purchased the USFL’s New Jersey Generals. Trump not only decided that the USFL needed to switch to a fall schedule and compete directly with the NFL but, under his direction, the USFL also filed an antitrust lawsuit against the NFL. Ironically, the USFL won that lawsuit but were only awarded $3.75 in damages. With the league’s financial resources depleted by the lawsuit, the USFL suspended the 1986 season and never came back.
For all the legitimate criticism that can be directed towards ESPN, the 30 for 30 documentaries have been consistently excellent. While Small Potatoes features plenty of exciting game footage and interviews with former USFL players, it’s not surprising that the most interesting thing about it is listening to Trump revealingly discuss his time as a USFL team owner with the same mix of self-aggrandizement and defensive posturing that he uses to discuss the size of the crowd at his inauguration. Unlike the majority of the players and former owners interviewed in Small Potatoes (including Burt Reynolds, who was one of the owners of the Tampa Bay Bandits), Trump still appears to take it personally that he was never taken seriously as the owner of a football team.
I did not know anything about the USFL before I watched Small Potatoes. My only complaint is that I wish it had been longer. The story of the USFL was too interesting to be confined to just one hour.
This weekend, I will be seeing Rings, the second sequel to the 2002 film, The Ring. (Of course, The Ring itself is a remake of the Japanese film, Ringu.) Since it’s been a while since we’ve had a new installment in the Ring franchise, I decided to rewatch the first film tonight.
I have to admit that I had a few concerns before I rewatched TheRing. When I first saw The Ring, it scared me to the extent that I actually had nightmares afterward. Even after all these years, the image of that little girl emerging from the well and then crawling out of the television still makes me shiver. But even with that in mind, I still found myself wondering if The Ring would live up to my vivid memories.
After all, it’s been 14 years since The Ring was released and, since that time, it’s been copied and imitated by literally hundreds of other PG-13 rated horror movies. Would the shocks still be effective, now that I knew they were coming and that I would no longer be surprised to learn that the little girl in the well was actually evil?
Add to that, there was the question of technology. In 2002, it seemed all too plausible that people could be trading back and forth a cursed VHS tape. The Ring was made at a time when DVDs were still considered to be exotic. When The Ring first came out, YouTube didn’t even exist. But today, both VHS tapes and VCRs are artifacts of another era. DVDs have been replaced by Blu-rays and Blu-rays are in the process of being replaced by streaming services. For The Ring to work, you had to be able to relate to people watching a VHS tape. Today, all of these people would be too busy watching cute cat videos on YouTube to fall into The Ring‘s trap.
In short, would The Ring still work in the age of Netflix? And would the film still be as scary as it was when it was first released? These were the question that I found myself wondering as I sat down to rewatch The Ring.
And the answer to both questions is … for the most part, yes.
Here’s the good news. All the important things still work. The performances of Martin Henderson, David Dorfman, Amber Tamblyn, and especially Naomi Watts hold up well. Gore Verbinski’s direction is still effective and, as I rewatched the film, I was surprised to see how many odd and quirky details that Verbinski managed to work into the film. (I especially enjoyed the magic-obsessed desk clerk.) The cursed video was still creepy and compulsively watchable and I still felt uneasy while watching Anna Morgan (played by Shannon Cochran) comb her hair in that mirror. Even more importantly, the little girl in the well, Samara Morgan (Daveigh Chase), was still incredibly frightening.
Admittedly, The Ring is dated and some of its effectiveness has been diluted by imitation. Unfortunately, that’s something that happens with any financially successful horror film. Beyond that, as effective as the entire film was, there were parts of The Ring that did feel undeniably silly. There’s a lengthy scene in which Naomi Watts, while on a ferry, attempts to talk to a horse and the horse reacts by jumping into the ocean. I understand that the scene was probably meant to establish that, as a result of watching that videotape, Watts was now cursed. But, still, I kept wondering why Watts was bothering the horse in the first place. I mean, I love horses too but I know better than to disturb one while on a ferry. As well, the film’s opening sequence — in which Amber Tamblyn is menaced and ultimately killed by Samara — no longer felt as effective as it did when I first saw it, largely due to the fact that it’s been copied by so many other horror films. Imitation may be the ultimate compliment but it does tend to dilute the effectiveness of horror.
But, in the end, The Ring held up well enough. The film’s storyline — characters watch a cursed video tape and then, seven days later, are killed by Samara — was simple but enjoyable. And, when David Dorfman delivered his classic line: “No. You weren’t supposed to help her,” I still felt a chill run down my spine.
For the longest time, I thought that Two-Minute Warning was a movie about a gang of art thieves who attempt to pull off a heist by hiring a sniper to shoot at empty seats at the Super Bowl. As planned by a master criminal known as The Professor (Rossano Brazzi), the sniper will cause a riot and the police will be too busy trying to restore order to notice the robbery being committed at an art gallery that happens to be right next to the stadium.
I believed that because that was the version of Two-Minute Warning that would sometimes show up on television. Whenever I saw the movie, I always through it was a strange plan, one that had too many obvious flaws for any halfway competent criminal mastermind to ignore them. What if the sniper was captured before he got a chance to start shooting? What if a riot didn’t break out? The sniper spent the movie aiming at empty seats but, considering how many people were in the stadium, it was likely that he would accidentally shoot someone. Were the paintings really worth the risk of a murder charge?
Even stranger was that Two-Minute Warning was not only a heist film but it was also a 1970s disaster film. Spread out throughout the stadium were familiar character actors like Jack Klugman, John Cassevetes, David Janssen, Martin Balsam, Gena Rowlands, Walter Pidgeon, and Beau Bridges. It seemed strange that, once the shots were fired and Brazzi’s men broke into the gallery, all of those familiar faces vanished. When it comes to disaster movies, it is an ironclad rule that at least one B-list celebrity has to die. It seemed strange that Two-Minute Warning, with all those characters, would feature a sniper shooting at only empty seats. For that matter, why would there be empty seats at the Super Bowl?
That wasn’t the strangest thing about Two-Minute Warning, though. The strangest thing was that Charlton Heston was in the film, playing a police captain. In most of his scenes, he had dark hair. But, in the scenes in which he talked about the art gallery, Heston’s hair was suddenly light brown.
Recently, I watched Two-Minute Warning on DVD and I was shocked to discover that the movie on the DVD had very little in common with the movie that I had seen on TV. For instance, the television version started with the crooks discussing their plan to rob the gallery. The DVD version opened with the sniper shooting at a couple in the park. In the DVD version, there was no art heist. The sniper had no motive and no personality. He was just a random nut who opened fire on the Super Bowl. And, in the DVD version, he did not shoot at empty seats. Several of the characters who survived in the version that I saw on TV did not survive in the version that I saw on DVD.
What happened?
The theatrical version of Two-Minute Warning was exactly what I saw on the DVD. A nameless sniper opens fire and kills several people at the Super Bowl. In 1978, when NBC purchased the television broadcast rights for Two-Minute Warning, they worried that it was too violent and too disturbing. There was concern that, if the film was broadcast as it originally was, people would actually think there was a risk of some nut with a gun opening fire at a crowded event. (In 1978, that was apparently considered to be implausible.) So, 40 minutes of new footage was shot. Charlton Heston even returned to film three new scenes, which explains his changing hair color. The new version of Two-Minute Warning not only gave the sniper a motive (albeit one that did not make much sense) but it also took out all of the violent death scenes.
Having seen both versions of Two-Minute Warning, neither one is very good, though the theatrical version is at least more suspenseful than the television version. (It turns out that it was better to give the sniper no motive than to saddle him with a completely implausible one.) But, even in the theatrical version, the potential victims are too one-dimensional to really care about. Ultimately, the most interesting thing about Two-Minute Warning is that, at one time, an art heist was considered more plausible than a mass shooting.
It’s an older, more world-weary Dean Martin we see in MR. RICCO, a fairly gritty but ultimately unfulfilling 70’s flick that would’ve made a decent pilot for a TV series (maybe in the NBC MYSTERY MOVIE rotation with Columbo and McCloud), but as a feature was best suited for the bottom half of a double bill. This was Dino’s last starring role, though he did appear in two more movies (THE CANNONBALL RUN and it’s sequel), and this attempt to change his image from footloose swinger to a more *gasp!* sober Martin doesn’t really cut it.
Dean’s a defense lawyer, a “lily white liberal” who gets black militant Frankie Steele (Thalmus Rasulala ) off a murder rap. When two cops are blown away in an ambush, the witness provides a description of Steele, causing friction between Ricco and the police, especially his friend Detective Captain Cronyn (Eugene Roche, an underrated character actor who’s really good here). The…
Quarterback Cat Catlan (Charlton Heston) used to be one of the greats. For fifteen years, he has been a professional football player. He probably should have retired after he led the New Orleans Saints to their first championship but, instead, the stubborn Cat kept playing. Now, he is 40 years old and struggling to keep up with the younger players. His coach (John Randolph) says that Cat has another two or three years left in him but the team doctor (G.D. Spradlin who, ten years later, played a coach in North Dallas Forty) says that one more strong hit could not only end Cat’s career but possibly his life as well. Two of former Cat’s former teammates (Bruce Dern and Bobby Troup) offer to help Cat find a job off the field but Cat tells them the same thing that he tells his long-suffering wife (Jessica Walter). He just has to win one more championship.
Number One is unique for being one of the first movies to ever take a look at the dark side of professional football. At 40, Cat is facing an uncertain future. His years of being a star have left him unprepared to deal with life in the real world. He has no real friends and a wife who no longer needs him. This would seem like a perfect role for Heston, who always excelled at playing misanthropes. Heston is convincing when he’s arguing with his wife or refusing to sign an autograph but, surprisingly, he is thoroughly unconvincing whenever he’s on the field. For all of his grunting and all the lines delivered through gritted teeth, Heston is simply not believable as a professional athlete, even one who is past his prime. (When he played the 40 year-old Cat, Heston was 46 and looked like he was 56.) Whenever Cat throws a football, he’s played by Heston in close-ups and very obviously replaced by real-life Saints quarterback Billy Kilmer for the long shots. A football film is only as good and convincing as the football action and, on that front, Number One leaves much to be desired.
This 1969 press photo displays Heston’s throwing technique.
Two final notes: For the scene in which Cat is tackled by three Dallas Cowboys (all played by actual players), Heston requested that the players actually tackle him. Heston ended up with three broken ribs.
Finally, Number One was made the cooperation of the New Orleans Saints and features several players in the cast. When Number One was filmed, the Saints were still a relatively new expansion team. Cat is described as having already led the Saints to a championship but it would actually be another 40 years before the Saints would finally make their first trip to the Super Bowl.
In America, they love winners and that’s especially true when it comes to the Super Bowl. Every year, one team wins the Super Bowl and goes home to a parade and sometimes a riot. Another teams loses the Super Bowl, often becomes a laughing-stock, and spends the next season searching for “redemption,” never mind that even the team that loses the Super Bowl still did something that 30 other NFL teams failed to do.
Remember the XFL?
Quarterback Cat Catlan (Charlton Heston) used to be one of the greats. For fifteen years, he has been a professional football player. He probably should have retired after he led the New Orleans Saints to their first championship but, instead, the stubborn Cat kept playing. Now, he is 40 years old and struggling to keep up with the younger players. His coach (John Randolph) says that Cat has another two or three years left in him but the team doctor (G.D. Spradlin who, ten years later, played a coach in North Dallas Forty) says that one more strong hit could not only end Cat’s career but possibly his life as well. Two of former Cat’s former teammates (Bruce Dern and Bobby Troup) offer to help Cat find a job off the field but Cat tells them the same thing that he tells his long-suffering wife (Jessica Walter). He just has to win one more championship.
