So, We Watched Sidelined 2: Intercepted (2025, Dir. by Justin Wu)

Posted on November 27, 2025 by Dazzling Erin

Since we had a few hours to kill before the Cowboys game started, Lisa and I decided to watch a movie. I wanted a love story. She wanted something with dancing. We settled on Sidelined 2.

Sidelined 2 picks up where the first Sidelined ended. Drayton (Noah Beck) is the starting quarterback at USC, even though he’s only a freshman and he’s really scrawny for a football player. (All of the football players in this movie looked too scrawny to be playing for a top-ranked program.) Dallas (Siena Agudong) is studying dance at Cal Arts and trying to figure out how to pay for her semester after she learns her scholarship won’t cover everything.

They’re in love but they still struggle because they’re going to different schools and they both have to figure out how to balance their relationship with all of their other responsibilities. Drayton tears his ACL and becomes bitter. Dallas gets a job at a coffeehouse and her boss has really messy bangs and keeps singing songs on his guitar. Dallas and Drayton realizes that there are other possibilities out there. Will their relationship last?

I thought the first Sidelined was cute for what it was. The second one was pretty boring and whatever charm the two leads had in the first film disappeared during the sequel. Drayton’s not much of a boyfriend, even before he ruins his knee. Dallas says she’s never even been to Dallas, which is weird. If I was named after a city, I would visit. It’s a Wattpad movie and all of the dialogue sounds like it was written by an AI that had been programmed to try to sound young by dropping random slang. Drayton asks Dallas if she’s “hangry.” Lisa made me go back three times to make sure he actually said that.

James Van Der Beek comes back for five minutes. He used to be the teenager with a dream. Now, he’s playing the father of a teenager with a dream. Feel old, yet?

So, I Watched Sidelined: The QB and Me (2024, Dir. by Justin Wu)

Posted on February 17, 2025 by Dazzling Erin

Drayton Lahey (Noah Beck) is a high school quarterback who is being pressured by his father (James Van Der Beek) to accept a football scholarship to “Waco.” (I guess that’s supposed to be Baylor.) Drayton has the talent to turn pro and he’ll be a starter if he goes to Waco, despite being only a freshman. (Maybe it isn’t Baylor. Baylor football coaches aren’t that dumb.) But Drayton likes a cheerleader named Dallas Bryan (Sienna Agudong), who is the sister of his coach (Drew Ray Tanner) and who wants to go to California after she graduates so that she can pursue her dream of being a professional dancer.

It’s a slickly-made high school football movie and, even worse, it’s a Wattpad movie so there’s no surprises to be found here. I was able to predict every line of dialogue before the characters said it. The plot was old-fashioned but the actors said stuff like, “I’m tired of your main character energy,” just to make sure that we all knew the movie was made in 2024. I was a cheerleader in high school but no one on our football team was offered a scholarship anywhere. I could still relate to some parts of the movie, though. It was always awkward after the games when the parents would yell at the players because they dropped a pass or threw an interception. Even our bad players were put under a lot of pressure and, as cheerleaders, a big part of our job was to make everyone felt like a winner even when they were losing. We were good at our job but, by the end of the year, we still had a losing season and no scholarships.

Sienna Agudong was believable in the lead role but I had a hard time buying TikTok star Noah Beck as a quarterback with the talent to be a freshman starter or to even go pro. The big “star” in this movie was James Van Der Beek, playing the type of humorless father figure that he used to rebel against in his teen idol days. If you can remember Dawson standing in that rowboat, this movie will make you feel old.

I Watched Backwards (2012, Dir. by Ben Hickernell)

Posted on February 14, 2025 by Dazzling Erin

Want to feel old? Remember James Van Der Beek from Dawson’s Creek and how he was an aspiring film director who went to high school and thought he knew better than all of his teachers? In Backwards, James Van Der Beek is the teacher! He’s not just a teacher but he’s also the head of the school’s athletic department. He still looks and sounds like Dawson, though.

When Abi Brooks (Sarah Megan Thomas) fails to qualify for the Olympic rowing team and is instead offered a spot as an alternate for the second time in a row, she decides to take a job coaching a high school team instead. It’s not an easy transition. At first, Abi pushes her rowers too much and forgets the importance of having fun. But then she falls in love with school’s athletic director, Geoff (that would be James Van Der Beek), and she starts to loosen up. Her rowers start to win and soon, they have a chance to go to London and compete in a prestigious race!

Then, Abi is contacted by her former coach (Glenn Morshower). There’s an opening on the Olympic rowing team and he needs Abi to come to practice immediately. When Abi asks if she can come after coaching her students in London, her coach tells her that he’ll have to pick someone else if Abi isn’t at practice on Monday. Abi wants to go the Olympics but James Van Der Beek says she’ll be abandoning her students if she goes. Abi has to make a choice, her students and her love or her lifelong dream.

I liked Backwards up until everyone started to give Abi a hard time about accepting a spot on the Olympic rowing team. Abi has spent her entire life working for her chance to go to the Olympics. She’s nearly 30 so this is probably her last chance to go as a competitor. Abi took a job coaching because she was told that she wouldn’t be on the team. Now, out of nowhere, she finally has her opportunity to fulfill her lifelong dream and be a part of the Olympic tradition. Should she leave her job to start training for the Olympics? Of course, she should! Anyone in the real world would understand that this is an opportunity that Abi can’t pass up and no one would expect her to. True friends would have wished Abi luck and promised to cheer for her instead of guilting her! Dawson was always guilting Joey about something too. That’s why I liked Pacey.

Up until that point, Backwards was pretty good. Sarah Megan Thomas was believable as an athlete and Glenn Morshower had the coach thing down perfectly. I was happy with Abi and Geoff finally admitted how they felt about each other. I still think Abi should have gone to the Olympics, though.

Back to School #55: Varsity Blues (dir by Brian Robbins)

Posted on September 16, 2014 by Lisa Marie Bowman

james-van-der-beek-varsity-blues-e1358953220340

“I don’t want your finger.”

Bleh!

The 1999 high school football film Varsity Blues has been showing up on cable fairly regularly lately and, seeing as how I’m currently in the process of reviewing 80 of the best, worst, most memorable, and most forgettable high school films of all time, I decided that I might as well watch the whole thing.

Don’t get me wrong. I had seen bits and pieces of it over the years. I knew that it was set in Texas. I knew Jon Voight played a fanatical football coach. I knew that James Van Der Beek played an idealistic quarterback who clashed with the coach. I knew that there was a fat guy named Billy Bob, mostly because every time an out-of-state director makes a film about Texas, there’s a fat guy named Billy Bob. I knew about as much as one could learn from that episode of The Office where Michael Scott shows the film during “Movie Monday.”

“I don’t want your truck.”

But I had never seen the whole film so I decided, why not? After all, I had already decided to review several other Texas-set high school films — The Last Picture Show, Dazed and Confused, Dancer, Texas, and Rushmore. And hey those films were all good so maybe Varsity Blues would be good too!

Bleh.

One of the big clichés about Texas is that the entire state is obsessed with football. (The other big cliché, of course, is saying that “everything is bigger in Texas.” As if being a tiny state like Vermont is somehow preferable…) I’ve always found the whole “Texas worships football” thing to be amusing because I’m a Texas girl and I don’t know a thing about football. People tend to talk about Texas and football as if there aren’t any fanatical football fans in New York or California. Ultimately, of course, it has little do with football and everything to do with the fact that the rest of the country loves to hate my home state. If Vermont was known for being obsessed with football, there’d probably be thousands of articles about the “proud history of Vermont football.” But since it’s Texas, we end up with movies like Varsity Blues.

"I don't want your painfully obvious at social commentary."

“I don’t want your painfully obvious attempt at social commentary.”

Anyway, Varsity Blues tells the story of Mox (James Van Der Beek), who is a backup quarterback for the championship-winning West Caanan High School football team. However, Mox isn’t just your average jock. For one thing, he’s seen reading Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five. (It’s indicative of this film’s approach to characterization that we never learn whether Mox actually understands or even likes Slaughterhouse Five. We’re just supposed to be impressed by the fact that he owns a copy of the book.) Mox wants to leave Texas to go to an Ivy League school. He doesn’t want to play under the legendarily abusive Coach Kilmer (Jon Voight). (How evil is Kilmer? So evil that he poses for pictures like the one above.) And Mox resents the pressure put on him by his football-crazed father. (“You throw that fucking pigskin!” his dad shouts at one point.) As Mox puts it, “I don’t want your life!” and the line is just hilarious because Van Der Beek’s attempt to sound like a Texan is hilarious.

(Tip for actors: If you can’t do the accent, don’t try. Because I guarantee, if I ever meet James Van Der Beek, I’m going to tell him that his accent sucked and then I’m going to laugh and laugh. It probably won’t do much for his self-image. Sorry, James.)

“Get me on Hawaii 5-0 because I don’t want James Van Der Beek’s career.”

Anyway, when star quarterback Lance (Paul Walker) is injured, Mox is suddenly the team’s starting quarterback. And you know what? Mox is going to play the game his way! Soon, he is standing up the cartoonishly evil Coach Kilmer and challenging small town Texas’s obsession with high school football.

And here’s the thing: this is a film that wants to have it both ways. It wants to challenge the philosophy of winning at all costs and it also pretends to be about the unfair pressure that high school athletes are put under. But you better believe that the film ends with Mox leading his team to victory. And it’s not so much that Mox wins as much as it’s the fact that you know the film would never have the courage to actually have Mox lose. The film wants to be celebration of rebellion but, ultimately, it’s just a standard sports film.

And, even beyond that, it’s just not a very good film. I was shocked, when I checked with the imdb, to discover that Varsity Blues was actually filmed in Texas because the film feels like it was made in California. It has no authentic Texas flavor to it. What it does have is some of the worst fake accents that I’ve ever heard in my life.

Mox may not want his father’s life but I don’t want this stupid film.