May Positivity: Round Of Your Life (dir by Dylan Thomas Ellis)

Posted on May 4, 2024 by Lisa Marie Bowman

2019’s Round Of Your Life tells the story of the Collins family.

Carl Collins (Boo Arnold) is a retired PGA golfer who is still considered to be one of the best to ever play the game. He’s put a lot of pressure on his two sons to follow in his footsteps. Tucker (Tim Ogletree), who likes to tell jokes and doesn’t always follow the best golf course etiquette, has just started on the PGA tour. Meanwhile, 15 year-old Taylor (Evan Hara) would rather play video games than stick with all of the hard work needed to become a golf pro.

When Taylor fails to make the Varsity Golf Team at his high school, an angry Carl goes for a late night drive. Unfortunately, his car is hit by another car, this one being driven by a teenage girl who was too busy texting to pay attention to the road. Carl ends up in a coma. And Taylor ends up determined to join the golf team and make his father proud.

Coach Wilson (Richard T. Jones) is skeptical about giving Taylor a second chance to play for the school. But then Wilson sees Taylor playing a round with his best player, Connor (Blair Jackson, who gives the film’s best performance). Realizing that Taylor actually is a good golfer, Wilson allows him to join the junior varsity team. When one of the varsity players is caught cheating, Taylor moves up to varsity. He also starts a tentative relationship with Bailey (Alexandria DeBerry), even though Connor considers Bailey to be his girlfriend.

Tucker, meanwhile, starts going out with Minka (Katie Leclerc), a nurse at the hospital. A surprisingly large amount of screentime is devoted to Tucker and Minka’s romance, despite the fact that there’s not really much of a story there. Both Tucker and Minka are single and they start dating. One gets the feeling that the main reason this storyline was given such prominence in the film is because the actor playing Tucker also wrote the film.

This is a faith-based film, so there’s naturally a lot of emphasis on everyone praying for Carl’s recovery. This is the type of film where people discuss attending a Fellowship of Christian Athletes meeting without a hint of irony. This is also the rare high school film where no one ever curses, there’s no drinking to be found, and all of the relationships are relatively chaste. Whether or not the viewer finds this to be realistic would depend on what type of high school they went to. My high school experience was a bit different.

When the film started, I had a problem with the amount of pressure that Carl put on his sons to follow in his footsteps. That was especially true in the case of Taylor, who seemed to be a good kid who just happened to be a bit more laid back than either his father or his brother. Though it’s not made apparent until the film is nearly over, Round Of Your Life did share my concerns. Visually, Round of Your Life is fairly bland and the twist at the end won’t be a huge shock to anyone who has ever seen one of these films before. But there is a likable earnestness to this movie. And, needless to say, the golf courses were lovely.

Back to School #64: Friday Night Lights (dir by Peter Berg)

Posted on September 20, 2014 by Lisa Marie Bowman

For the past three weeks, I’ve been looking at some of the best, worst, most memorable, and most forgettable high school and teen films ever made. I’ve been posting the reviews in chronological order and, as I look back over the previous 63 Back to School reviews, one thing that I can’t escape is football.

It’s funny. Despite being a Texas girl, I know very little about football and, whenever I have found myself watching a game, I’ve usually end up getting bored out of my mind. I’m not a huge fan of sports films, either. It’s just not my thing. And yet, as a result of doing this series of reviews, I’ve watched more football films over the past month than I had probably seen in my entire life previously. Some of the films that I’ve reviewed specifically were football films — The Pom Pom Girls, All The Right Moves, and Varsity Blues, for example. However, even the film that weren’t specifically about the sport often featured scenes set on the football field. Just think of Forest Whitaker in Fast Times At Ridgemont High or the socially conflicted jocks from Dazed and Confused.

For a lot of films, football and high school seem to go together. And one of the most acclaimed high school football films is 2004’s Friday Night Lights. Now, I have to admit that Friday Night Lights is not one of my favorite films. It’s a football film, I’m not into football, and therefore, Friday Night Lights is a film that I respect more as a well-made film than like as a source of entertainment. Perhaps the best thing that I can say about Friday Night Lights is that I understand why so many people who do love football also happen to love this film.

And I do have to say that I appreciate that Friday Night Lights is also a film about Texas that actually manages to realistically portray my home state without resorting to the predictable clichés that dominated Varsity Blues.

Taking place in Odessa, Texas, Friday Night Lights follows the 1988 season of the Permian Panthers. As opposed to most sports films, Friday Night Lights does not focus on a team of lovable underdogs. Instead, the Panthers are already known for being a championship team. As the season begins, Coach Gary Gaines (Billy Bob Thornton) is under tremendous pressure to continue that winning tradition. However, when the team’s star player is injured during the first game of the season, the Panthers suddenly find their pre-ordained winning season in doubt. Gaines finds himself being alternatively celebrated and demonized depending on how the previous night’s game has gone and his players find themselves under tremendous pressure from everyone in town. The film features a great performance from Billy Bob Thornton and a really good one from Derek Luke, playing a player who abruptly goes from being a future superstar to a present could-have-been. In fact, the entire film is well-acted with even country singer Tim McGraw giving a surprisingly multi-faceted performance as a former player-turned-drunk.

In short, Friday Night Lights is a lot like Varsity Blues, except that it doesn’t suck.

(Incidentally, Friday Night Lights did inspire a TV series. I never watched it.)

Back to School #52: The Faculty (dir by Robert Rodriguez)

Posted on September 14, 2014 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Have you ever wanted to see Jon Stewart get stabbed in the eye with a hypodermic needle?

If you answered yes, then 1998’s The Faculty might be the film for you!

The Faculty takes a look at what happens when a new alien species happens to turn up outside of a painfully normal high school in Ohio. By painfully normal, I mean that Herrington High School is just as messed up as you would expect a suburban high school to be. The teachers are all underpaid and resentful of their principal (Bebe Neuwrith). Prof. Furlong (Jon Stewart) is the overqualified science teacher who will perhaps be a little too excited about the chance to examine a new alien species. Coach Willis (Robert Patrick) is the emotionally shut off coach of the school’s losing football team. Mrs. Olson (Piper Laurie) is the drama teacher who struggles to promote creativity in a school that’s more interested in blind conformity. Miss Burke (Famke Janssen) is the teacher who cares too much. And, finally, there’s Nurse Harper (Salma Hayek), who looks a lot like Salma Hayek.

And, as typical as the teachers may be, the students are even more so. We get to know a few and they all neatly fit into the expected stereotypes. Casey (Elijah Wood) is the nerdy outcast who is regularly picked on by … well, by everyone. Deliliah (Jordana Brewster) is the status-obsessed head cheerleader who has just broken up with her boyfriend, Stan (Shawn Hatosy), because he quit the football team. Zeke (Josh Hartnett) is the school rebel, the kid who is repeating his senior year and who sells synthetic drugs out of the trunk of his car. Stokes (Clea DuVall) is an intentional outcast who pretends to be a lesbian and has a crush on Stan. And finally, there’s Marybeth (Laura Harris), a new transfer student who speaks with a Southern accent.

These students would seem to have nothing in common but they’re going to have to work together because the entire faculty of Herrington High has been taken over by aliens! Fortunately, the aliens are vulnerable to Zeke’s drugs, which is something that is learned after Jon Stewart takes a hypodermic to the eye…

When one looks over the top Texas filmmakers (director like Terrence Malick, Richard Linklater, Mike Judge, and David Gorden Green), Robert Rodriguez often comes across as being both the most likable and the least interesting. Like his frequent collaborator Quentin Tarantino, Rodriguez fills his movies with references and homages to other films but, unlike Tarantino, there rarely seems to be much going on behind all of those references. However, Rodriguez’s referential style works well in The Faculty because, along with acting as an homage to both Invasion of the Body Snatchers and John Carpenter’s The Thing, The Faculty also manages to tap into a universal truth.

Teachers are weird!

Or, at least, they seem weird when you’re a student. Now that I’m out of high school, I can look back and see that my teachers were actually pretty normal. They were people who did their jobs and, as much as I like to think that I was everyone’s all-time favorite, I’m sure that there have been other brilliant, asthmatic, redheaded, aspiring ballerinas who have sat in their class. My teachers spent a lot of time talking about things that I may not have been interested in but that wasn’t because they were obsessed with talking to me about algebra or chemistry or anything like that. They were just doing their job, just like everyone else does.

But, seriously, when you’re a student, it’s easy to believe that your teachers have been possessed by an alien life form.

Probably the best thing about The Faculty is the fact that the aliens cause the teachers to act in ways that are the exact opposite of their usual personalities. For most of the teachers, this means that they turn into homicidal lunatics. But, in the case of Coach Willis, this actually leads to him not only becoming a happy, well-adjusted human being but it also turns him into a good coach. Suddenly, Willis is getting emotional about the games, his team loves him, and he even gets a win!

Go Coach Willis!

As for the film itself, it’s not bad at all.

Lisa’s rating: 7 out of 10.