Bringing The Green Vegetables

My friends Matt ("Sidwell Matt") and his roommate Matt ("Aswell") live in Glover Park and party hysterically. They held a costume-required viewing of "Grizzly Man". Also, both of these Matts are enormous, six-four or six-five, hell, taller, I dunno. When you're five-eight, at some point those distinctions become irrelevant. They're both in the irrelevantly tall camp.

Anyway, Sidwell Matt and Aswell threw out a Monday email inviting a few heads to "Invincible Tuesday: A Celebration of the Little Man". It also turned into a celebration of low-level bar food, as we snacked on fatty chicken wings, oven-baked chicken tenders and (thanks to me) the hilariously incongruous Broccoli Rabe with Garlic & Olive Oil from Whole Foods.

Then, we watched "Invincible". What a shit film. They took a wonderful true story -- 30 year-old Philly bartender makes the Eagles as a special teamer -- and ripped out the soul. It opens with a sequence set in the 700-level of the Vet. There's no cursing. No punches are thrown. Now, I didn't expect an accurate, gritty, hurling-their-own-feces portrayal of the Philly faithful. I did have an inkling; I've seen "Remember The Titans". Still, these fans wouldn't have been out of place at my uber-pussy cellar-dwelling private high school football games. I couldn't get over it.

The film didn't expeect me to. The rest of the movie portrays South Philly's bar flies, striking union workers and unemployed alcoholics in a similarly realistic light. Worse still, the screenwriters murdered this film before Disney pulled their teeth. They were wrong to shoehorn this into a story about one man giving a battered city hope and a story about some walk-on turning around a football team. At best, it could have been the NFL's Rudy, where a man fights and wins an internal battle, and the applause of those around him, the reward that follows, is both warming and immaterial.

They couldn't pull that together, though. If it had been a "you made the team" ending, a stirring speech from Vermeil to the Eagles locker room about the virtues of grit and toughness and character, that would have done it. Instead, we get this cockamamie blocked punt... and then, the director makes the brilliant decision to show the actual play, where Papale did not, in fact block the punt at all. Aspiring Filmmakers: When you base something on a true story, do not give the audience incontrovertible video evidence of the shit you made up.

The film is shot in sepia, but might as well have been a cartoon. Fuck you, Disney. Why can't the Christian Right get more up in arms about your talking animals and your half-human mer-people? Hey, Pat & Jerry, I heard Sodom was chock full of mermaids getting fucked by talking lions. Now, sic 'em!

Rating: 1/5 of Dick Vermeil's Tears