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August 26, 2006

Hollywood Celebrates ThatKidInTheCorner Day!

In which I go to see Invincible and wonder, What if the entire world really does revolve around me?

You'll have to forgive a bit of narcissism on my behalf this Saturday morning. On August 25th, Hollywood released both a Disney film about the Philadelphia Eagles, Invincible, and a Broken Lizard movie about drinking games, Beerfest. The trailer for Invincible features guys in a bar doing an E-A-G-L-E-S chant; the Beerfest commercial shows a guy shooting quarters. Birds and drinking games. On the same day. So you really can't blame me if I think this is all somehow about me.

(Do you ever secretly wonder if all the other people you encounter on a given day are actually robotic drones filling out the ranks in the gigantic RPG simulation that is your life? Me neither. Never once.)

Admittedly, I have yet to see the Beerfest movie (though late-night text messages on the topic seem very encouraging), but I made a point of showing up for Invincible on opening night. I mean, I really have to tip my cap to the Walt Disney Company and The Philadelphia Eagles, LLC for programming an absolutely perfect end-to-end cross-media content consumption experience for me. The blow by blow:

4:13 pm: battle traffic to get home in time for 5 pm PDT kickoff of Eagles - Steelers preseason game. Typical road rage and swearing, accentuated by lingering anxieties about missing the first couple minutes of the telecast.

4:56 pm: arrive home, open laptop, do some quick assessments of remaining work for afternoon. All very doable.

5:00 pm: and we are live on channel 31 (ESPN on the Comcast dial) for a special Friday Night Presentation of Monday Night Football. My first taste of Kornheiser in the booth. Is that Vince Papale doing the intro for the telecast? I wonder how they were able to line that up? Did you say something about Invincible being a Walt Disney Pictures release? And that Walt Disney Pictures and ESPN are both owned by the Walt Disney Company? Really?

5:02 pm: what's that? Is that our first commercial for Invincible? Did someone say that it was Vince Papale night at the Linc? Oh wait, they meant that it was Vince Papale day in the City Of Philadelphia. Of course.

5:12 pm: is that another commercial for Invincible?

6:45 pm: my buddy shows up (not an Eagles fan, but at least sympathetic to my needs) and finds me on the couch, in Eagles jersey, shouting at the third-string defense.

6:55 pm: is that Dick Vermeil (played by Greg Kinnear in Invincible) visiting the ESPN broadcast booth? I wonder how or why he ended up there?

7:55 pm: okay, we're good. Our ones looked better than their ones. J.R. Reed played like a superhero and Buck looked good. Check. Time for dinner.

8:30 pm: meander to theater to secure tickets for 9:45 show. I'm definitely wearing my #32 M. Lewis shirt. I'm concerned the show might sell out. "Two for Invincible at 9:45." Really? The guy wearing the Eagles officially licensed products, in C@L, wants to see the movie about the Eagles? I quote Marvin from Midnight Run:

Girl at desk: [selling a flight ticket to Marvin] Would that be smoking or non-smoking, sir?
Marvin Dorfler: [exhaling smoke] Take a wild guess.

The two teenagers in the ticket booth look on in fascinated horror. It doesn't hurt my feelings that my buddy may have been rolling his eyes at this little demo.

--Interlude for dinner in Ballard; it goes without saying that I enjoyed dipping the fries in the tartar sauce: viva C@L! --

9:45 pm: the curtain is up and suddenly it's early summer, 1976, in South Philadelphia (I was a couple months old at the time). Sigh.

So I'm going to try to keep the hyperbole to a minimum in my notes on the film. I'm going to try. Baseline answer is that I really really liked it. But, well, I wasn't too tough a sell. All things considered, the only caveat/ qualification I'll offer along with my enthusiastic endorsement of this film/ entertainment experience is that it's definitely a Disney movie, but mostly in the Miracle genre as opposed to the Remember The Titans genre. If that makes sense. My takeaways:

Someone get me a Frank's soda and some Herr's: It's one thing to make the generic sports rags-to-riches story. We get the underdog who overcomes all the odds and finds improbably success. The team doesn't really matter all that much, since we're really engaged by our underdog hero, typically some everyman who exists beyond the boundaries of his immediate environment. Within that context, I expected to enjoy that this movie was about Philly/ The Birds, but figured I'd be hungry for more Philly/ The Birds than I would get. Nope. The Philly/ The Birds stuff is completely over-the-top, and actually feels pretty authentic. I just expected the standard cliches, and while we got the obligatory "They booed Santa Claus!" they actually kept it pretty real. Evidence of said Real, Keeping It: the Yuengling logos everywhere (easy one), the playing football with the guys (including obligatory fighting), the general anger and tone of the folks in the stands, the booing the team at training camp, the shots of the row houses, that they devoted an entire minor character and subplot to a standard hater/ Negadelphian guy at the bar (This person exists! He calls WIP all day!), and -- the coup de grace -- the friggin' plastic slipcovers on the couch of the old Italian lady who lives next to Vince(!). Bee-yoo-tee-full.

The obvious Rocky stuff: I mean, if you're going to make an underdog sports movie in Philly, you can either fight the Rocky thing or embrace it. Invincible completely embraces it. We get shots of Vince on an early-morning jog in South Philly. Wasn't Rocky shot in 1976? Hmmm. I'm shocked that Vince didn't bump into Rock on one of those runs or pour Paulie a beer there at Max's.

It might as well have been a sitcom: speaking of Max's, there are essentially three sets in the entire film: the bar where Vince works and his buddies hang out, his empty apartment (complete with holes in the wall that Vince put there in a drunken rage), and football. That's it. Again, and I can't stress this enough, this is a movie about the Eagles that, when it isn't showing the Eagles, takes place in a bar and a 30-year-old bachelor's apartment. See above in re: Around Me, The World Revolving.

Legit football shots: nothing worse than when the football movie has silly, inauthentic or overdone slo-mo football action shots. Invincible gets it right, especially the speed of the special teams experience, and the hitting at practice. It felt right. Also, they made Harold Carmichael appropriately tall.

Dick Vermeil comma Leonard Tose: who has Oscar ballots? Who? Get Greg Kinnear's name on the ballot! He does a dead-on Dick Vermeil; I was just bummed that we didn't get any Dick Vermeil tears. But he totally nails the Dick Vermeil accent and cadence. And this is definitely something that deserves serious consideration by a professional actor. Also, the guy who played Leonard Tose was perfect.

Minor issues with authenticity: what was that track doing in the overhead shot of the imaginary Vet? It was bad enough that they couldn't digitally recreate the field on the Vet (ew, Franklin Field), but to insert a track? The vet was a circle...I don't even understand how the track would have worked?

Thank You For Calling the Wachooooovia Center: I could have used a ton more Philly accents. A ton. A couple of the minor characters had vague flashes, but this was a real opportunity to have someone go nuts with the Phillytalk (see here for some of the comprehensive work on the topic) and really take it to the next level (in a Fargo sort of way). The Philly accent is something of a secret (though Tina Fey almost blew its cover on SNL the night before Super Bowl XXXIX); this would have been a classy way to go national with it.

Yeah. So. Invincible is pretty sweet. Go Birds.

(See below for a picture of the cheesesteak I made in the middle of writing this; couldn't be helped -- the lunch choice, the photo, and the decision to post said photo.)

Posted by thatkid at August 26, 2006 1:02 PM under C@L , Philly , Sports , Stuff To Buy , ThatKid

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Posted by: Jonathan at August 27, 2006 3:39 PM

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