When I remember “Remember the Titans” (2000), I remember it as being a lot better than it actually is. I gloss over the “based on a true story” bending of actual events into outright falsehoods, the Disneyfied melodrama, the insertion of musical scenes to help the Original Motion Picture Soundtrack sell better, and the general sports movie, big-game, big-speech schmaltziness. Yet the story of a Virginia high school overcoming an integration controversy to win a state football championship with a black head coach is still interesting enough to overcome the Hollywood treatment. Plus, it’s just fun watching Denzel be Denzel.
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The one thing I’ve noticed about the last couple of Peter Berg movies is that Mark Wahlberg gets his ass whupped. First “Lone Survivor” and now “Deepwater Horizon” (2016), a retelling of the 2010 BP oil exploration disaster. (Good thing Berg isn’t doing the “Ted” series, otherwise the bear probably would have killed Marky Mark by now.) This one reminded me a little of 1970s disaster flicks (“The Towering Inferno,” “Earthquake”) where chaos is the star and we’re just trying to survive along with all the actors until the end. Things were a lot less gory 40 years ago, though.
You watch “True Story” (2015) with the expectation that there’s going to be the typical true-crime plot twist, even though it’s so obvious that there isn’t going to be one. Instead, you get a character study of a disgraced journalist (Jonah Hill) and an accused murderer (James Franco) and the bizarre relationship that develops between them. Which is sort of like the bizarre relationship you have with the plot, wanting to believe in something that you know isn’t there. Because it makes for a better story? You went in wanting to understand a killer. You ended up understanding the writer.
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