Any Given Sunday (1999)
Directed by Oliver Stone
A star quarterback gets knocked out of the game and an unknown third stringer is called in to replace him. The unknown gives a stunning performance and forces the aging coach to reevaluate his game plans and life. A new co-owner/president adds to the pressure of winning. The new owner must prove herself in a male dominated world.
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What critics compared Any Given Sunday to
It’s understanding of the league and league business is questionable, putting it in same category as Draft Day or Any Given Sunday, both movies that strain credulity in this regard.
…it’s a muddled mix of “Any Given Sunday” and “Rosemary’s Baby.”
With this setup, it seemed like HIM could be a more sinister, twisted version of Any Given Sunday peeling back deeper levels on the sacrifices professional football players make to become the very best.
Like many “unauthorized” films that feature American pro football, Him is obliged to omit any trademarks connected to the real-world NFL (see also: North Dallas Forty, The Last Boy Scout, Any Given Sunday).
Much like Moneyball or Oliver Stone’s Any Given Sunday, Air is a look at the business behind sports rather than the games themselves.
Obviously influenced by Oliver Stone 's Any Given Sunday , Berg effectively paints his own gritty, documentary-style picture of the competitive sport, without relying on too many trite, gushy, over-the-top moments.
Oliver Stone took a stab at the same subject with Any Given Sunday, but his overheated hysteria often got in the way of the larger points he was trying to make.
It's what the Omaha Beach sequence in Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan is to Oliver Stone's Platoon: an evolution by way of devolution that erases the veneer, such as there is, prettifying violent confrontation, becoming in the process the unadorned engine to which Stone's ultimately featherweight Any Given Sunday aspired.
Oliver Stone's Any Given Sunday was virtually ruined by this same syndrome, but to his credit Berg does show some restraint in Friday Night Lights.
Focus is effortlessly cool (and very hot) for a good long time, ramping up to a genuinely amazing mid-movie showdown with the great B.D. Wong playing a billionaire degenerate gambler during a game in which, if I’m not mistaken, Oliver Stone’s Any Given Sunday Miami Sharks have made it once again to the Super Bowl.
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Watching Life of Pi (Pi) a line from Oliver Stone’s Any Given Sunday came to mind – “There are no atheists in foxholes.”
La cámara del cinefotógrafo, Salvatore Totino ( Any Given Sunday , 1999; The Da Vinci Code , 2006), parece deslizarse desde la cresta más alta del Everest para mostrarnos inmensas masas de roca helada y configurar fluidas y emocionantes secuencias donde los espacios reducidos, las grietas y los huecos de las montañas incrementan la sensación de vértigo.
Damson Idris has the same presence of a young Jamie Foxx in “Any Given Sunday.”
That’s why the best pigskin flicks—including Peter Berg’s Friday Night Lights and Oliver Stone’s underrated Any Given Sunday—elevate it to something resembling gladiatorial combat.
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The script by Daniel Pyne (a Miami Vice TV vet before penning Any Given Sunday and The Manchurian Candidate) and Glenn Gers would probably have benefited from the excision of some of the filmâs unnecessary bits of business.
Your mileage my vary, but I have to go all the way back to 1999’s Any Given Sunday to find a really great feature that bore his name, and after the loud flop of Alexander (a movie he’s recut and re-released into approximately forty-seven different version) and the odd detour of World Trade Center, he began what looks like a campaign, conscious or not, to recreate his past successes.
Some of his best works (JFK, Nixon, and even Any Given Sunday, his take on the NFL) have taken real stories of shadowy abuses of power and blown them up to operatic proportions.
The film doesn't feel as if it was shot out of a cannon, like his raucous '90s output (best being the wildly indulgent "Natural Born Killers," worst being the gassy, overbearing "Any Given Sunday").
He takes a firm stance with "Snowden," his best feature film since 1999's "Any Given Sunday."
Stone followed Natural Born Killers with the very good Nixon , another portrait of an American icon, and then went on to make a handful of sometimes interesting but lesser films — the bonkers genre flicks U-Turn and Savages , the football exposé Any Given Sunday , the Bush-biopic W. , the respectful 9/11 drama World Trade Center .
In the case of “Snowden,” however, most of them do, making this biopic/thriller the director’s most consistent movie he’s made since 1999’s “Any Given Sunday.”