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DVD The Best of Times
This shaggy-dog fable barely drew fleas when it arrived in the winter of 1986. Now critics refer to it as a winning, offbeat classic. What took 'em so long? Probably the fact that director Roger Spottiswoode (Tomorrow Never Dies) and screenwriter Ron Shelton (Bull Durham) were chasing something very elusive: a cockeyed, scatological look at delayed glory. Robin Williams plays Jack Dundee, a meek bank VP in Taft, California, who daily relives the humiliation of a bobbled pass in the game against Bakersfield. Not content to live out his days as "Butterfingers" Dundee, Jack hits on a plan to "rewrite history" by restaging the Big Game. Taft's now-over-the-hill quarterback, Reno Hightower (Kurt Russell), reluctantly goes along with the harebrained scheme to redeem his buddy. The guys' wives (Holly Palance and Pamela Reed) shake their heads and play along. At once zany, sweet, and nostalgic, this small-town chronicle strives for, and achieves, folk-legend status. "Casey at the Bat" in shoulder pads, anyone? --Glenn Lovell
Robin Williams and Kurt Russell give a performance different from their norm. I have never liked Robin or Kurt that much, but I liked this film because it is likeable, minus all the profanity and other tactless nonsense included in this film. The storyline was the most acceptable part. I purchased this DVD about a year ago, and as soon as I finished watching this film, two things occurred to me. A) This film does present itself in an oddly, almost irreverently comedic tone and B)The Best of Times, though certainly interesting, should not have recieved the acclaim that many people gave it. It was never a critics choice, however, and rightly not, because it is at best a B- kind of thing. It is, however, worth checking out because it's a Sunday night classic.
BOTTOM LINE: Don't waste 2 hours on it if you hate small towns, football, a combination of the two, or bad acting by no-names included in the less than all-star back cast.
A underated classic
I first saw this movie when it was out on VHS. Yes, it is that old of a movie. From the start, I thought this movie was a classic. Jack Dundee (played by Robin Williams) is living in a state of agony because of a dropped pass in a highschool football game. Reno Hightower (played by Kurt Russel) was the quaterback, the only good quaterback the town ever had, who threw him that pass. The town in the movie is a typical small town where highschool football is big. Unfortunately for Robin Williams, that was the one chance the town had for a championship season. Robin Williams gets the idea to replay the game with the same players on both sides. Without giving away the plot, this is one movie that is worth getting. It will keep you amused and rooting for Williams throughout the whole movie.
Always have enjoyed this film
I remember going to see this film when it was released. I have always enjoyed it. Not a hit movie for some reason & not the best film ever made, but it is funny, Robin Williams doing his thing. Just ordered the DVD. I can finally watch it wide screen at home.
Director Robert Aldrich had a knack for depicting outsiders with originality and authenticity. Much like The Dirty Dozen, The Longest Yard is a popular fable about integrity and group unity. It possesses a requisite toughness along with the loneliness that accompanies the outsider status. Compromise is never easy in an Aldrich film. There's always a bitter price to pay.
Burt Reynolds, in peak form, plays a former pro quarterback ostracized for shaving points. After beating up his girlfriend and resisting arrest, Reynolds winds up in prison, where he's taunted by warden Eddie Albert to help his semiprofessional team of guardsmen win a championship. Naturally, the inmates despise Reynolds, and naturally he redeems himself in one of the great movie football matches of all... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Burt Reynolds - Eddie Albert Director(s): Robert Aldrich DVD Release Date: Released the 10 May 2005 Usually ships in 24 hours
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Necessary Roughness came on the heels of the baseball film "Major League" and follows the same script formula of a group of misfits overcoming all odds and winning the big game. Due to NCAA sanctions, the Texas State University Fightin' Armadillos must form a football team from their actual student body, with no scholarships to help, to play their football schedule. With fewer players than most teams, the makeshift team must overcome obstacles that the best teams in the country couldn't deal with. Using a 34 year old quarterback, a female placekicker and a gang of misfits, Ed "Straight Arrow" Genero (Hector Elizondo) must take his team to play the number one Texas Colts.
At the height of urban paranoia and the birth of survivalist movement in the 1980s, director Michael Ritchie decided to team Robin Williams and Walter Matthau. Talk about an odd couple; yet it actually might have worked, with Matthau's hang-dog deadpan and Williams's manic energy, were it not for a limp script by Michael Leeson. Williams and Matthau play two victims of Reaganomics, unemployed acquaintances who witness a robbery and identify one of the participants to the police, an act that turns them into targets for the robber in question, who comes looking for them. Williams's response: become a one-man arsenal and join a training camp for militant survivalists. But the comedy is neither sharp enough nor sufficiently smart to pull it off; Matthau is the calm center while Williams's... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Walter Matthau - Robin Williams Director(s): Michael Ritchie DVD Release Date: Released the 23 April 2002 Usually ships within 24 hours
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Robin Williams in his fuzzy, sensitive mode with bittersweet touches plays a musician in a Russian circus who gets talked into defecting by a pal and does so (though the pal bails on him at the last minute)--in the middle of Bloomingdale's. A great concept, to be sure, but writer-director Paul Mazursky doesn't seem to know where to go from there. Williams winds up living in the same kind of poverty that he did in Russia, casting about for a way to make a living while both wallowing and drowning in the sudden tidal wave of freedom. Mazursky wants to make a point about how little we appreciate what we have, but he fails to entertain in the process--or at least to engage in a consistent way. --Marshall FineMore Info about this DVD Actor(s): Robin Williams - Maria Conchita Alonso Director(s): Paul Mazursky DVD Release Date: Released the 27 November 2001 Usually ships in 24 hours
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A very savvy, 1978 film directed by Ted Kotcheff (First Blood) dealing with the seamier side of professional football. Phillip Elliott and Maxwell (Nick Nolte and Mac Davis, respectively) are players for a Texas football team loosely based on the championship Dallas Cowboys. Though at the peak of his football career, Elliott is a personal and physical mess, needing all manner of drugs prescribed by the team physician to play and even to move around. The indifference of the team management and the hypocritical stance toward recreational drug use versus the drug abuse practiced by the players leads to a crisis of conscience for Nolte. The combination of Nolte's volatile presence and Davis's understated performance as the quarterback who thinks he's seen it all helps make North... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Nick Nolte - Charles Durning Director(s): Ted Kotcheff DVD Release Date: Released the 30 January 2001 Usually ships in 24 hours
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