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DVD The Longest Yard (Lockdown Edition)
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 time. --Bill Desowitz
Review(s): DVD The Longest Yard (Lockdown Edition)
doesn't have the humor, but this is a quality football movie. Well worth watching
Often billed as a football comedy, I'm not sure The Longest Yard really is one. Starring a young Burt Reynolds, The Longest Yard is, simply, a good movie. Reynolds is Paul "Wrecking" Crewe, a former NFL star quarterback who has been out of the game for eight years. He's not a very good man. He is selfish, treats a woman poorly (who is also treating him poorly when we meet her), drives drunk, wrecks her car, assaults a police officer, and doesn't really take anything seriously. Crewe is sentenced to prison where the warden (Eddie Albert) wants Crewe to help coach his semi-pro football team and help with the championship.
To make a long story short Crewe declines, gets put on a nasty work detail and in the end has to put together a football team made up of inmates to give the warden's team a proper warm-up game before their season starts. Crewe has ideas on what exactly he should be doing and how to best protect himself and proceeds to put together a team of the nastiest, toughest inmates in the prison. The joke will be on the warden because some of the guards are on the warden's team and the inmates are out to hurt them.
There are moments of humor as Crewe cracks wise as often as he can and there is some situational comedy with the football, but this is not a terribly funny movie. It's just a well told, well acted story. The backstory of Crewe having shaved points off of a football game comes into play several times in the movie and everyone here does an excellent job making the characters real and raw, and the action believable yet entertaining. It is easy to see why Hollywood wanted to remake this movie, but that is another topic best left for another time.
Despite being a person who loves to watch movies, my experience with Burt Reynolds is rather limited. I loved his performance in Boogie Nights, but otherwise I only know him from The Cannonball Run and Smokey and the Bandit. This is unfortunate because Reynolds certainly can be a good actor and he is quite good here in The Longest Yard. Fans of movies and football movies need to see this one. It is well worth the two hours and it holds up quite well.
-Joe Sherry
"Was it worth it, Pop?"
I can't believe they even considered remaking this film! And with Adam Sandler in the Burt Reynolds role? What in the name of God were they thinking? Burt had one of his best roles here as Paul Crewe, an ex-pro way past his prime who finds himself in prison after socking his girlfriend, dumping her car in the bay, and beating up the police. When he gets inside, he finds that the warden has a semi-pro team that practices against the inmates. Eddie Albert is at his malevolent best as the sadistic warden who never drops his grin. The fun starts when Reynolds sets about organizing the inmates' team. This is a movie with a really likeable cast, from James Hampton of "F Troop" fame, to Richard Kiel, who has perhaps the best line of the movie. Along the way, the inmates regain their pride as human beings, and they play to win. Reynolds knows he's expected to throw the game, just as he had done when he was a pro, but something happens that makes him change his mind. And that's the beauty of this mind. He starts to actually care about something, and about the people around him. The turning point in this movie is when Reynolds asks Pop, the lifer who takes care of the team equipment, is punching the warden was worth thirty years. "Yeah," he pauses. "For me it was."... "Then gimme my goddamn shoe!" This film is an example of the kind of quality movies that were made in the seventies: stories about people, real people that you come to care about. I doubt the remake will succeed in that regard.
Watch It With The Guys
I'm not gonna bother mentioning the name of the several celebrities that are featured in this film. Yes, this film is to do with American Football minus the cheesy bit. If someone ran over the story, I wouldn't believe him/her and would never watch it. But yes, this is one of a kind and this movie has some extreme good use of limited party humor. It's funny in it's own way but I liked the camerawork and all a lot. Adam Sandler was good and so was Chris Tucker. I enjoy prison movies but this one's the kind to be taken lightly since it's no Shawshank Redemption but it is one movie that comes out of the blue and bang! It's good. Anyhow, before I confuse either of us, let's just say The Longest Yard is by far a movie worth watching. I enjoyed a lot of scenes in the film and would recommend people to give it a watch at the nearest theater or rent the dvd and watch it with your friends.
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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Adam Sandler is no Burt Reynolds, but his remake of The Longest Yard is amusing enough to stand on its own. Inheriting the role played by Reynolds played in the 1974 original, Sandler plays Paul Crewe, a scandalized former football star who violates his parole and winds up back in the slammer, where an ambitious, corrupt warden (James Cromwell) manipulates him into forming a convict football squad to compete with a team of bullying prison guards. But where the original (directed with characteristic ruggedness by Robert Aldrich) was a semi-comic study of inmate resistance against powerful oppressors, Sandler's version is a formulaic comedy about winning against the bad guys. That makes it a softer, less meaningful film, and Sandler (reuniting here with Peter Segal after Anger... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Adam Sandler - Chris Rock - Burt Reynolds Director(s): Peter Segal DVD Release Date: Released the 20 September 2005 Usually ships in 24 hours
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While women shed more than a few tears over Love Story back in 1970, men had their equivalent with Brian's Song on TV. This biopic about the Chicago Bears' Brian Piccolo and Gale Sayers is no mere sports film. It's one of those transcendent stories that struck a rare cultural nerve, a sensitive film about love, friendship, cancer, racial harmony, and football that came along at just the right time. James Caan is at his free-spirited best as Piccolo, and Billy Dee Williams is very charming as the quiet Sayers destined for superstardom. Roommates and rivals, these two rookies soon become best friends because of their competitive natures and complementary personalities. When Piccolo becomes stricken with cancer, his relentless will to live inspires the talented Sayers to reach... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): James Caan - Billy Dee Williams Director(s): Buzz Kulik DVD Release Date: Released the 08 August 2000 Usually ships in 24 hours
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Based on the perennial nonfiction bestseller by H.G. Bissinger, Friday Night Lights looks at high school football in the harsh light of reality, finding heart and hardness while stirring our emotions. Actor-director Peter Berg (Very Bad Things, The Rundown) is Bissinger's cousin; he knows the material well, and understands how an obsession with winning turns high school kids into somber, over-pressured gladiators--expendable soldiers in a community war against shame and obscurity. The fact-based story focuses on the 1988 football season of Odessa-Permian high school in West Texas, and as a fast-paced sports movie, Berg delivers the goods with a rousing, frenetically styled crowd-pleaser. But there's darkness in this tale of weary underdogs, including an abusive father... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Billy Bob Thornton - Lucas Black (II) - Derek Luke - Jay Hernandez Director(s): Peter Berg DVD Release Date: Released the 18 January 2005 Usually ships in 24 hours
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Clint Eastwood's 25th film as a director, Million Dollar Baby stands proudly with Unforgiven and Mystic River as the masterwork of a great American filmmaker. In an age of bloated spectacle and computer-generated effects extravaganzas, Eastwood turns an elegant screenplay by Paul Haggis (adapted from the book Rope Burns: Stories From the Corner by F.X. Toole, a pseudonym for veteran boxing manager Jerry Boyd) into a simple, humanitarian example of classical filmmaking, as deeply felt in its heart-wrenching emotions as it is streamlined in its character-driven storytelling. In the course of developing powerful bonds between "white-trash" Missouri waitress and aspiring boxer Maggie Fitzgerald (Hilary Swank), her grizzled, reluctant trainer Frankie Dunn... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Clint Eastwood - Hilary Swank - Morgan Freeman Director(s): Clint Eastwood DVD Release Date: Released the 12 July 2005 Usually ships in 24 hours
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