April 2001
One Shots : Any Given Sunday
ANY GIVEN SUNDAY
by Sˇkou

Okay, so by now, you've heard all the drama. Racist. Sexist. And everything else in between. And I know you're expecting me to jump on the bandwagon. But I gotta tell ya, I'm really not feeling the hype. It would be one thing if, as in my one shot of The Green Mile, I felt there was a subversive, clandestine kind of cheap-shot lurking in the movie for some to pick up on and for others to miss. However, in Any Given Sunday it's spelled out for you right there on the screen. Hey, it says in no uncertain terms, the game of football is racist, sexist, exploitive, and downright scuzzy. You can't miss the message; the movie beats you over the head with it in vivid images and scathing dialogue so it seems kind of redundant to define the movie itself by the same adjectives. I think that misses the point. The point of the flick is to bring the "stuff" up, to open the can of worms and see what happens. You know, that thing that Spike Lee does all the time when he brings up all the tough issues without pointing you toward any resolution. In my opinion, that's the point of Any Given Sunday. It's an attempt to tell it like it is- bad stuff included. That said, I think folks should lambaste the NFL, not the filmmakers. My personal complaints were: one, the thing was so long that I can't see why they didn't clearly resolve all the subplots instead of only a few and, two, I admit it, I could have done without that locker room scene- while I recognize that's the way it really is (as any female sports journalist will tell you) we didn't really need to see all that, did we·? Ladies? Hello? Oh, well, never mind.