Ripoffs, duds and flatly lame premises are legion in the ongoing tale of assembly line Hollywood hokum, but if anyone in the film industry wants to tell the story of Boise State's 2006 season cinematically, he should just spend his half million securing the rights to this:
The Broncos' story, according to the Idaho Statesman [hat tip: The Wiz], is a "David and Goliath" tale with "creativity, courage, risk-taking and even romance" enough to convince five different producers to inquire about making a film in the vein of Hoosiers, Rudy and Miracle (they forgot Remember the Titans and We Are Marshall). Except that three of those examples were relatively minor stories that weren't popularly known until they were filmed many years later, and even the massively hyped Olympic hockey victory wasn't put to film for a quarter century after the fact. Most of all, every one of these except Hoosiers is a hackneyed account of sentimentality run amok. Frankly, judging from his incredulous reaction to the end of Remember the Titans, SMQ could not begin to accept the ending of the Fiesta Bowl as part of a script, anyway.
And he doesn't have to, because the actual Fiesta Bowl is a real memory he and millions of other thrilled fans will always possess because they actually watched it, live, unscripted and absurd. Reality exists not to be turned into entertainment; it is not made official by celebrity. SMQ would rather not have the gaps in his memory of an actual event filled by some goateed actor as Jared Zabransky, steely-eyed and spouting cliched fiction when things look most bleak, or a dysfunctional couple in Section EE decide if Boise State can make it work, then maybe we can, too. Aside from the fact that all sports are inherently dramatic, and we already know the outcome of Boise State's dramatic story, and other unlikely stories in college football and elsewhere are routinely ignored (like, for insance, the "original Cinderella story," by Charles Davis' estimation, the 2004 Utah Utes, who also won the Fiesta Bowl to cap a surprising undefeated season), let us at least recognize reality in this case overwhelmingly shames whatever slow motion drek comes forth to exploit it at eight dollars a pop. And if you missed it the first time, damn, it's on YouTube. Heart-stopping drama resides above this paragraph.
But, hey, another college football movie, cool. Chris Peterson should be played by the guy from Napoleon Dynamite. What SMQ would really like to see is a taut psychological biopic, in the mold of Amadeus or Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, called Landlubber of Lubbock, chronicling the meteoric rise and idiosyncratic genius of Mike Leach and starring Vince Gill in the title role, if only for the distant possibility of colliding Leach with the Oscar-lusty tabloids. Get Milos Forman on the phone!
Hmmm...she's a little too short. Not sure interracial will play in Idaho.
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