Movies

Following the true live events of the De La Salle High School Spartans and their epic coach Bob Ladouceur who at one time had a 151 game winning streak. What happens when the champions become the underdogs? A senseless murder occurs of a promising young player... Will the coach, players, alumni recover and soldier on? This film talks about brotherhood and family in ways that all athletes could stand to be reminded of. Fantastic movie.

Before I review the movie proper, let me just mention how pleasantly surprised my movie theatre-working friend was in seeing LSU football coach Les Miles as an audience member in the beginning of the movie with lines, to boot! I wasn't as surprised since I knew about it having read about his appearance in last Friday's review-by John Wirt-in the Red section of our town paper, The Advocate. All right, we both loved the various plays as depicted on screen of the games and were touched by many of the dramatic scenes of many of the teammates outside of the game. Oh, and the filmmakers did a good job of disguising New Orleans as a California town, too. I really don't have anything else to say except I recommend When the Game Stands Tall.

Responding to the overtly religious criticism/ This movie was about a team that won 150 games in a row. It was based on real life coaching. (This was not a made up part of the story but intrinsic to the coach's point of view).To leave family/faith values out of the movie would have been like telling the story of a journey without any information about how the characters were able to get from point A to point B when no one else in history had ever done so.Nevertheless the movie wasn't just about the overall journey, but also included the individual stories of the coach and black and white students facing their own challenges.The many football scenes through-out the movie were great fun to watch!