Jeff's Reviews

Thoughts on every movie I've ever seen.

Any Given Sunday (1999)

Directed by Oliver Stone

Starring Al Pacino, Dennis Quaid, Cameron Diaz, James Woods

Author

An interesting look at sports management politics. That eyeball moment was a bit weird.

Stone’s flamboyant style (changing camera angles and film types, jagged cuts, montages, overpowering music) worked well with U-Turn’s whimsical storyline but seems a little odd when a story that is so normal and grounded. Maybe that’s the purpose of his style – to throw your perception of the story a bit to make it a bit more difficult to interpret as normal and grounded. An interesting ending under the credits. A lot of people had already left the theater and missed out.

The photography is fun and engaging. Interesting to see how Stone shoot sports. Nice football-in-flight shots.

Pretty amazing cast. It’s always fun to watch Pacino yell. Great voice, and a fantastic pre-game speech near the end (I’d love to have a transcription). Nice to see LT in there. Sorry to see that Berkley has made absolutely no progress since her nauseating performance in Showgirls. Seeing Charlton Heston after the metaphorical shots of Ben Hur, as well as seeing an actor of his calibre in such a small role, was a little distracting.

Apparently I was gipped of 12 minutes by watching the shortened Euro-Australian cut.

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