College Football Coaches as Movie Directors

This week marks the beginning of the 2012 NCAA football season. My next 14 Saturdays will feature at least a few hours parked in front of a TV watching college football. It’s a dirty secret I don’t talk about much at TDYLF- I’m a huge college football fan, and my enthusiasm for the sport has kicked into hyperdrive this year with my beloved Missouri Tigers making the jump to the SEC. Naturally, college football has been on my mind a lot in the last few weeks. And I’ve realized there are a lot of parallels between college football coaches and movie directors.

The Black Sheep of Director Filmographies

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The majority of film directors have a unique style, an imprint that they place on all of their films. It can be something as significant as David Lynch’s surrealism or something as minor as Quentin Tarantino’s car trunk POV shots. A large part of the fun that I have in watching movies is seeing a director’s style develop, recognizing what they’re doing, and seeing the patterns when they do these things again and again. However, there are occasions where directors have films that break from their own conventions. They create something entirely different. They create a black sheep, as it were. These are films that stand out (sometimes for better, sometimes for worse) in their catalogue. Here are several examples:

Director: Robert Altman
Film: Secret Honor (1984)
First and foremost, Robert Altman is known for drowning his viewers in overlapping dialogue. His characters all speak all at once. It’s quite an immersive feature for the viewer. Some may find it distracting. Personally, I find that it makes me feel like I’m in the room with his characters. You find it all over the place in Altman’s movies. Imagine my surprise when I watched Secret Honor, a movie that featured only one character (a fictionalized Richard Nixon) and his endless monologue. It’s a credit to Altman that the film works so well. It’s also a testament to the film’s sole actor, Philip Baker Hall.

10 Dirty Secrets That I Keep

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No, not THAT dirty. Just dirty movie secrets I keep- things that I generally don’t say out loud because I know it’ll make someone else angry. It’s much like Peter Griffin’s confession on Family Guy that he didn’t like The Godfather. Even if you really do think that The Godfather “insists upon itself” and you preferred The Money Pit, you’d be wise to not bring it up very often. There’s also the notion that it’s better to keep some things to yourself for fear of how you’ll be viewed among your peers. I’m hoping that there are at least a few people out there who agree with me on these. I also hope that half my readership doesn’t view me as some sort of angry ogre after finishing this article. So without further adieu, here are 10 Dirty Secrets That I Keep.

1. I like Kevin Smith, and I like his movies
This puts me in peril of losing a lot of credibility with a lot of people who take films very seriously. You know what? I don’t care. Clearly, his movies (other than maybe Clerks) aren’t beacons of cinematic accomplishment. But they make me laugh. I even liked Cop Out. Hell, I liked it quite a bit. His schtick about being an outsider who broke the system gets a little tiresome, but I’m not going to hold that against his films. And he seems to be a genuinely good human being (if you don’t mind the vulgarity and crass topics, which I clearly do not).