Quarantine Movie: Varsity Blues





"West Canaan. Sex and football. That's all there is...."

 Varsity Blues is your typical football movie.

High school quarterback. Comes from nowhere. Nasty coach. Team comes from the blue. Last-second heroics. Super-hot high school girls. Drinking. The town cares about nothing else. Texas.

James Van Der Beek's Moxon, the quarterback who's come from nowhere to lead the team, on the back of former QB (the late Paul Walker)'s injury.

All he really wants to do is sit on the sidelines, read novels behind playbooks, and revise to go to Brown University.

He's got some friends, which include his idiot wide receiver friend Tweeter (Scott Caan), and most of all, his obese friend Billy Bob (the late Ron Lester), who spends most of his time chugging things, be it beer, whiskey and, er, maple syrup.

If you've already seen this then read on....if you haven't....look away.


THE GREAT BITS

 We loved Mox's brother, who's 'spiritual': Every bit in the film you see him go from one religion to another. If he's nailing himself up as Jesus, he's dressed as Malcolm X, and the end, it comes to this... Winner.

 Miss Davis: Not only was her sex-ed class amazing, but it was one hell of a way to find out why your high school teacher drives such a good car in later minutes..

The football scenes: Unlike, say, Remember The Titans, where some of the scenes in football games are hilariously awful, most of the on-field football scenes are amazing.

The ball in the stones of the mascot: Sometimes, opposition mascots really annoy me. I once saw the Alabama Crimson Tide one doing ticker-tape angels after 'Bama won the SEC Championship Game, and I felt jealous. Maybe it was because the cheerleaders were with him (or her (they are generally sexless)), or... anyway. Mox gets them...



Coach Kilmer: Jon Voight's baddy coach is a badass. While we'd love to think of most college coaches as Eric Taylor from Friday Night Lights, there are more than enough coaches who push their kids so far for their own gratification rather than anyone else's. He's basically a nasty cocktail of Bear Bryant and Nick Saban.


The team getting the hell beaten out of them to 'Thunderstruck': 


It was...fun: There were some tender moments and some cliched moments throughout, but hey, it's a high school Hollywood football movie. But you could cheer the Coyotes (pronounced wrongly, methinks), and have a lot of fun doing it. And this includes the football scenes not being awful.



NOT SO KEEN ON

 Tweeter: Scott Caan's character is hardly Julian Edelman, and right now, he's probably doing time right now, if his way of treating women is anything to go by. Or he's the 25-year old who's still hanging out of the high school, being an annoying version of Wooderson in 'Dazed and Confused'. This is basically a played-up schtick of Caan's that he's perfected over the years, but this wasn't as fun. Just made you shudder a bit.

Mox's pants: You're in the South, and y'all are wearing trousers that you could fit a car into. Was it late 90s fashion, or just crap fashion?




James Van Der Beek's Texas accent: The movie was filmed in Texas, but James Van Der Beek's accent wasn't Texan. In fact, I can't quite work out where it was from.

The whole whipped cream scene: A lot of people seem to talk about the 'whipped cream' scene as one of legend. I'm a very juvenile 41 year-old and still watch Dazed and Confused a lot to whip me back to times when I listened to good music and smoked grass, but the whole cheerleader 'just wearing whipped cream scene' isn't all that. The fact that she's just a misunderstood cheerleader who just wants to get out of town makes it, well, sad. Maybe I should go back to being a teenager and go back for more whipped cream (WHOA! DOUBLE ENTENDRE DUDE!).

One more thing: WAS THERE NO COUNTRY MUSIC EVER GETTING PLAYED?

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