I thought it was OKAY. It delivered what was advertised and what you really wanted to see: Al Pacino playing Al Pacino playing Joe Paterno, with props to the makeup and costume guy and good casting support.
He was good enough to distract from what really should have been important: how the Jerry Sandusky scandal was handled. I think the movie is like the Lucy-Charlie Brown field goal situation: juuuust when the movie gets you to excuse Joe Pa as a grouchy, out of touch, crotchety football coach (who didn’t even know what the word “sodomy” meant) . . . .the final scene is Lucy pulling the football out on the audience at the last second.
As an admitted and biased Penn State Hater, I applauded the ending. Penn St supporters will rip the film apart at its very last detail. You be the Judge.
saw the first half so far . When most coaches get to that age the assistants really run the show. That was the case with Bear Bryant . It was OK and you could tell it was HBO because they pulled no punches when talking about what happened with the kids.
That’s what happens when the coach is considered untouchable. Nobody cares about anything except winning. Even crime is brushed aside for the pursuit of wins.
A pre-emptive note, here: Anyone who brings anything at all into this thread from any Pit thread will receive a warning. If you know what I’m referring to, good. If you don’t, then I’m confident you won’t accidentally do so. Got that?
The first being that Al Pacino’s portrayal of Paterno and Adam Sandler’s portrayal of Sandy Wexler are way too similar.
They never really showed us why Penn State loved Paterno. It wasn’t just that he won football games. Paterno comes off as an addled and rather unpleasant and uncaring man, as a coach, husband and father.
I loved the line from McGuinn that “I can’t remember what I had for breakfast,” is a lie people say when they actually do remember.
I found it a little confusing with all the flashbacks and time-line jumping. But it did a good job of portraying Paterno as a doddering old man who just wanted to concentrate on football to the exclusion of everything else in the universe.
This and the girls’ gymnastic scandals tell beyond a doubt that power and money will cause people to turn a blind eye to things that would otherwise outrage them. Hopefully, things are changing in that regard. Only time will tell.
I’m from local (Altoona, about an hour south of State College) and I actually lost a LOT of people I’d considered friends when this all blew up because I was insufficiently supportive of “Joe-Pa” while this was all being hashed out. All I’ve seen about this movie online has been Penn State fans complaining about how the movie got all the VISUAL details wrong (“Beaver Stadium doesn’t look like that!” “The Paterno statue never looked like that!” “There was no lion logo over Beaver Stadium at the time this happened!”)
It sounds to me that they can’t find much substantive to complain about, to be honest.