Woodlawn (2015)

Just a terrible film, plot didn't make much sense and missed the chance to capture a truley remarkable moment in history

A movie based on an true story. A combination of sport and faith in a time of racism around 1972. What an amazing movie! I did not expect that. How the faith in Jesus Christ can bring people together. Competitiors or not. Goosebumps a lot of times during the movie! The sentence in the movie: "Do you believe in miracles?" explains everything! Worth seeing!

I started to watch this film thinking it was going to be as good as Remember The Titans or Friday Night Lights (the TV show), or at least it was going to try, but what a disappointment. This film uses American High-School Football as an excuse to convert you into Christianity, or to make you feel good if you are a Christian already. The guys who made this film didn't have in their minds making a good film but to make a film about Jesus and to earn some bucks to pay the bills. But if you are a film lover with a little bit of good taste, refrain from watching this film, unless you are a die-hard football movies fan and/or you love Christian-themed flicks and don't care much about quality. But even then, it's not worth your time, there are better movies out there. Acting: Although you may find an experienced cast, such as Sean Astin and Thomas C. Howell, all of them are very badly directed by the team of brothers who are the actual filmmakers. The only one I could spare would be Jon Voigt. The characters are flat, their personalities lack any hint of human complexity... It's just good or bad, no grey area whatsoever. The main character, coach Tandy Gerelds played by Nic Bishop, is a copycat of Friday Night Lights' coach Eric Taylor (played by Kyle Chandler), but worse. Unless every high school coach behave the same. Cinematography: It looks like this film had a low budget. Then it looks the film crew is used to make movies with low budgets... And it shows. Some shots are "cheap", especially the ones in the football matches, where the Production team may not have all the dough to pay the extras, they probably had just one day to shoot with a large crowd, so sometimes you don't see people cheering in the background. Some shots, especially the ones after a touchdown, have these low-angle shots that are too obvious. And the shots with rain are just ridiculous. Music: They tried to be "epic", but they failed miserably because the chosen score is too epic for what appears on the screen. It's not a matter of not being epic the things that happened in that high school, it's about how it's filmed this feature which makes it too "cheap" for such "epic" music. Doesn't match at all. Screen writing: The events described are treated in a very unnatural, gauged way. Instead of filming greatness through humbleness, they do the opposite. Everything looks fake and too easy, and perhaps it wasn't that easy at all for some black people back there in Alabama in the early 70's. Filmmaking: The movie is way too long. Maybe if it were 90 minutes long, the filmmakers had some good taste and some experience with good filmmaking and knew how to direct the cast, the film would be a 5 or 6 out of 10. Subject: The theme of this film should have been how black people struggled to be accepted by white people through football achievements and with a little help of a preacher, but instead it is a vehicle to show how good Christianity is and how much good could do with your life, when there are wars, refugees, torture, lots of dead people and whatnot in the rest of the world created by the same deity. They should have left the Christian web page at the very end of the credits, not at the beginning. So, this movie is for people who are not very bright, or haven't seen any good film in their lives, or are too fanatic with Christianity that are too blind to see. I know the hard work it is shooting a film, but they tried too hard to make a bad movie. The positive reviews on this film are not trustworthy. Be smart and don't lose 2 hours of your precious time watching this cheap crap. Trust me.

My guess is that if this film did not have so much of a religious, or Jesus theme, the score would have been far, far higher. I am a spiritual man, but not a religious man, nor a Christian. But, the film was very inspiring. If you can just separate yourself long enough from the Jesus aspect of the film, it is a wonderfully enjoyable film. The roles played by the coach, the assistant coach, Tony's character, his family, his woman, and the ridiculously silly and inane high school principal, and the board of education super freaks, were outstanding. It was a story of unification during troubling times. It was about open minded, intelligent, creative, kindhearted people who refused to believe the hype, when it came to racial hatred, that was so prevalent at that time, in Alabama. Very inspiring. Very well made. Kudos to the creative team. Very realistic.