Any Given Sunday (1999)

I don't intend to add to the many positive comments about this movie. I agree with them. But from another perspective:

First, I have never been a football fan. However, any movie that combines Oliver Stone and Al Pacino has to get my interests. I loved it.

One thing that did impress me more than anything else was the quality of the sound design. The 3 dimensional noises in the huddle, on the line, from the grandstands; the growls and other sounds from the players; these things made the movie live and my blood boil. I was breathless.

Then these things interspersed with dead silences and slow motion dreamlike sequences gave the action a spiritual quality.

I stayed for the credits to see who had done this sound work and I think Wylie Stateman will get, at the very least, an Oscar nomination for sound design. If you ever wondered what this credit meant, see this movie and you will know. This movie would have lost a great deal of its punch without that sound designer's talent.

Fmovies: Any Given Sunday (1999)

Al Pacino, Jamie Foxx, Cameron Diaz, Dennis Quaid, LL Cool J, James Woods, Matthew Modine, Lawrence Taylor, Jim Brown, John C. McGinley, Aaron Eckhart, Charlton Heston, Oliver Stone, Elizabeth Berkley. Directed by Oliver Stone. Spoilers herein.

"Any Given Sunday" is a film that is a feast for the eyes, but not the mind. Stone does a great job for creating a dizzying direction, eye-opening visuals, and extremely loud sound, and he does all of this with the 2 and a half+ hours that he has to spare with the film but never does go deep into detail on the characters.

The story consists of a professional football team struggling with their season. The film opens with a quote from football legend Vince Lombardi, and then fades into a football game, where the starting quarterback for the Sharks, Jack Rooney is hurt in the middle of a game, unknown third string quarterback Willie Beaman is sent in for the rest of the season. As Beaman starts rising to fame, aging Coach D'Amato and Rooney begin to question if Beaman is worth risking the rest of the season and their chance for the championship as he is trying to make the team win by himself.

The performances are pretty good and powerful. Al Pacino and Jamie Foxx do great with the lead characters, and other familiar faces such as Cameron Diaz, Dennis Quaid, James Woods, LL Cool J, Matthew Modine and John C. McGinley in the supporting performances.

One thing I did really like about "Any Given Sunday" is how the action during the games is very realistic, gritty, and fast. It ultimately captures the intensity and hard work from the sport of Football. But like "Natural Born Killers" and "U Turn", the sound is so unbearably loud and images are so fast and dizzying that the film could give some viewers a headache. Stone has been known to cause controversy among his films, and this is a way that he seems to do it, but it didn't bother me so much as haters of the film. Despite of some of the strengths, "Any Given Sunday" does have a few flaws. The film is unnecessarily overlong, overly stylish, and underdeveloped. Stone really could have made the film about 20-30 minutes shorter, and with most of the time the characters are either playing on the game field or yelling at each other. Some scenes showing Willie's rise are no more interesting than a Nike Gridiron commercial or a Michael Bay film. Another thing Stone forgets to do is add emotion to the film, and he replaces that with mostly sports action.

Overall I really did enjoy this film a lot, for it's realistic football scenes and the living hell that the players go through in order to win. But at times it really does try too hard, especially when it's absent with a great script and follows clichés of older Football (or even gladiator) films. But I would recommend it to Stone fans and football fans especially. A very considerate 4 stars out of 5.

Let me start by saying that i dont like or even understand american football and i personally think it does not come close to soccer but with this film it did not matter a jot. Oliver Stone had directed a film here that crosses all bounderies. You dont have to like the sport or understand it to appreciate how brilliant this film is. It is shot so well ,it makes you fell you are in the game and as for the soundtrack well that just adds to a mesmerising showpiece. Stars such as Al Pacino, Dennis Quaid,James Woods and Cameron Diaz star but for me the real Star of this film is James Foxx who plays the Quaterback who begins to believe his own hype but ultimately understands that it the team that matters. One of the test of a good film is that if you start to look at the clock throughout the film is usually means its not good , this film lasted 2 and a half hours and i never looked at the time. Brilliant. 9 out of 10.

Any Given Sunday fmovies. I am a fan of Oliver Stone. He made many films that are classics in my eyes. Consider films like Platoon, JFK, Wall Street, Born on the Fourth of July, or Natural Born Killers. Even W. Now we see a certain Oliver Stone as director of Any Given Sunday. This can not be the same Oliver Stone. Obviously Any Given Sunday is made by a Gangster Rapper, a wannabe with some experience doing MTV videos, commercial videos and some experience doing promotion videos for American Football. Is this film so bad? In my opinion? Definitely! The first part of the film was just terrible, the second part at least had some structure and some story. Apart from the very poor directing, the editing was amazing as well. Lots of random shots, lots of meaningless shots, lots of unrelated shots. Add to that a sometimes weird soundtrack.

The acting? An insult to the actors! In the first part of the film only Cameron Diaz had a decent role. In the second part there were some indications that the director actually wanted to use the immense capabilities of Al Pacino. Dennis Quaid was completely miscast; a 45 year old quarterback? You must be joking. Jamie Foxx was badly used, James Woods had a ridiculously poor part. But look at what they did to Aaron Eckhart and Charlton Heston. Tedious little parts. Charlton Heston was probably only in it because they used some clips from Ben Hur, again unnecessary and unrelated. And then not to mention Ann-Margret. Was it really necessary to put her in this film at all? And certainly not as a drunk, possibly with dementia. As an overall result this film is a sickening insult to the viewer as well. A lot of promises, no delivery.

You are mad about American Football? Love MTV? Go see this movie. You like to watch a good film? Ignore this one. You expect an Oliver Stone film? Not this one, not Any Given Sunday.

I thought what a great combo for "Any Given Sunday" - Oliver Stone and professional football -- excess meets its match.

So I grabbed a chance to go to the movies with my sons. They got a lot more out of the first and third thirds of the movie that are football games, which I couldn't follow at all, knowing zilch about football so I missed any references to significances of plays and strategies and didn't recognize the zillion football players past and present in bit parts, but I got other visual and music references they didn't.

The football field is explicitly a jungle, with the sounds like an elephant herd crashing. Of course Stone never says or shows once what he can get across 5 times, so the jungle fever point of the primalness of sports as a venue for male violence is accompanied by Native American chants, aboriginal and Asian Indian mystic strains as well. I don't know enough about rap to judge those selections -- I could tell there were lots of lyrics about "niggaz" working for The Man type of thing.

The second third should have appealed to me as that's when the huge ensemble has personal interactions and we learn all their selfish, dastardly, unpleasant motivations, but I was on sensory overload. Example: Al Pacino as the Old Guard Coach calls in Jamie Foxx as the suddenly first string quarterback (in a terrific performance), for a tête a tête on the pro's of Jazz over Rap, as a metaphor of the old football of finesse (what? all those flashbacks to black & white football games were of a subtle sport?). But when Foxx walks in Pacino has "Ben Hur" playing on a wide-screen TV. As if we didn't get the point Foxx actually says "The old gladiators, huh?" If we still didn't get the point the conversation keeps intercutting with the chariot race. And if we still didn't get the point of any reference in the conversation to racial issues then intercuts to the galley slave scenes from "Ben Hur" THEN on top of that, the NFL commissioner who puts the Bitch Owner in her place for trying to play with the Big Old Guys is none other than Charlton Heston.

No one just has a conversation -- everyone shouts, usually at the same time, so I had to close my eyes and I'm not sure if I missed something.

This is Sunbelt Football of expansion teams where the sport is not a Fall/Winter season - so the women were everywhere in tank tops, cleavage, midriffs bare and hips swinging, even Cameron Diaz as the Bitch Owner. Though all the women are really high priced prostitutes (even usually sweet Lauren Holly is a hardened cold Football Wife).

What I don't think I missed was Stone's outsize determination to ignore the homo-erotic aspects of male sports violence that "Fight Club" reveled in. Aw come on Stone, not a single gay player in the closet? He crowds the behemoths into locker rooms and showers that can barely contain their bodies--but he's so afraid of showing them in contact that he even at one point has one throw a baby alligator into the shower so they scatter.

Everyone is criticized-- including the sportscasters, which Stone revels in playing one (I think in general this movie is a show down between Stone and Spike Lee as it takes on more racial issues than he's done in the past). What a coincidence that ESPN is continually bad-mouthed when there's a big legible credit at the end to Turner Sports Network when this is a Time Warner movie and ESPN's a competito

Any Given Sunday is one of Oliver Stone's most enjoyable movies. Sunday is pure entertainment, an action-packed spectacle that will delight even the most ardent sports enthusiast. Stone draws on the usual assortment of sports movie clichés, but he directs his actors, including Al Pacino, Jamie Foxx, Dennis Quaid, and LL Cool J, into such passionate and intense performances, that the movie is able to transcend its familiar material. While its 160-minute running time is a bit of a detriment, AGS works overall as a superior piece of escapist entertainment. Also, the locker room scene, which showcases a confrontation between Cameron Diaz and a football player with a giant penis, is a classic.