asc85 Add this one to the list of documentaries that I have absolutely no idea why this was so critically well-received. Unless you're a Harvard or Yale alum, I wouldn't know why anyone would enjoy this movie. The Yale and Harvard players are refreshingly humble, and I especially liked J.P. Goldsmith on the Yale side. But the coming attractions make it seem like references to Al Gore, Garry Trudeau, Meryl Streep and George W. Bush are significant in this movie. They're not. They're mentioned in passing as a side note. And the idea that there was a heavy discussion about what was going on at college campuses during the explosive year of 1968 in America is also exaggerated. All we saw was a classic Harvard/Yale football game with the players reminiscing about it. Nothing more. If you're looking for something deeper or even more entertaining, it's simply not there.

Neddy Merrill In the spectrum of potential audience size, Kevin Rafferty's moment by moment review of a 40+ year old Ivy League college football game must be close to the lowest end. Game footage from Harvard's television station accounts for somewhere between 3/5ths to 2/3rds of the documentary's run time with men in their late 50's talking about the game accounting for all of the remainder. Now it helps that one of these men was former Harvard offensive lineman and current movie legend Tommy Lee Jones who seems oddly somber and off put about having to discuss the game despite the fact that his team is Rocky Balboa to Yale's Apollo Creed. It also helps that some of the discussion involves future Presidents, Vice Presidents and other screen legends. Beyond the shine of celebrity, the proceedings also benefit from the darkness of war, specifically the Vietnam war and the coming together on a sports team of veterans of it with active protesters of it. However, women, residents outside the Northeast United States and those born after the Beatles broke up will struggle to find relevancy in this tale of an old football game. In short, see Rafferty's "Atomic Café" instead, an absorbing study of just how crazy the cold war got.

prudhocj ..............and if he/she did they sure didn't bother to try to understand it or what the movie had to say! This is one of the best movies of the year so far. It has twists and ironies that make us think about what games and human interplay have to teach us as well as the participants in the event. Some of the players came in not knowing what to expect, some came in sure they would win and others in the course of the game refused to give up on the game, themselves and their teammates! One of the players throughout the movie was presented in a way that we as viewers thought we would wind up intensely disliking him but in the end he wound up learning so much from this game that it helped him become the person he is today - in his own words, a "better person". This forced the viewers of the film to learn something about themselves as well. The movie has humor, pain, arrogance, humility and a full range of human emotions as well as nuttiness and thrills. Pegasus3 missed so much about this movie that it does appear they didn't really see it. E.g., they say that it was a close game?? Well gee, it WAS A TIE GAME...how much closer could it be?? And the player talking about injuring another player (who was his friend BTW)... he actually thought he HAD injured him in the game to get him out of the game BUT as we see in the footage on the play where he was sure he had accomplished this he was nowhere near the play!! What irony! And the fact that P3 didn't even understand the title....the most ironic of all. He asked if he missed something? Well only the entire point of the movie - that Harvard "won" the game simply by tying the score in the end when they weren't even expected to come close! They won by doing so much better than they were expected to do. Contrary to the writers comment the title DID sum up the movie! All in all - a well-made, interesting and ultimately great movie. The players themselves summed it up best - it was only a game but what a game and what FUN it was to play in it. GO SEE IT!

pegasus3 This was about one of the most boring documentaries I can recall ever seeing. Despite being a Yale Grad during that vintage decade, I could barely muster enough interest to watch the entire film. I had hoped for more than a bunch of aging males reveling in their past football exploits. To be sure, the game was dramatic and close, quite obviously by the final score. Despite an occasional foray into other topical issues of the era, the seemingly endless mechanics recounted by team members from both sides left one wishing for more depth and intelligent commentary by those having attended such august universities. And to see one of the Yale team gloating over his attempts to injure a key player to get him out of the game only gave this viewer a sour taste in his mouth rather than any admiration for such macho antics. In addition, one of the key celebrity participants looked like he had come off a month long drunk, pitching comments like some sort of arrogant poseur. The final puzzle of the film was the title. Am I missing something? A tie is a tie. Games are all about points and you're not a winner unless you score more points than your opponent. Notwithstanding some cutesy philosophical point that the director Kevin Rafferty might be trying to make, the title seems to fall flat as any kind of sophisticated summation of the movie's content.