Such a frustrating disappointment

hyped garbage

It's fun, it's light, [but] it has a hard time when its tries to get heavy.

Easily the biggest piece of Right wing non sense propaganda I ever saw.

The astonishing thing about this documentary isn't the excitement and the drama. The football game is presented brilliantly, the key plays are shown in riveting detail and you really feel like you're down on the field with the players right until the final gun. But the astonishing thing is how much you really learn about Harvard and Yale and why they have the reputation of being the very best of the best colleges in America. All the interviews in this movie are interesting, but the one that shocked me was when this big, tough, Harvard linebacker broke down and started crying, forty years after the game! And not because he muffed a block or a tackle, either. "I can't believe Harvard would take a chance on a kid like me," he said. That line really stuck with me long after I left the theater. You see, I went to Columbia, which is also part of the Ivy League. But the whole time I was there in the mid-eighties, I had a sense that there was something missing. It wasn't till I saw this movie that I understood what it was. The thing about Harvard and Yale isn't that they only admit the richest kids, or the smartest kids. The thing is that once you're admitted you're really someone. You're a part of something. And I suspect it's not just the stars on the football teams who feel that way. When I was at Columbia it was just the opposite. It was a campus full of strangers located in the most impersonal urban landscape imaginable. I don't remember anyone crying over how lucky they were to be there. When my roommate dropped out halfway through the freshman year, no one on the faculty or in the administration begged him to stay. No one asked me why I didn't do more to help him, either. It wasn't until years later I began to ask myself that question. And I've begun to suspect that the answer lies largely in the way Columbia treated all its undergraduates like cattle. They didn't expect champions, and they didn't get them either. To be sure, there were some star athletes on campus, and they got plenty of fawning remarks and plenty of special attention from the faculty. But it was because they were part of a special elite, not because they really mattered as individuals. None of us really mattered as individuals. That's why Columbia is strictly third rate compared to Harvard and Yale. I always thought it was because Yale and Harvard had richer kids, smarter kids, tougher kids. Really it's just because Harvard and Yale treat their students like human beings, and not like cattle. And that's what I learned from watching Harvard "beat" Yale.

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.

Watching Harvard Beats Yale 29-29 is like watching the greatest college football game you could ever imagine, and getting to know the players as it's happening. Even if you already know the final score, the process of getting there is spell-binding for anyone who enjoys watching sports (or has a pulse).But it's much more than just an amazing football game. Through interviews with the players - now older and wiser - the film evokes the background of the times - 1968, perhaps the most tumultuous year in modern American history.The players represented both sides of the political spectrum. Like other young people, many were war-protesters. Yet other players despised the protests - at least one was a proud Vietnam vet, who came to the Ivy Leagues after experiencing Khe Sanh.But on a cold November day, the players and the fans throughout New England put aside these political differences to celebrate the drama of The Game. Through the interviews, we learn that Yale was very heavily favored (thus a tie was considered a "win" for Harvard). We learn about the different personalities - which Yale players knew George W. Bush, which Harvard guy roomed with Al Gore, who dated Meryl Streep, who was the inspiration for the football-player character in Doonesbury, etc.But as the film progresses, these interviews slowly give way to a closer focus on the game itself. It's now late in the 4th quarter with the seconds ticking away. Harvard is still down by 16 points, and you are on the edge of your seat wondering how they are going to pull off this inspirational "victory", making everyone forget - at least for a brief moment - the darker battles then raging in America.

..............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!