I spent the weekend Remembering the Titans.
There are certain movies you can watch over and over like listening to your favorites songs. For me, it’s Pretty Women, Dirty Dancing, Sleepers, Love Actually and others that, when they come on cable TV, I sit mesmerized watching and waiting for my favorite scenes and lines to come up.
I am among the millions for whom Remember the Titans is one of these movies. I watched it twice while battling a bug. And while Denzel Washington, as Coach Herman Boone, steals the show every time with his admirably tough job of integrating the football team at a court-ordered high school in Alexandria, Virginia, in 1971, I learned some things this time or was reminded of some facts I had forgotten.
Fresh-faced Ryan Gosling was someone I probably did not even know when the flick came out in 2000, since this was before his breakthrough movie The Notebook. And the girlfriend of star player Gerry Bertier looked so familiar I waited for the credits to find out she was 17-year old actress Kate Bosworth. While watching the credits, I was stunned to see that Hayden Panettiere played the grade-school wisenheimer daughter of assistant coach Bill Yoast. I watched closely the second time and now could see the same face that grew up to be the Golden Globe winning actress and bitchy star of the acclaimed Nashville TV series.
Denzel Washington, who has had such a distinguished career playing myriad roles, was spell binding under pushback from every corner. And while liberties were taken with the real story, it is true that Coach Boone still lives in Alexandria as a hero and is best friends with Yoast, the former head coach of the all-white school before bussing. I also must have forgotten that Ronnie “Sunshine” Bass went on to play for the University of South Carolina in the mid-70s.
What a treat to Remember the Titans on a sick weekend.
