VARSITY BLUES: Coaching Ethics are Null and 'Voight'!

   As accomplished an actor as Jon Voight is—he’s won an Oscar and been nominated 3 other times—I just can’t get my head around two career moments where he ‘jumped the shark’.  One was his appearance in one of the most appalling movies of all-time:  “Anaconda”.  The second was the Seinfeld episode about Jon Voight’s car.  Now, every time I see a Voight movie, I can’t give it the credit it, perhaps, deserves! 
  Voight gives a very good performance in “Varsity Blues” as the evil, manipulative Coach Bud Kilmer, whose neanderthal ways may have worked in the 60’s, but are no longer acceptable in the modern age.   Some things are timeless:  discipline, skill building and motivation.  Others should have gone the way of the dinosaur:  sending a player out to play a game who is dizzy with a concussion, and shooting painkillers into his star quarterback’s knee.  Just to win a high school football game.  We snicker and shake our heads, but stuff like this happens all the time. 
  James Van Der Beek is also very good as second string quarterback Jonathan Moxon, who actually holds the wisest view of anybody in the film.  He’s about the only one in the movie who’s not obsessed about football, more concerned with getting a scholarship to Brown.  At the beginning, he’s shunned for his hermit outlook.  By the end of the movie, he’s revered for it.  It’s a good window into the world of how a sport can become like a religion.  Mox is warned that if he messes with the sacred tradition of high school football in Texas, then he will get sorely burned.  “Bring it on”, Mox says.  “I don’t need this.”  And so it goes.  I can’t imagine this movie was well-received in Texas.  But it’s a good flic, nonetheless. 
  We have to make special mention of actor Ron Lester, who plays the ENORMOUS Billy Bob.  If you saw a picture of Lester now, you wouldn’t recognize him.  He’s lost 348 pounds since appearing in “Varsity Blues”, literally a shadow of his former self.

8 out of 10