Just When You Think You're Out...

You see what I did there?   Tying two movies starring Al Pacino together.   I am so clever.

Well, like Michael Corleone getting dragged back in, that's what is happening to some of my Penn State alumni friends.    The new HBO biopic directed by Barry Levinson is re-opening the old wounds of just what did coach Joe Paterno know about the pedophile scandal that rocked their athletic department.  My chums are clearly not getting a break with this largely mediocre film.  

Okay, let's be real here, folks.  Nobody really knows how much the beloved Joe Pa knew in advance regarding his assistant coach Barry Sandusky giving teen age blow jobs in the locker room.   And those questions will never be answered since Paterno himself died just two months after the scandal erupted.   I know my friends still treat him like a god and that all this was a major rush to judgement.  

That said, the HBO flick plays like a documentary and the supposition of intimate family conversations, etc. is really inappropriate.   Essentially, the movie takes the same talking points of the press and that's unfortunate.   There are inner family battles between Paterno's wife and children.   Did these really happen?  Who knows?   But, because they show up in this movie, everybody will believe the events are true.

Indeed, the movie making here is pretty lackluster and predictable.   The events of those days where this news first came out up to the day Paterno was fired are played out in the coach's mind as he lies inside a MRI machine.   Frankly, the last time I was in a MRI machine, all I could think about was when the fuck was I going to get out of this MRI machine.  It's a stale Hollywood device and much of the movie has the similar cadence of week old rye bread.

Al Pacino as Paterno portrays the coach as a doddering old man.  Okay, maybe he was.   Then again, maybe he wasn't.   This is not the most objective of films.  

A lot of the footage is reliant upon old news accounts but that's about as authentic as "Paterno" gets.  It's so artificial that most of the film was shot in White Plains, New York, which I would never mistake for Happy Valley.   The film makers can't even get that right.

I, for one, believe that Paterno was likely more of a participant in the cover-up than we think.  But, none of us will never know and it's a shame that Barry Levinson wants us to believe otherwise with this hackneyed work.   

LEN'S RATING:  One-and-a-half stars.

Dinner last night:  Sausage and onions at Miceli's.