have to put up with the Ohio State fans at work. Rewind, A while ago after our last "Discussion" we had with the OSU supporters, he pulled me aside later and told me that everything I said in defending the Penn State Football program and Paterno was backed by the documentary. Has anyone watched it? And thoughts on it.
OT: Just got Netflix and a friend told me to watch Happy Valley. He is an Alabama fan. We both
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Didn't add anything to the narrative. I don't think it did Paterno any favors....didn't do any further damage either. I remember thinking that parts of it made some PSers out to be the cult everyone wants to believe we are. Overall, it wasn't a very well done film...thought it missed an opportunity to capture how fractured the community was in the immediate raw aftermath of the scandal in lieu of showing much of what had already been shown.
The film was pretty fair except it took the “culty-est” student it could find as a representative of the student body.
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here's my problem with Happy Valley . . .
I was on the fence about the film's portrayal of Bernie McCue. are they exposing him as the psychotic drunk loser he is? or are they trying to protray him as a sympathetic critic of Paterno?
when they used the 6 minute clip of Bernie by the statue to ptomote the film in the NY Times. . . showing ONLY people angrily confronting him, ignoring the thousands who must have patiently ignored him, ignoring the dozens of times he provoked people into a confrontation . . . proved that Amir Bar-Lev is an absolute fraud.
I think Kevin Horne's editorial on 5 reasons why the Happy Valley documentary sucks is excellent. It sums up a lot of reasons why I feel the documentary comes up short.
http://onwardstate.com/2015/06/16/five-reasons-why-the-happy-valley-documentary-sucks/
http://onwardstate.com/2015/06/16/five-reasons-why-the-happy-valley-documentary-sucks/
When it was screened in State College, the director would not answer any questions about why he left out certain elements. He said he could have made 50 films and gone in all sorts of directions. When asked why he focused on certain elements, like McCue, left out anything favorable to the coaches, didn't particularly focus on child sex abuse, featured a "fanatic" college kid who lives/breathes psu football and portrays him as a typical penn staters, he basically shushed the questioner and moved on.
