My husband and I have had this conversation over and over for years about how we remember being movie fans as children, and this is something we both experienced separately years before we met. When we became aware of pop culture, there were certain people who were big movie stars, or at least very active, and to us they had always been big and would always be big. His example is Dabney Coleman. That guy was everywhere. And mine is Nick Nolte. He was huge, how did he become a running punchline on Rifftrax?

And here they are in the same movie. I’m recovering from my monthly cancer treatment and I’m feeling bad, so I turned on the TV to look at MGM Plus. I am obsessed with that service because it’s full of flawed but interesting big budget movies everyone forgot about. And I picked North Dallas Forty because it’s leaving the channel soon.

Now, right away this has a great opening sequence. Nolte’s character, a chronically injured pro football player, is trying to get out of bed in the morning. Every pain he feels flashes to a shot of an injury on the field as he makes his way to the bathtub. He sits down in the water and lights a joint, and his mind flashes to a successful catch he made, right as three men with rifles break into the bathroom (which has a glass door to the outside??) But they’re not home invaders exactly, they’re his friends coming to take him out hunting and to a party. This foreshadows a moment later in the film where he comes home to find the same door open, and an intruder with a pistol in his home!

Now, as I sit here in shock and not really grasping what I’m watching (paused in the middle of the film) that home invasion has yet to be addressed. Is this the satire I was promised? I remember satire being something vaguely from high school, maybe it was Jonathan Swift I read, maybe Alexander Pope, but I have trouble understanding it to this day because my mind tries to follow the plot of the movie every damn time. And I’m not even mentioning what passes for satire on the internet these days, where people just make stuff up and then defend it as jokes.

My research tells me that satire is punching up, and that this is a movie about corporate sports, but all I see is a faded matinee idol and a party I wouldn’t go to if they were passing out free Alienware PCs, and not throwing them into the swimming pool. Should I watch the rest of the film? Does it ever turn into the horror movie that the music cues keep promising? I’m sure Bo Svenson is about to turn into his character in Primal Rage and that had a party scene that looked a lot more fun!

Anyway, who do you remember as a big star in your late night cable watching times of the 80s? Remember when HBO used to package flops as “sleeper hits?” What’s your favorite sports movie? I just watched Major League for the first time last week (Tom Berenger was another one of those guys I remember being ubiquitous) and that was solidly of its time, but not as nastily as North Dallas Forty!

For more of my unscripted film thoughts, check out my video essay on Night Game, which is another nasty movie about sports I found on MGM Plus. Except I liked that one better because it was basically a horror movie: https://youtu.be/FxL5DMbUV7I?si=4VucCvy4ZRvh6xx7